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X Minus One: 1950s Science Fiction Radio Programs Available to Listen (2011)
- xixixao 6y agoAlso a golden age of radio. Orchestra, cast, sound effects. Are shows like this ever produces nowadays?
- Igelau 6y agoMission to Zyxx, although a parody and not always great, has great sound effects and bits of score.
- flats 6y agoThe BBC & the CBC produce a lot of dramatic radio with full casts & music & sound effects, but not all that much science fiction - see BBC Radio 4 Extra, for example. CBC’s Vanishing Point is the most recent dedicated speculative fiction show I’m aware of with that level of production values.
- lostcolony 6y agoYes, but it's more novelty stuff. I know the Atlanta Radio Theater Company does it ( https://artc.org/ https://artc.org/) and of course, The Thrilling Adventure Hour ( http://thrillingadventurehour.com/ http://thrillingadventurehour.com/ )
- hcrisp 6y agoLamplighter Theatre produces many quality classic and Christian-themed dramas, hosted by John Rhys Davies. https://lamplighter.net/c/lamplighter-theatre/ https://lamplighter.net/c/lamplighter-theatre/
- bnralt 6y agoThere have actually been a lot of really good independent audio dramas in recent years. To name just a few: Edict Zero - A police procedural on a far flung colony planet. Orphans - A group of people with no memory crash land on a mysterious planet where they're being hunted. Archive 81 - Starts as a story about a guy investigating paranormal tapes, then eventually moves into more of a dark fantasy type setting. Theater of Tomorrow: A SciFi anthology series, with some relatively long multi-part stories. StarTripper!! - Lighthearted show about a desk clerk in the future who grows bored of his day job and buys a spaceship to travel around the galaxy. Our Fair City - Set in a futuristic city standing alone in a post apocalyptic wasteland, it's a bit of a screwball comedy/drama dealing with the various residents who reside there. MarsCorp - SciFi comedy about a woman who's been reassigned to assist the Martian colony effort and finds the entire project on the verge of collapse. As you can probably tell, I tend to listen to shows in the SciFi/Fantasy genre. There's a lot out there, but I picked ones that are relatively well written (in my opinion) and give the feeling of a big production (full cast and sound effects).
- em-bee 6y agothe Leviathan Chronicles is extremly well made. after years of hiatus currently the third season is airing.
- em-bee 6y agohere is a list of shows i have listened to so far: Broken Caalo Xan Deep Vault Earth Collective Story Edict Zero EOS 10 Escape Velocity Exoplanetary Falcon Banner Foundation Series (BBC) Girl In Space In Darkness Vast Leviathan Chronicles Liberty Nova Star Hunters Our Fair City Project Stellar Ruby Starship Iris The Bridge The Bright Sessions The Fourth Ambit The Kingery The Orphans Tides Tin Can Transmissions From Colony One Vast Horizon Wolf 359 if you like star trek, there is a list of fan audio drama here: http://startrekreviewed.blogspot.com/2009/06/247.html http://startrekreviewed.blogspot.com/2009/06/247.html
- csours 6y agoSee also Science Fiction Theater. Here's the episode that played the night of the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance that George McFly would have seen in Back to the Future: The Hastings Secret https://archive.org/details/ScienceFictionTheatre1956TheOtherSideOfTheMoonS01E39/Science+Fiction+Theatre+-+1955+-+The+Hastings+Secret+-+S01E29.mp4 https://archive.org/details/ScienceFictionTheatre1956TheOthe...
- jsemrau 6y agoThat comes at an amazing timing. In my opinion, this time period was a golden age of science fiction. And I agree with Peter Thiel that we are currently mostly viewing the future as too negative.
- JaimeThompson 6y agoAs a side a lot of us could view the future in a more positive way if people like Peter Thiel would use their immense power for good instead of just enriching themselves / helping others spy on us.
- jsemrau 6y agoValid point. Yet, the 50s and 60s had, from the viewpoint of now, a more exploratory and positive outlook on the future that is worth living and investing in. Currently, all future scenarios are dystopian nightmares. In my opinion, that needs to change.
- rangibaby 6y agoThe first radio story is literally about Commie, oops, I meant alien, infiltrators disguising themselves in human society to destroy it from the inside
- csours 6y ago"Better Living Through Chemistry" - There was a feeling in the first half of the 20th century that man could do no wrong. Yes some chemicals may be destructive, but there's no way we could do permanent damage to something as big as the earth; yes some people may be hurt here or there, but it will be a temporary effect on the way to a bright and shining future. We may deplete some animal populations, but they'll bounce back. Things are getting better in so many ways, the ends justify the means! That bright shining feeling has been tarnished by cancer hot-spots, mutated frogs, depletion of the ozone layer, nervous system damage from ethyl lead. I grew up on science fiction and I still love it, but the easy science fiction of the 1950's looks pretty simpleminded sometimes. Note: I am not anti-chemistry or anti-science, but we do need to be careful and safe. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr...
- dathanb82 6y agoI was very surprised to click on the llama icon and end up in a web-based port of Winamp.
- Igelau 6y agoRetro AND vintage!
- sn41 6y agoI absolutely love science fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s. In my spare time, I try reading "Galaxy science fiction" from archive.org. It is a pleasure to read classics like "The Fireman" by Ray Bradbury, which eventually became Fahrenheit 411, in their original versions. One, now largely forgotten, novel I enjoyed from that period is "Day of the Triffids".
- WiseWeasel 6y agoMy exposure to it is only from the entertainingly campy movie adaptation, which I can recommend. https://youtu.be/0KUjE995IO4 https://youtu.be/0KUjE995IO4 (trailer, 1962) I hadn’t considered following that one to the source; what did you like about the book?
- vmilner 6y agoThe BBC radio 1968 version of Triffids is excellent, with a pretty modern feel, (except for the music). The BBC 1981 TV version is also great.
- jamiek88 6y agoThat version scared the crap out of me as a kid, now I realise why , I was four!
- vmilner 6y agoIs The Day of the Triffids really largely forgotten? Maybe I have a UK bias.
- johnny_reilly 6y agoChallenge that: Day of the Triffids is not largely forgotten! And nor is anything else by John Wyndham; Trouble with Lichen is also terrific.
- Igelau 6y agoThere are hits and misses in here, but I love listening to these. A few big names in there too. I seem to recall there's an episode in there that's preceded by an announcement about the Korean War.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoWhen I was a kid there was a local radio station that would play all kinds of old radio programs. I fell asleep every night for years listening to them. They would play War of the Worlds on Halloween. I feel lucky to have stumbled on old radio as kid.
- mcbuilder 6y agoSame! WHO 1040 AM. This was my favorite followed by Dimension X, Suspense, and the Burns and Allen Show. They dramas and sci-fi were pretty intense listens as a kid.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoIt still amazes me that many of those shows were done live on the air, not prerecorded. Sounds effects and all.
- jejones3141 6y agoYup. I rather liked _Night Beat_ ("Copy boy!").
- cronix 6y agoI did the same in Portland in the mid 80s. X-1, The Shadow, The Hall of Fantasy, Jack Benny, Lone Ranger and Fibber McGey and Molly, the Whisperer and The Whistler were some I remember fondly. I think The Shadow, X-1 and The Whistler were my favs though. I actually have a ton saved that I use in Industrial music that I make :)
- annoyingnoob 6y agoI tell my kids their rooms are like Fibber McGey's closet and they just give me blank stares.
- lostcolony 6y agoI was introduced to them by audio tape by my parents. Lots of the comedies, but eventually some of the dramas. Less sci-fi, but Suspense was a delight in October.
- phreeza 6y agoLove these, used to listen to them a lot. The Veldt is probably my favorite.
- chadcmulligan 6y agoIt was also an episode on Ray Bradbury Theatre iirc, a great story
- flats 6y agoX Minus One was the best of the full-cast science fiction radio shows of the 50s (episodes like “Star Bright”, “The Parade”, and “Field Study” are forever etched in my memory) but there were several others - I recommend the Relic Radio Science Fiction podcast (https://www.relicradio.com/otr/home-2/science-fiction/ https://www.relicradio.com/otr/home-2/science-fiction/) for a sampling of them. My favorite science fiction radio, though, is Michael Hanson’s Mind Webs. You can listen to all of the episodes at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410 https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410) & I compiled a list of my favorite episodes to guide you on your journey at https://blog.robador.com/2015/04/the-best-of-mind-webs/ https://blog.robador.com/2015/04/the-best-of-mind-webs/. Not full cast, but great stories told well with good music. They even made some new episodes a couple years ago before Michael Hanson died.
- mintplant 6y agoMind Webs is excellent! I would also recommend Quiet Please, which has a similar feel and quality but a more horror/speculative fiction focus. https://www.quietplease.org/episodes/ https://www.quietplease.org/episodes/ The episode The Thing On The Fourble Board is widely regarded as a classic of that era of radio. https://www.quietplease.org/episodes/the-thing-on-the-fourble-board-60.html https://www.quietplease.org/episodes/the-thing-on-the-fourbl... While I'm at it, I'll point to Erik Bauersfeld's Black Mass as well, another high-quality horror-fantasy radio show that was produced locally in the Bay Area. The adaptation of The Outsider always gives me chills. https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/thriller/black-mass/the-outsider-1968-11-20 https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/thriller/black-mass/th...
- CarbonJ 6y agoX Minus One is great! A friend of mine runs "Retrostrange" - a radio station that plays old sci-fi shows and often features it. I find it really relaxing to throw it on in the background while I work. http://retrostrange.com/ http://retrostrange.com/
- bilater 6y agoI want to know when exactly did people stop talking like this or was this only a Shakesperean thing for media and gradually went out of fashion?
- oh_sigh 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
- nescioquid 6y agoI share your curiosity. I've marveled at people's diction in man-on-the-street interviews from the 30s, 40, 50s. Maybe the effect of an editorial filter or change in acculturation, or more likely co-determined by things I haven't guessed at.
- dyates 6y agoIt's called the Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accent and was designed as a way to blend the American accent with British Received Pronunciation. It was deliberately cultivated by the upper class and actors in the early 20th century; there was a book called Speak With Distinction that taught people how to speak like this. It started dying after WWII and was basically gone from the media by the late 60s. Maybe because post-WWII America was less dependent on ties with Britain for its national identity, or maybe because people decided it sounded silly and fake. No-one spoke with the accent naturally, so it really only took a fashion change for it to disappear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-british-accent-took-old-hollywood-by-storm https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-british-acc...
- 082349872349872 6y agoI put Suez (1957) as an end bracket for the british empire, which would agree as an inflection point with "started dying after WWII and was basically gone from the media by the late 60s." (When Orwell describes Airstrip One as always having been a part of Oceania, he's taking the early adopter "after WWII" viewpoint. This year we'll learn if the airstrippers will have always been eating chlorinated chicken...)
- twic 6y agoThe UK had Journey Into Space: https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/sci-fi/journey-into-space https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/sci-fi/journey-into-sp... That was an episodic space adventure, rather than unrelated short stories like X Minus One.
- UncleSlacky 6y agoThey're played quite frequently on BBC Radio 4 Extra as well: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00clkyv https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00clkyv
- msla 6y agoThe Internet Archive has a whole section of Old Time Radio: https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio I've always liked "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar": https://archive.org/details/OTRR_YoursTrulyJohnnyDollar_Singles https://archive.org/details/OTRR_YoursTrulyJohnnyDollar_Sing... And there's Bob and Ray episodes: https://archive.org/details/bobandraytoaster?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/bobandraytoaster?tab=collection "The Damon Runyon Theater" is good: https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Damon_Runyon_Singles https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Damon_Runyon_Singles
- sqlacid 6y agoI highly recommend NIGHTFALL from CBC. https://archive.org/details/Nightfall-cbc-oldTimeRadio https://archive.org/details/Nightfall-cbc-oldTimeRadio Newer vintage, 80's, excellent productions
- msla 6y agoCBS Radio Mystery Theater is another "OTR Revival" series, from 1974 to 1982. Complete collection: https://archive.org/details/cbsrmt-74-02-08-33-conspiracy-to-defraud https://archive.org/details/cbsrmt-74-02-08-33-conspiracy-to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBS_Radio_Mystery_Theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBS_Radio_Mystery_Theater Rod Serling hosted The Zero Hour 1973 to 1974: https://archive.org/details/podcast_zero-hour_259662597 https://archive.org/details/podcast_zero-hour_259662597 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zero_Hour_(U.S._radio_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zero_Hour_(U.S._radio_seri... And then Sears Radio Theater, aka Mutual Radio Theater: https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_Sears_Radio_Theater https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_Sears_Radio_Theat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Radio_Theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Radio_Theater It's amazing what you can find if you know where to start digging.
- UncleSlacky 6y agoThere's also the OTR Network Library: http://www.otr.net http://www.otr.net
- tzs 6y agoThis reminds me of something I've wondered about and been irked by recently. Audio without video works well for storytelling. Video without audio doesn't work nearly as well. There are a few over the air TV channels I can get but not strong enough to avoid fairly frequent dropouts. A dropout causes up to a couple seconds or so of parts of the picture frozen and parts replace with assorted colored blocks, and audio to be completely lost. It makes the program pretty much unwatchable. If they had just allocated more bandwidth to ECC on the audio, even if that meant less on the video and so more frequent video dropouts, most of those channels would become watchable, because for most programs missing a little video doesn't make you lose the story as long as the audio is uninterrupted.
- em-bee 6y agoi made a similar experience with the star trek fan films i have been watching. you can find anything from the most ridiculous to professional productions. there is a huge range. on the other hand star trek audio drama (and any scifi audio drama i have listened to) all sound most excellent. there is hardly any that doesn't. as long as you have some decent voice acting and a few sound effects, you are good.
- tzs 6y agoWikipedia has a handy list of X Minus One episodes based on stories by famous writers [1], and a list of all the episodes [2]. These might come in handy since the Archive.org listing just lists the episode titles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Minus_One#Episodes_based_on_stories_by_famous_writers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Minus_One#Episodes_based_on_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X_Minus_One_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X_Minus_One_episodes
- optimalsolver 6y agoOf possible interest: I made a Reddit bot [0] that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks when their titles get mentioned in comments, and then replies with the link. It uses the Speculative Fiction Database for reference. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/EmotionalField https://www.reddit.com/user/EmotionalField
- giantrobot 6y agoOn SiriusXM there's an old time radio channel that plays this show and tons of others (Ch 148 Radio Classics). I love X Minus One, Dimension X, Suspense, and Escape. You can also find them on The Internet Archive.
- drdeadringer 6y agoI was raised on re-runs of Dragnet, The Shadow, The Six Shooter, and The Whistler. Years later I got hands on X Minus One, CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, and others. For a spell there was the "modern era" 'Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theatre' too. Great times. I revisit from time to time. Buy Blue Coal -- anthracite!
- CamperBob2 6y agoI wonder what the copyright status of these shows is? I wish I'd been a little more aggressive with wget a few months ago when IA was posting a lot of textbook .PDFs. The same consideration might apply here if you're a fan of this type of material. Once it's been yanked from the archive, you have to assume it's gone for good.
- em-bee 6y agowell, the internet archive hopefully vets stuff they feature, so it should be safe. but i agree with you. i am listening to the more recent scifi audio dramas and i am keeping a copy of each one.
- pjmorris 6y agoI once read a Harlan Ellison essay on the power of the spoken (and written) word applied to radio stories. He had a line about the imagination having a much larger special effects budget than any movie studio could ever achieve. It always stuck with me.
- em-bee 6y agoi have a similar thought on role playing video games. if you remember text based MUDs, they allowed for a lot more imagination like a book vs movies. now i wonder, we have book, audio drama and movies, and we have text and graphic games, but i have not yet seen any pure audio game. something even a blind person could enjoy
- euroderf 6y agoWhy doesn't someone sell refurbished radio sets preloaded with this kind of material ?
- shrubble 6y agoI would mention that archive.org also has Escape! as a series, which includes a good adaptation of the short story, 'The Most Dangerous Game' amongst its episodes.
- creativeCak3 6y agoThis is why I'm so happy Internet Archive exists. Listened to the first episode, and it's not too bad! Thanks for this gem.