10 FORGOTTEN Radio Dramas That Came Back After TV Killed Them

A man in his sixties who'd made radio dramas before the war talked CBS into one more attempt, and then produced a brand new one every single day for nine years. Fourteen hundred of them. Rod Serling came back to radio the year after The Twilight Zone made him famous. Edward Albee wrote a play for stereo where one character comes out of the left speaker and one out of the right, so you're in the room with them. And in a homeless mission on the south side of Chicago, a drama went out every week that never stopped, not once, through the entire period everybody calls the dead years. In this documentary, we count down ten American radio dramas from the years after television was supposed to have finished the medium off. Why did a five-night serial hosted by the creator of The Twilight Zone collapse in under a season? What did Sears put on the air five nights a week in 1979, and which five famous faces hosted it? And what did the man running a forty-five-year drama series tell the businessmen who came asking to sponsor it? In this video, we cover: The Creaking Door: A sound effect from 1941, brought back thirty-three years later to open the biggest revival of them all. Five Nights, Five Hosts: Lorne Greene, Andy Griffith, Vincent Price, Cicely Tyson and Richard Widmark, on the radio in 1979. Made In A College Studio: Why a campus station in Utah could afford better drama than either national network. God Needs No Sponsor: The show that turned down the money and outlasted every one of them. News And Sports: The four words CBS used in December 1982, and the twenty years of silence that followed. Chapters: 0:00 - The Night It Came Back 1:08 - The Zero Hour, Rod Serling 3:46 - General Mills Radio Adventure Theater 6:44 - Alien Worlds 8:39 - Earplay, NPR 11:12 - Bradbury Thirteen 13:33 - National Radio Theater of Chicago 15:45 - Jim French, Seattle 18:01 - Unshackled 22:23 - Sears Radio Theater 25:31 - CBS Radio Mystery Theater If you enjoyed this look back at the dramas that came back after everybody had buried them, subscribe for more forgotten American radio history. Radio Drama, CBS Radio Mystery Theater, Himan Brown, Rod Serling, Old Time Radio, Sears Radio Theater, E.G. Marshall, Radio History, 1970s Radio, Nostalgia