Superman | Green Hornet | Sci-fi | Westerns
by Bob Stepno
Good journalism needs honest facts and, honestly, even more than most of this website, this page is “in progress” with a few incomplete or unexplained links, Web coding in need of correction, and a mixture of content that I have been gradually moving to separate pages on specific radio genres, such as detective, real-life, science fiction, western, and suspense series.
The most obvious “adventure” series with reporters in prominent roles are Superman, with Clark Kent, Lois Lane and the whole Daily Planet crew, and The Green Hornet, with publisher Britt Reid and the staff of The Daily Sentinel.
However, other adventure heroes sometimes had “reporter” friends or were involved in plotlines that included reporters, including one of the most famous, “The Shadow.”
The Shadow, in print as a pulp-magazine character, had a newspaper reporter as part of his network of “operatives.” But in the character’s radio incarnation — with Orson Welles among the actors to play the mystery man — most of the operatives were eliminated to simplify the plot. “The lovely Margo Lane” filled the role as his main assistant. Although she was not a newspaper reporter, she sometimes impersonated one in the service of the Shadow. (More than 30 of Welles’ appearances as the Shadow are preserved in a streaming and downloadable collection at the Internet Archive.)
For example, in the episode “Murders In Wax” (July 24, 1938) Margo Lane pretended to be a Globe reporter to interview a suspect. In “The Society of the Living Dead” (Jan. 23, 1938), she posed as a sympathetic reporter to interview the daughter of a missing man and suspected suicide. The episode also used reporters’ newspaper and radio stories to further the plot.
Margo also played a Globe reporter twice, and she and Lamont Cranston visited a newspaper morgue, while investigating “The Comic Strip Killer” on Nov. 23, 1947.
Some of the radio scripts use the name of newspaper reporter Clyde Burke, who was a minion or assistant to the “print” version of the Shadow. On radio the character does not get involved with the Shadow directly, but his name is used for a voice reading headlines in several broadcast episodes, including “Night Without End” in 1938. His prescence was an attempt to maintain some continuity with the magazine stories, according to Shadow historian Martin Grams Jr.
A newspaper publisher demonstrates a variety of 1941 “new technology” when two men are murdered at one of Cranston’s haunts, in “The Chess Club Murders,” Feb. 23, 1941. Among other things the publisher has a dictaphone for recording stories and a remote control at his club that can broadcast headlines scrolling as an electric-light news bulletin on his Star-Bulletin newspaper building.
The publisher is a bit weak of reportorial ethics, though, being ready to run speculation about the first murder before the second murder is discovered — his suspect in the first crime.
Another publisher plays a big role in the end-of-season episode “The White Legion,” March 20, 1938, but not as hero or victim. Could he be soft on the vigilante organization — or even its leader?
“The Shadow” episode from Feb. 6, 1944, “A Pass to Death,” opens with a journalism student visiting a prison — with a special interest in the death chamber. The student shows great enthusiasm and preparation, up to a point. The journalism lesson, if any, might be to have good background dossiers on people you are likely to interview — easier to do with the web available today, not easy to do back in the 1940s… even with newspaper libraries, which were quaintly called morgues.
“News culture” remained alive in other episodes, where plot developments were moved along by newsboys shouting headlines, or by the Shadow and Margot listening to radio news reports. Not only were those techniques used in “Circle of Death” (Nov. 11, 1938), in that episode the Shadow also hacked into a public address system during a police commissioner’s meeting to tell the “gentleman of the press” he was issuing a challenge to a serial killer — followed immediately by a newsboy hawking the resultant extra.
In its early days the Shadow series also used a newsboy shouting “extra extra” at the end of each episode to preview the next installment, not unlike The Green Hornet usual closing.
(As of this January 2023 JHeroes update, a popular CD collection of digitally restored Shadow episodes is no longer available, according to its publisher Radio Spirits, and 257 formerly downloadable MP3 files at the Old Time Radio Researchers Group Library: The Shadow are in transition between library hosting services.)
One of several movie adaptations of The Shadow, International Crime, went a step further: The lead character was a journalist himself — a crime columnist for the newspaper, broadcasting his radio “column” under the name “The Shadow.” The full 1938 film is available in several formats as International Crime at the Internet Archive.
The Blue Beetle, a radio and comic book superhero, may have borrowed from Superman and The Green Hornet, but his day job wasn’t at a newspaper. Instead, he was a rookie police patrolman. However, his girlfriend in the comic books was a Lois Lane style reporter, Joan Mason, who even appeared as the title character in some comic stories. On the radio, he also shared the stage with newspaperman Charlie Stone, “ace reporter of the York City Sun,” friend of police officers Dan Garret (the Blue Beetle) and his partner.
The comic, launched in 1939, evolved into a radio serial in 1940 that ran for less than a year. Frank Lovejoy, the actor who played the Beetle, was to have more success a decade later playing a newspaper columnist in the mystery/drama series “Night Beat.”
Radio episodes of The Blue Beetle are available from the Old Time Radio Researchers Group at archive.org, including Drug Ring, which includes reporter Charlie Stone. (Click the episode title to download or stream an MP3 if an audio player icon is not visible.) Not only does the character don his blue chain mail to fight reefer-dealers and opium dens, he begins taking a mysterious drug himself — a secret “vitamin 2X,” which gave him the ability to recover from bullet wounds and increased his strength and speed and mental abilities.
The reporter doesn’t have a big part in the episode, although he is observant enough to get the license number of a gunman’s car. When Garret’s partner sends him to call for an ambulance for the hero, shot down on the street, he mentions that he’ll call his paper at the same time. “Boy, what a story!” he says, on his way to the phone.
(Since my first posting of this page, I’ve discovered that Archive.org has a second BlueBeetle collection, which may have higher sound quality.)
Alas, the shows are juvenile, punctuated by organ arpeggios and overwrought dialogue, which may explain why the series had such a short run on radio, although the comic book has had several incarnations under several publishing companies over the years. Wikipedia has an overview of the character, and websites including the Internet Archive have some copies of the early comics.
References:
Blue Beetle Companion by Christopher Irving, 2007
Jerry Haendiges Blue Beetle radio log
Golden Age Blue Beetle pages at WonderWorld Comics.
Science Fiction and Thrillers
Drawing on pulp and literary fiction, rather than the world of comic book heroes, radio’s science fiction anthology series also had the occasional futuristic journalist. In a 1957 episode of X-Minus One, a reporter on the planet Mars investigates a plague that causes violence and madness, protected by an invisible spacesuit that allows him to enter the quarantined area. The title is Inside Story (click to download an MP3 if a player icon is not visible).
In The Last Martian the reporter stays on Earth.
Science Fiction plots with news reporters also appeared on the 1970s attempt to revive radio drama, CBS Radio Mystery Theater, including the episode titles “The Man Who Saw Martians,” “The Song of the Sirens,” “The Time Box,” and “Universe Hollow.”
Suspense & Escape and similar…
Radio writers became very skillful at scaring listeners with dramatic suspense, including, perhaps most memorably, the series by that name, “Suspense,” and the similar “Escape.”
The Old Time Radio Researcher’s Group has posted a “certified” collection of more than 900 half-hour episodes from the 22-year run of Suspense, and 250 episodes of Escape, from 1947 to 1954. Early radio collector J.David Goldin’s radiogoldindex.com has plot summaries for both series. With a little cross-referencing and searching, I have a list of journalist episodes in progress, but updates to the archive addresses have disabled an earlier paragraph presenting them here. The same is true on some of the episodes of other series below.
LIGHTS OUT
“The Signal Man” 1946, one of several radio adaptations of a story by, of all people, Charles Dickens.
(I’ve written about other versions here )
Scoop (1942-12-08):
This December 1942 episode of the scare-filled late-night radio show Lights Out must not be confused with the amusing Evelyn Waugh novel by the same name. As it opens, a 40-year-veteran newspaper columnist is called into the office of a heartless and clueless new publisher. To save his job and keep serving his readers, the columnist even offers to continue working for no money.
The columnist sounds a bit like Boris Karloff, which should be a warning that the publisher’s end will not be a pretty one.
Ghost on the Newsreel Negative (1946-08-10):
Remembering the early days of multimedia reporting — a newsreel cameraman and soundman from Paragon News head out to get a story about a place the newspapers have been calling a “ghost farm.” The owner isn’t there, but someone is …
A Resource
Jeff Dickson and his successor Rick Hurdle have created and maintained a fascinating old time radio website with a twist: A focus on Science Fiction, Horror, and Adventure series, creating a searchable catalog of plot reviews and summaries. Again, journalism-focused keywords can find a wide variety of reporter roles.
See OTRPlotSpot
INNER SANCTUM
“The Last Story” from 1945 stars Richard Widmark as a newspaperman named “Tony Muse,” typing away. He was supposed to be writing a story about fishermen, but it took a wrong turn involving a local cemetery, a tortured woman with yellow eyes, a man with a harpoon through his chest, and madness. Widmark’s spooky radio performance was a couple of years before his star-making movie debut as the psychopath with a creepy laugh who shoved a wheelchair-bound woman down a staircase in “Kiss of Death” (1947). In “The Last Story” someone else does — or doesn’t do — the shoving, but Widmark’s reporter character winds up with a gun in his hand threatening a psychiatrist — for reasons entirely unrelated to journalism. I won’t spoil the suspense any further, but the story does end with his writing an apology to his editors.
The Brenda Clan’s ghost story, in “Mark My Grave,” Jan. 17, 1949, has a reporter/photographer off in search of a missing American in a village famous for a ghost story.
Both are part of a larger collection of one of the most famous and long-lived old-time radio series, Inner Sanctum, 1941-1952.
There may be other journalists lurking in those Inner Sanctum archives, or real-world lessons for journalists in those two. I plan to give them another listen and expand this page, but for now I’ll just include them here and invite your comments.
THE WHISTLER
The Whistler’s narrator introduced suspenseful and ironic stories about people from many walks of life, most of them tangled up in murder plots — which can be sampled easily in more than 500 episodes in the Old Time Radio Researchers’ collection at the Internet Archive or their plot summaries in the Radio GoldIndex.
For the story “Night Final,” Jan. 28, 1948, the main character was a newspaper reporter:
“She was a newspaper woman, and a good one. Words came easily to her — fresh new interesting ways of saying what she saw, or felt, or heard. Her critics and colleagues agreed that regardless of her shortcomings as a person, Helen Conover was a superlative reporter — holder of the guild award for on-the-spot reporting, the first woman to win such an honor.”
When she gets a divorce, her husband has another assessment, with a slight echo of Hildy Johnson’s speech about leaving her editor husband in “His Girl Friday.” But Helen’s husband isn’t an editor, he’s just angry:
“You’re a great girl, a fine reporter. I resent losing you, I admit it. It’s just too bad you didn’t take enough time out from your reporting to learn to be a woman.”
Will she be the heroine, villain or victim of her story? Can she meet an important double-deadline? There’s a twist at the end, with the newspaper involved again.
(By the way, those quotes are thanks to an online copy of the script, via the Generic Radio Archive… I can imagine a journalism-in-theater class having fun re-enacting this story, or maybe a media ethics seminar.)
Here’s the broadcast itself:
Another episode of The Whistler was a reminder that journalists on radio weren’t always confined to the roles of hero or villain. They could be victims, too.
“It’s only murder when you get caught,” says one character in this April 4, 1945, broadcast, “Meet Mr. Death,” offering $5,000 to a pharmacist to poison a news columnist… a good reminder that journalists on radio weren’t confined to the roles of hero and villain. The title character shows up later, with his own twist on that quoted phrase.
Not much journalism is mentioned, including the exact motive for killing the columnist, but he does show up at the drug store to pick up his sleeping potion, for which he blames his profession. He chats with the pharmacist’s fiancée and gives her some advice: “Keep him away from the newspaper business, a fate worse than death.” Along with that ironic comment, the story has another twist, typical of The Whistler, involving retribution… but no more discussion of news careers.
Four more journalists meet The Whistler:
The Whistler’s “One Man Jury” explores another reporter’s career, particularly a story that leads to acquittal of a woman accused of murder. But in “Eight to Twelve,” a reporter has problems cooking up his own alibi after doing-in the editor who fired him. In “Spell in Green,” it’s a woman columnist filling the murderer role, and her boss is the victim. Next up, the episode “Bird of Prey” has writers in both the murderer and victim roles.
Maybe I need to do more research and find out whether retired reporters and editors were composing these radio plays, vicariously taking out grudges on bosses and co-workers!
Newspaper Heroes on the Air 