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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, I’m Eric Molinsky.

When Emory Braswell was growing up, he used to love listening to radio drama serials.

EMORY: I listened to The Shadow and The Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.

Now Emory’s parents restricted the amount of radio he could listen to – especially at night -- but they always made exceptions if Joe Louis was boxing, or if Franklin Roosevelt was on the radio.

One night in October 1938, Emory heard his father’s Model-A Ford pull up to the house, and he thought he heard the President addressing the nation.

CLIP: WAR OF THE WORLDS

EMORY: So I ran down and got in the car and my mother was sitting there too. I said, "What's happening?" He said, "Well, there's some kind of story going on about an invasion. We're being invaded by Mars or something." My father sounded skeptical. So I listened to it, and sure enough there was somebody supposedly from either the state department or the guv-mint, as my family would say, talking about a meteor that had crashed in New Jersey and there were beings coming out of it and they were destroying all the local militia and stuff. One of the fascinating parts about the program was it was a music program and they would interrupt the music for many bulletins coming from Jersey. ME: You said your father was skeptical. Was he skeptical throughout the whole thing and were you skeptical throughout the whole thing? EMORY: No, I was just wide eyed listening to it, trying to decide, is this all happening or not? My father was kind of skeptical because when it was over with, he says, "I think it's a hoax." As I said, the business about the music going on and bulletins coming made it seem much more real. Then when the program was over, it seemed to go back to regular programming, and we could understand, and we listened for further announcements and nothing came. So my father said, "That proves it's a hoax." I took it seriously.

They eventually learned that they were listening to War of the Worlds from Orson Welles. 2

Neil Verma teaches radio history at Northwestern University. He says there’s a reason why young Emory Braswell thought he heard FDR during the show.

NEIL: There's a moment in the War of the World's broadcast where the Secretary of the Interior comes on the microphone on the world of the fiction and gives a little speech to buck up the troops and let everyone know that civilization will continue no matter what. Originally, that piece was written to be not the Secretary of the Interior, but President Roosevelt. The CBS Network said, "No, no, no, you can't have President Roosevelt's voice if it's not actually President Roosevelt. People will get confused; we'll get in trouble. We can't do it." Orson Welles says, "Okay, well, we'll change it to the Secretary of the Interior." Then, the actor who portrayed the role goes up to Welles, according to legend and says, "Well, I don't know how the Secretary of the Interior sounds." Welles says, "Don't worry. He sounds just like Roosevelt."

RICHARD HAND: I mean that's the achievement of War of the Worlds, it sounds like the weather forecast, it sounds like a radio show playing music and then gradually it shifts.

Richard J. Hand teaches radio drama at The University of East Anglia in the UK.

RICHARD HAND: And I think that's one reason it had such impact, is that understanding, we can take a genre and jump a form, and use the structures, and formula, and conventions of another form in order to tell a story.

When we look back at pop culture in the 20th century, we tend to focus on movies, TV or pop music. It’s easy to forget that radio was the dominant form of entertainment for decades. There were hit shows in every genre but sci-fi kept pushing the boundaries of what the medium could do. A lot of famous sci-fi writers got their start in radio, like Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick.

And these radio dramas laid the groundwork for stories that couldn’t be done on film for decades because special effects weren’t good enough. In some ways, these radio shows are the missing cultural link between genre fiction, and the movies and shows we watch today. But they’re also stand-alone works of audio art that could play with our imagination in ways that the printed word and the visual image never could.

We’re going to take a trip back in time just after the break.

➢ BREAK

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EM: So today’s episode is a co-production with the excellent podcast, Twenty Thousand Hertz. In fact, I’m co-piloting this episode with the host of that show, Dallas Taylor. Dallas, how would you describe Twenty Thousand Hertz?

DT: We’re produced out of the Defacto sound studio just outside Washington DC, and we like to say it’s a show about the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.

EM: And old radio dramas and serial fit into that.

DT: Absolutely. Since a lot of people aren’t very familiar with this era, let’s zoom out and look at the big picture. When did the golden age of radio dramas start?

EM: It really took off in 1934 when the FCC was created.

DT: The Federal Communications Commission – which is still around today.

EM: Very much. That’s around the time when the big networks starting forming like CBS and NBC.

DT: Also still around today, but mostly for TV.

EM: Yeah. Neil Verma says when the networks got into the business of making highly produced radio dramas, they were not motivated by noble reasons.

NEIL: If they couldn't demonstrate a level of public service that they were giving to the listeners out there, then they ran the risk of further government regulation and intrusion, so all of the money they were making out of selling all the bootblack and soup and yeast and tea, they would be taken away. So they enshrined in their mandate to create high culture content, and for a lot of them that meant radio drama.

EM: And interestingly, if we look at the big picture, each decade of radio drama had its own style. The ones in the ‘30s were ambitious. They grappled with big nationalistic ideas because it was the Depression. Then in the ‘40s, anxiety around the war got channeled into radio dramas that were like film noirs, or I guess you could call them “radio noirs.” Or as Neil Verma put it:

NEIL: In the 1930s, radio is kind of a theater in the mind, so it's a big theatrical space that you're supposed to imagine in your mind. In the 1940s, it becomes really a theater about the mind. 4

EM: And then in the ‘50s, radio dramas are very influenced by the Cold War with aliens standing in for the Russians.

DT: Wasn’t that the same thing with Hollywood movies at the time?

DT: Yeah, but on radio it played out on a much more intimate scale. Like there was a radio drama in 1955 called Zero Hour, written by Ray Bradbury. The alien invasion is told from the point of view of a woman who discovers the children in her neighborhood, including her daughter, have been co-opted by these inner- dimensional beings. The parents think the kids are playing a game, but this one woman begins to realize the truth.

CLIP 1: ZERO HOUR

NEIL The main character, played by Esa Ashdown, is immobile. Almost all of this play takes place in her kitchen or living room. Most of the interplay between her and her daughter the ones where she comes to suspect the daughter is collaborating with this evil alien happen at just outside the edge of our earshot.

CLIP 2: ZERO HOUR

DT: I think a lot of people have a misconception that radio dramas from this era were goofy or naïve.

EM: Yeah, I used to think it was just two guys banging coconuts behind a microphone to sound like a horse. That was true for the radio serials aimed at kids. But when I listened to these shows, I couldn’t believe how dark and weird they were.

DT: And the FCC was okay with that?

EM: Well, they were more concerned with obscenity, or overt political messages. But radio wasn’t under the same kind of restrictive code that Hollywood was back then. Neil Verma thinks the censors feared the power of visual images, and they underestimated the power of audio to create images in your mind.

NEIL: Almost everyone talks about radio as a blind medium, which is a particular way of talking about a medium, no one talks about sculpture as a deaf medium, but whenever 5 you hear anything about radio, the first thing people say is it's blind. It's strange to characterize or essentialize a medium by something it can't provide.

DT: What are some more examples of this really dark stuff?

EM: Well, thrillers were the dominant format. But they weren’t just spy thrillers or detective shows. A lot of these shows were what we would call “horror.”

RICHARD HAND: Some things that we might think of post George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, this kind of unhappy ending, you're getting it in the '30s and '40s.

EM: Again, Richard Hand:

RICHARD HAND: And one great example of that was Arch Oboler's play, Burial Services, which is about a young woman being buried alive in a coffin, and we hear the inside of her head, a kind of stream of consciousness because she's not dead, she's in a catatonic fit or whatever it might be. But no one rescues her. Unfortunately there's no recording of that particular piece, but the response was phenomenal. And there was lots of letters of complaints, and shock and disgust. And Arch Oboler thought he'd get sacked, but actually the station were happy saying, "Wow, if there's this many people complaining, how many people are listening? This is fantastic."

EM: But the most famous horror story from this era was The Thing On Fourble Board from a spooky anthology series called Quiet, Please.

DT: What year was this?

EM: 1948. It’s about 25 minutes, and it’s mostly a monologue of an oil field worker. He tells the story of how he and his buddy found this alien creature on the fourble board, which is like a catwalk on an oilrig. And he describes this creature as having the head and torso of a girl, but the body of a giant spider.

CLIP 1: FOURBLE BOARD

RICHARD HAND: It sounds like something out of a Bosch painting of Hell or something out of John Carpenter's The Thing.

EM: And as the character is talking, he’s waiting for his “wife” to come out, and we realize his “wife” is the creature. And we’re not a passive listener. We’re her next meal. 6

CLIP 2: FOURBLE BOARD

DT: (REACTS)

EM: Horror films in the ‘40s were nothing like this. When this episode came out, the big “horror movie” that year was “Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.” If this were live action in the ‘70s or ‘80s, they would’ve used stop motion. Today the creature would be CG. But something would’ve been lost either way.

RICHARD: if you made a visual version of that, it would either be so silly, the ending, or so horrifying, you couldn't think about anything else. But it's understanding what the audience can -- it's spinning plates, isn't it? We can kind of balance these ideas at the same time.

DT: One of the things that fascinated me in researching the history of radio dramas was how people listened to them.

EM: Yeah, that’s another misconception. Typically we imagine entire families sitting around staring at the radio, waiting for it to become a television set.

DT: Which is true to some extent, but a lot of people listened in their cars. And there were these devices called crystal sets, which were not made out of crystal. They were jerry-rigged pieces of technology with a copper wire that acted as an earbud. So decades before the iPod or even the Wak-Man, people were listening on these portable devices.

RICHARD: It’s something that’s invading your domestic space and I think that’s why science fiction and horror understood that on radio.

DT: I was also interested in the way they used sound effects to stimulate the listener’s imagination. Neil Verma talked about a pioneer in the field named Ora Nichols. She worked with Orson Welles for years.

NEIL: In the War of the Worlds there's this famous scene where you can hear the Martian vessel cooling and she did that by taking a cast iron pot and rubbing its two sides together to make that really specific, grindy voice.

CLIP: WAR OF THE WORLDS

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NEIL: She also built machines and there were companies that would put together what would we think of as sound effects libraries on transcription discs.

DT: And Richard Hand says audio engineers had all sorts of short cuts ready to go like that. If you wanted to simulate a gunshot:

RICHARD HAND: Sometimes they'd use a metal rod and hit a leather seat, and you get that crisp bang sound, and that would work really well. And this is one of my favorite things I demonstrate with while doing a practical session of radio, where you can take a cork and wet it, and squeak it against the side of a bottle or a saucer. And that was effect they would use for the sound of rats, because you get this squeaky, squeaky sound.

DT: But none of these tricks mattered if the mic wasn’t placed properly. That may sound like a minor detail but Neil Verma says mic placement was crucial – not just with props but with actors too.

NEIL: The world that is the off-mic environment, that's where radio drama happens. And that's how you create really important relations, like what character are you close to? What character do you listen to?

DT: Radio dramas were performed live in the ‘30s and ‘40s, so there was a limit to how many of tricks you could do. But in the 1950s, they moved over to pre- recorded magnetic tape, which gave the audio engineers a lot more creative freedom. And radios themselves became more sophisticated, so listeners could hear this subtler sound design.

EM: Speaking of advances in technology, the conventional wisdom is that radio dramas went out of fashion in the ‘50s because TV came along.

DT: That’s true to some extent. The networks moved a lot of money and talent to TV. But something else pushed radio dramas off the air: rock n’ roll. Remember, these were commercial radio stations. They catered to the marketplace and suddenly people couldn’t get enough of this new fangled music.

EM: But radio dramas kept going in the UK.

DT: Well, the BBC is government funded. They have multiple outlets so they could play rock on one channel, radio dramas on another, and create TV 8 networks. It wasn’t a zero sum game. And you talked with someone who’s worked with the BBC?

EM: Yeah, Dirk Maggs. He’s been directing radio dramas for decades. He’s been working with Audible lately. He recently did an adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and he loves the creative challenges of figuring out the sound of Discworld, which rests on the back of a group of elephants that are on the back of a giant turtle -- that’s swimming through space.

DIRK: You know, you're thinking, "How the hell'd you do that?" But, you come to take it sequentially. Describe the turtle, describe the elephants, describe the world that's on there, and then go into the world. That would be my way of going at it.

EM: When Dirk got to the BBC in the ‘70s, he says radio dramas were still going strong, but they were feeling a little stale creatively. There were a lot of legacy shows that had been around for years. Then in 1978, Douglas Adams – who was a writer on Doctor Who – created this really unusual radio drama called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it wasn’t a drama. It was an epic sci-fi comedy, which had never been done before.

DIRK: They really didn't think it was gonna get much of a listenership, so they put it on at half past 10 at night. It was not expected to do much business. And by the third week the listening figures they were getting back were through the roof. For myself., going into the BBC as a technician it was the only thing everybody was talking about.

CLIP 1: HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE

EM: The radio show was such a hit; Douglas Adams adapted it into a novel – a series of novels. And the BBC adapted those novels back into radio. And eventually, Douglas Adams chose Dirk Maggs to work on the later radio series.

CLIP 2: HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE

DIRK: The first episode of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy destroys the Earth and everybody on it and it leaves just two humans, actually only one human in the first episode alive. That is so vast and so ambitious an idea that, for a start, you're gonna listen to the next week's episode to figure out where does this go from there. But secondly, the enormity of it -- if you are in that imaginative state where all these images are coming to you and you combine that with writing, which says, the Vogan ships hung in the air and in precisely the way that bricks don't. You know, it could only be born in an 9 audio medium. It's too big, in a way, to combine those elements, and that was Douglas' achievement.

DT: And radio drama got a second life in the U.S. too.

EM: Yeah, thanks again to science fiction. This was around the same time, late ‘70s. NPR was struggling – which is hard to imagine because NPR is a powerhouse today but it was pretty new back then. The president of NPR, Frank Mankiewicz, thought that a radio drama event could bring in new listeners. So he asked John Houseman for advice.

DT: The actor John Houseman?

EM: Yeah, he also worked with Orson Welles on War of the Worlds. And Houseman recommended that they hire an audio engineer named Richard Toscan to create this big radio drama event.

RICHARD TOSCAN: Having been handed this hot potato, I went back to John Housman, and I said, "Okay, you got me this job, how do you think I could develop an audience for public radio in America?" "How would you do that?" And in his Professor Kingsford voice he, after thinking a moment, he said, "create a scandal."

EM: But this was the late 1970s, what was still shocking at that point? And a friend of Richard said, sort of jokingly, why don’t you do Star Wars on the radio? He thought, huh.

RICHARD TOSCAN: Here was, at the time, the most visual film Hollywood had ever made, and to say you were going to turn that into radio just sounded so outlandish that it had to be possible. Also everybody at NPR under Frank Mankiewicz, that is anybody below Frank, was scandalized by the idea. This was seen as, you know, the most lowbrow, boring thing. The result, of course, was that after the 13 episodes aired, despite all the sniping, and whatever, of NPR, the measurements that then came in showed, according to NPR, that it had raised the audience of NPR by 40%.

DT: NPR’s Star Wars was groundbreaking in other ways. It was in stereo – which was not common back then. They got LucasFilm to lend them Ben Burtt’s sound effects, and the John Williams score. They had to recast most of the actors, except Mark Hamill. But Richard Toscan says the recasting worked in their favor.

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RICHARD TOSCAN: Part of the idea is that we didn't want the series, or at least I didn't want the series to be a clone of the film. I didn’t want people to sit down in front of their radio and say oh, I remember this from three years ago or whatever.

DT: Remember, Star Wars was a 2-hour movie. This was a 6-hour, 13-part radio drama. So they got the late writer Brian Daley – who had written Star War spin-off novels – to add additional scenes that were not in the movie. So we got to hear Leia’s relationship with her father on Alderaan.

CLIP 1: NPR STAR WARS

DT: And we got to hear Luke’s training with Obi-Wan Kenobi:

CLIP 2: NPR STAR WARS

EM: Today we’re in a new golden age of audio dramas with podcasts, but Neil Verma says we can trace a lot of those shows back to NPR’s Star Wars because it made an argument to a new generation that may have seen radio dramas as passe -- that they can tell stories in a way that no other medium can.

NV: You know a lot of people who make audio dramas today look back at this as the gold standard. But I think it's not just the gold standard because of the great score or the great sound effects or any of those sorts of things. I think because it really creates these deep senses of character out of what had been relatively two-dimensional characters and that's something that a lot of audio dramas these days like to explore. It's become a much more writerly medium.

EM: By the way, most of the old radio dramas are available online so it’s a hidden world to discover. And we can binge on them, which people couldn’t back then.

DT: It turns out they’re perfect for the digital age.

EM: Thanks for helping me with this episode. Dallas Taylor is the host of Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.

Special thanks to Richard J. Hand, Richard Toscan, Dirk Maggs, Emory Braswell and Neil Verma, who says binging on episodes of the classic radio show Inner Sanctum Mysteries had a strange effect on him – not the show itself but hearing all those ads for Lipton Soup. 11

NEIL: And I hate Lipton Soup, but I listened to so many episodes of the show that I went to the kitchen one day and I opened up the cupboard and what did I see? A row of Lipton Soup because I had just heard the ads so many times. ME: I'm sure the advertisers must have been thrilled. “I'll tell you, buddy, 50 years later we'll all be dead and somebody's going to buy Lipton Soup!” NEIL: I know, right?

Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky and imagine worlds pod. My website is imaginary worlds podcast dot org.