A Million COULD-BE Years on A Thousand MAY-BE Worlds by Peter Wood
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ld time radio did better science iction over ifty years ago than television and movies can even manage today. I irst got hooked on old time radio via mail order cassette tapes when I was a kid. My dad and I loved to sit quietly and play tapes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (1949-62). My dad was obsessed with The Shadow and often tossed out the show’s catch phrases like “The tree of crime bears bitter fruit”. In the early 80s the Tampa Tribune actually still ran radio listings with the radio programming for the week. Many radio stations ran 1940s and 50s radio dramas to cater to retirees. Along with those classic rebroadcasts, I listened to the irst run CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974-1982) which often ran science iction stories. These few remaining shows barely hinted at the wealth of radio programming before television. In the 1940s radio dabbled in science iction. Anthology programs like Suspense (1940-1962) Escape (1947-1954), and The Lux Radio Theater (which from 1934 to 1955 did hour long versions of movies with the real casts) occasionally did science iction. Dimension X (1950-1951) was the irst exclusively science iction program. It ran for ifteen episodes before NBC remade it as X Minus One in 1955. X Minus One aired 126 episodes until 1958. It was a perfect storm for launching a science iction anthology. Radio was running scared and many radio programs (such as Dragnet and Gunsmoke) simply gave up and transitioned to television. The pulp science iction magazines were in full swing. Radio needed a gimmick to compete with television’s juggernaut. X Minus One was a last ditch effort to regain listen52
ers. Television shows like Captain Video with their laughable special effects and juvenile stories couldn’t compete with the theater of the mind. NBC teamed up with Astounding and Galaxy magazines to offer adult stories from contemporary writers still familiar to today’s science iction fans. The program adapted stories from Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and William Tenn, among others. The episodes dealt with serious subjects in a mature manner. Each program began with a mock rocket launch: “Countdown for blastoff… X minus ive, four, three, two, X minus one… Fire! [Rocket launch sfx.] From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future; adventures in which you’ll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with Street and Smith, publishers of Astounding Science Fiction, presents… X Minus One.”
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Then for the next thirty minutes the story sucked you in.
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Sadly a great many classic radio shows have been lost. The networks often performed radio shows live and did not record the episodes. Listeners at home sometimes recorded shows on primitive disc recorders at 78 rpm collecting just ive minutes at a time. Home taping could be prohibitively expensive until the late 1940s. Then came the development of wire recorders that could capture complete programs. Finally, just in time for X Minus One, the technology improved and listeners could afford to record over an hour of program-