Theater of the mind
One of my fondest childhood memories
is riding back from camp and listening to the old time radio shows on WRVO 89.9
out of Oswego. We would lie on our backs in the dark and listen to The Shadow, The Jack Benny Show, You Bet
Your Life, and Fibber McGee and Molly.
The WRVO station had a seemingly bottomless archive of radio shows and played
them as retro entertainment in their “Theater of the Mind” program.
Old Time Radio — a loose phrase
that encompasses nearly all fictional talk radio other than Prairie Home Companion — is more than
just a footnote in the annals of American popular culture. There was a time
where the popularity of radio far exceeded that of cinema. During the golden
age of radio, movie theaters would schedule their times around the most popular
radio shows like Amos and Andy.
Finding Old Time Radio (OTR) beyond
your local station was costly and difficult, until now. Seeing no future market
value, the broadcast majors let copyright lapse on their radio shows and made
no effort to make shows available to the public. Now, with the network of
collectors on the Internet, the gates have been thrown wide open. OTR has
virtually no retail value and most of it is public domain, allowing collectors
to package hundreds of shows on mp3 CDs at rock-bottom prices. Quality varies
from show to show and site to site, but when programs are going for less than a
dime, you can afford to experiment.
If you need some OTR immediately,
check out www.rusc.com, where you can download a gig of OTR for $7.50. That’s
like five straight days of great vintage entertainment.
— Michael Neault
Mad, mad, mad pre-adolescence
Douglas Adams once observed,
“Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature.
That’s how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday
is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after
that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.” He probably
wasn’t thinking of Mad Magazine. Or
maybe he was.
The Mad Magazine age is 12. You have a budding sense that you may
actually know everything. On top of that, the notion first tickles your
cerebellum that everyone else is really dumb — particularly those adults, the
ones over there, in the corner, waiting for you to put down this newspaper and
read something that’s good for you, not this mental floss that corrupts morals
and causes hair lice. The kicker though is that this revelation has come to you
alone. And you are so alone; so very, very alone.
So, let us not cast aside the things
of our youth, particularly the things that made that youth a tinge more
bearable. Let us leave them out on the kitchen table. And remember to look
askance when any pre-adolescent opens those Mad-dening
pages.
Mad
Magazine crawled out of the horrifying crypt of EC Comics in the 1950s.
Originally a comic book created by Harvey Kurtzman, it became a slick magazine
when Kurtzman told his publisher, Bill Gaines, that he was leaving EC for the
better world of full-size mags. Gaines wanted his one-man editor-artist-writer
to stay, so he offered to publish a magazine. After five full-sized issues,
Kurtzman was lured away by another little emperor of the publishing industry,
Hugh Hefner.
Mad
Magazine prospered however. By the 1970s, every smart aleck in the back row
of his middle-school class secretly longed to join the Usual Gang of Idiots of
the Mad masthead.
Let’s not ignore what Mad Magazine has always done best: It helps tear down the idols of our childhood. How those
idols are replaced is beyond any magazine’s scope. Well, other than Teen People, but that’s always been an
exception.
— Craig Brownlie
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.
