Sunday, February 22, 2009

Radio Memories: Hope For The Future

"I may not know the right decisions, but I know many of the wrong ones."

Sometimes that seems the most honest statement we can make when we attempt to learn from experience...

Every Sunday we take a break from more serious blogging and look back to the days when radio offered more than music or news... the days when the airwaves were filled with radio drama, creating a theater for the imagination.

This week's entry comes from a radio show I dearly loved when I first heard them as a teenager, the science fiction series Dimension X. Science fiction and the storytelling medium of radio drama were a natural match, yet it wasn't until the late 1940s and early 50s that radio began to take science fiction seriously, especially with the debut of this NBC series in April of 1950. Dimension X often turned to published high profile science fiction authors like Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury for their story material, adapting short stories like Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" and Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles".

Pursuing a strategy that requires a science fiction writer's imagination to understand, NBC almost guaranteed the show's short-lived one-year run by constantly shifting its time slot, even keeping it off the air entirely for twenty weeks throughout the first half of 1951.

The particular episode that we have on offer this week comes from this latter half of Dimension X's run. Entitled "Time And Time Again", it was originally broadcast on Thursday July 12th, 1951. A little light on the science side of its fiction this time out, the episode is nevertheless a fun reminder of the challenging mix of humility and confidence necessary to live in hope...

Previous Radio Memories posts:

An American In England: Women Of Britain

Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports

The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast

Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War

Escape: Vanishing Lady

Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

1 comment:

truepeers said...

Good stuff; you're making us all time travelers!