Sunday Spotlight: Radio in Sci Fi!

  Radio played a pivotal role in science fiction’s golden age. The dawn of the pulp era was also the dawn of the radio era. Radio greats were the staple of entertainment in the late 1920’s through the late 1940’s, and everyone knew and enjoyed greats like George Burns & Gracie Allen, Abbott & Costello, Jack Benny, Arthur Godfry, Fibber McGee & Molly, and Basil Rathbone portraying Sherlock Holmes, among others. Science fiction, however, was under-represented during the heyday of radio. This was partly due to Orson Welles’ colossal blunder with War of the Worlds in 1938, and partly because there was a war on between 1941 and 1945, which meant radio stations had higher priorities than outer space adventures. There were two notable, pre-Golden-Age exceptions: Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century (1932 – 1936), and Flash Gordon (1935 – 1936). But otherwise, science fiction was kept outside the radio broadcast booth.

  With the onset of post-war television, all that changed. Not only was science fiction respectable again (thanks in large part to the technological advances of World War II), but many of the radio greats saw the handwriting on the wall and crossed over into television, leaving radio behind. Many radio studios then sought to fill the void television had left, and science fiction was readily available to do so. By 1950, sci-fi burst onto the radio dial. For those young boys who didn’t want to watch The Honeymooners with mom & dad, they could sneak away to tune in to science fiction shows using grandfather’s old radio upstairs.

  Nearly all great authors of the pulps and the later Golden Age sci-fi authors had one thing in common: their work was dramatized on the radio. Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke all had their work put on the airwaves, and this is part of what separated their work from that of, say, A.E. Van Vogt, who was too busy farting around with L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics to bother with aggressively promoting his story rights to the broadcast studios. It is also one of the main reasons why Clarke, who never really got going with sci-fi until 1948, when the “Golden Age” was half over, is regarded as one of the “Big Three.”

  NBS, the National Broadcasting Service (later, NBC), produced 2000 Plus, which first aired in 1950 and broadcast various 30-minute time-slots until 1952. Dimension X (1950 – 1951), soon followed. Although it came later and didn’t last as long, Dimension X was the more popular of the two. It was revitalized a few years later as X-Minus One (1955 – 1958). Another radio program, Beyond Tomorrow, was developed by rival CBS in 1950, although it is a matter of conjecture if any episodes actually aired. Those few episodes still exist today, however, as downloadable podcasts. In 1955, a children’s program called Space Patrol was extremely popular for television viewers. It was quickly made into a radio program as well for those who could not yet afford a television. Something similar happened with the television program Tales of Tomorrow (1951 – 1953), which was a precursor to The Twilight Zone (1959). ABC produced a radio version of Tales of Tomorrow in 1953. But it did so poorly, that it canceled after only a few episodes, pawned the remaining 15 episodes off onto CBS, and the television show itself was even canceled. 

  The link between science fiction and radio dramas can be seen today even in the common use of the term “sci-fi.” According to the American Heritage dictionary, Forrest J. Ackerman, the sci-fi writer, promoter, historian, and perhaps the genre’s biggest fan, first used the term in a speech given at UCLA in 1954. What he was doing was making a sly bit of humorous reference to “hi-fi” which was common slang for a “high-fidelity system,” a common synonym for someone’s stereo at that time. Since kids were using hi-fi to listen to science fiction, it became “sci-fi.” Get it? If not, that’s okay. Neither do most other people, because the linguistic link is so old that it’s been forgotten. But the term stuck, even if the understanding behind it didn’t.

  By 1960, nearly all radio dramas had been canceled. Just about everyone, finally, owned or had access to a television. The era of radio adventures was over, and T.V. would now rule the entertainment world, leaving the newly invented portable transistor radios to be used strictly for music, news, religion, and sports. Radio drama never entirely died, however. Various programs were continued in limited timeslots on National Public Radio (as they still are), and good ol’ Britain, which loves all things old-fashioned, contributed one more great radio drama to the sci-fi world: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978 – 1980).

Eric

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