I just finished up listening to an audio book on the 1930s-1950s radio show The Shadow. The first disc was a 45-minute history/overview of the show, and then the book had 8 of the original shows to listen to. They were fantastic! Radio drama is really cool – it is especially nice when I’m running on a treadmill. Yes, the plots could be contrived, the dialog was not always sparkling, the characters could be flat, but it was still great! The medium of radio allowed for plots and lines that would not make it on TV. It seemed to be part of the flavor. The sound effects were fun, and the melodramatic music on the organ was great.

For those who do know much about the Shadow, he fought crime. He “mastered the art of clouding men’s minds so they could not see him,” and he would track down evildoers and find ways to bring them to justice. He only “appeared” to the villains as a voice, the baritone voice of the Shadow, with a sufficiently creepy laugh. Only appearing as a voice works really really well on radio, by the way.

The thing that continually surprised me about the radio shows was the level of crime. In most of the shows, someone (or someones) dies. The Shadow is also no Superman – sometimes the people he is trying to protect die, and sometimes the villains die. In all of the shows that I heard, the Shadow always found out what was going on, but he did not always save the victim and he never seemed too shaken up when the malefactors died. In one show, he forced two murderers to sign a confession – if they did not, he was going to turn them over to a mob of their possible victims, who would kill the two men. Not exactly legal, and certainly not nice. I always think that the 30s and 40s had fairly innocent diversions for entertainment. The Shadow proved me wrong.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows….

Check out some of the shows here!
You can even download 98 of the shows for your mp3 player (click on “Whole Directory”). How very very cool.