Listening to. . .

[brian1984_2001]

Been trying out a few new OTR shows and seeing what I like.

Listened to all of the X Minus 1 shows. The show started out really great with some classic Bradbury and other great Golden Age sci-fi writers.

But they switched their print affiliation from Street & Smith's Amazing Science Fiction to Galaxy Magazine and the show went down hill precipitously. They featured way too much comedy and silliness, and not enough of the drama that typified Golden Age Sci Fi.

I've listened to about two dozen Inner Sanctum and found that I don't much care for the show. I don't like the narrator at all. A couple episodes have been good, and the acting is superb. But most shows are simple (very simple) murder mysteries and I don't care for them.

I've taken in 3 episodes of the detective show Broadway is My Beat. This show is dark and treats murder seriously. Not many laugh lines in this show. I was not too taken with it at first, but will listen to a few more episodes before I give up on it.

I listened to the first Five shows of Zero Hour which was the Rod Serling 1970s OTR revival show. The first five episodes comprised one whole story about a murderous couple on the lamb.

As you might expect, Rod Serling's narration is without reproach -- even as he was dying of cancer. I've only taken in one story, so it's not possible to judge the show, but I can say I hate the music beds. While I'm into 70s nostalgia and kitsch, I can say tha t Ferrante & Teicher should be forgotten.

The show flowed too seemlessly from commercial back to show. Sometimes I had to discern between commercial and show without any warning we'd come back.

The encodes are filled with great 70s public service announcements. My favorite is the Cub Scout PSA with the pop ditty "Be Prepared". I'd forgotten about it and hearing it again for the first time in 30 years put me back into my parents' 1973 Vega on a summer night. It was great.

Thank you to all of you that actually read all the way to the bottom of my rambling monologue.

[Chris Conlon]

I quite enjoyed the rambling monologue, and I couldn't agree more with you about X MINUS ONE, which is routinely named the greatest of all OTR science fiction series; many of its episodes are indeed great, but a lot of those top-notch tales are actually remakes of DIMENSION X scripts (the latter show being my own choice for great OTR SF series). Indeed, there are far too many silly comedies in the program. A few of them are genuine classics ("How-2" and "Something for Nothing" come to mind), but most are just...well, silly.

It's worth noting, though, that X MINUS ONE's early affiliation with Street & Smith's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION magazine, and the later switch to GALAXY, had nothing to do with the stories that were chosen for dramatization. That "in cooperation with" tag line really just bought the magazine(s) in question that little ad at the end of the show, when the announcer tells you what's in this month's issue. In fact, X MINUS ONE chose stories freely from any source---as evidenced by the fact that so much Bradbury was done early in the series. ASTOUNDING specialized in hard, science-based SF; its editor, John Campbell, would have nothing to do with a fantastist like Bradbury, and never published him.

As for INNER SANCTUM, there's no question that the stories are basically campy and dumb, but for me, it's the spirit of the thing. They can be wonderfully entertaining if you're in the right mood.

ZERO HOUR is an interesting curio, isn't it? You probably know that Serling had nothing to do with the series other than hosting it (no writing or producing, as with TWILGHT ZONE). That voice still worked a certain magic, though, even just a year or two before he died (of heart trouble, not cancer).

I enjoyed your post, Brian. Ramble on!