Hello America,
It...is...later...than...you...think.
For our Halloween Spooktacular
Oct 22- 23 at 4 & 7pm this year, we here in the Hear Again Radio Project sound labs decided that we would use the Halloween show this year as a chance to explore one of the most influential and pioneering radio programs from the golden age of radio,
Lights Out.
Lights Out was a series created by Wyllis Cooper in the fall of 1933, and later taken over by Arch Oboler in 1936. Full details on the history of the popular anthology series can be found
here. In addition to the taut and engaging stories, one of the other things that drew audiences to this series was the interesting and creative sound effects that the show featured. In researching the effects we stumbled upon this image of an article highlighting the stars and the foley artists from the series.
For our
Halloween Spooktacular, we will be featuring one script by each writer. First,
Slurp! Goes the Amoeba by Wyllis Cooper which is a spooky tale about a lab experiment that goes horrifically wrong. It is tasty! We follow that with one of our favorite Arch Oboler scripts, last performed in the inaugural Hear Again performances for the 2009 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, entitled
Special to Hollywood. As always, we have many treats for our audience, including Halloween candy and a special give away courtesy of our friends in Old Time Radio, the
Old Time Radio Researchers group. Please visit their terrific site:
http://otrr.org/
Look for us on The Face Book:
http://www.facebook.com/HearAgainRadioProject
We were on our way to rehearsal this morning for the Hear Again Radio Project's Halloween Spooktacular, and I almost drove the car off the road when I heard this story on NPR. In short, an ex-employee of the National Archives stole recorded archive material and sold it on eBay. As a group that is dedicated to the idea of finding a new audience for Old Time Radio, we are horrified that someone would be so callous as to steal any of the source recordings from the Archive and rob future generations a chance to hear the original broadcast.
