X Minus One was the best of the full-cast science fiction radio shows of the 50s (episodes like “Star Bright”, “The Parade”, and “Field Study” are forever etched in my memory) but there were several others - I recommend the Relic Radio Science Fiction podcast (https://www.relicradio.com/otr/home-2/science-fiction/) for a sampling of them.
My favorite science fiction radio, though, is Michael Hanson’s Mind Webs. You can listen to all of the episodes at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410) & I compiled a list of my favorite episodes to guide you on your journey at https://blog.robador.com/2015/04/the-best-of-mind-webs/. Not full cast, but great stories told well with good music. They even made some new episodes a couple years ago before Michael Hanson died.
While I'm at it, I'll point to Erik Bauersfeld's Black Mass as well, another high-quality horror-fantasy radio show that was produced locally in the Bay Area. The adaptation of The Outsider always gives me chills.
Of possible interest: I made a Reddit bot [0] that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks when their titles get mentioned in comments, and then replies with the link. It uses the Speculative Fiction Database for reference.
When I was a kid there was a local radio station that would play all kinds of old radio programs. I fell asleep every night for years listening to them. They would play War of the Worlds on Halloween. I feel lucky to have stumbled on old radio as kid.
Same! WHO 1040 AM. This was my favorite followed by Dimension X, Suspense, and the Burns and Allen Show. They dramas and sci-fi were pretty intense listens as a kid.
I did the same in Portland in the mid 80s. X-1, The Shadow, The Hall of Fantasy, Jack Benny, Lone Ranger and Fibber McGey and Molly, the Whisperer and The Whistler were some I remember fondly. I think The Shadow, X-1 and The Whistler were my favs though. I actually have a ton saved that I use in Industrial music that I make :)
Louisiana's WRBH - Reading Radio for the Blind and Print Handicapped [0] would air a block of old radio programs after midnight. As a kid I would try my best to stay awake late enough to listen them from my bed.
I was introduced to them by audio tape by my parents. Lots of the comedies, but eventually some of the dramas. Less sci-fi, but Suspense was a delight in October.
This reminds me of something I've wondered about and been irked by recently.
Audio without video works well for storytelling. Video without audio doesn't work nearly as well.
There are a few over the air TV channels I can get but not strong enough to avoid fairly frequent dropouts. A dropout causes up to a couple seconds or so of parts of the picture frozen and parts replace with assorted colored blocks, and audio to be completely lost.
It makes the program pretty much unwatchable.
If they had just allocated more bandwidth to ECC on the audio, even if that meant less on the video and so more frequent video dropouts, most of those channels would become watchable, because for most programs missing a little video doesn't make you lose the story as long as the audio is uninterrupted.
i made a similar experience with the star trek fan films i have been watching. you can find anything from the most ridiculous to professional productions. there is a huge range.
on the other hand star trek audio drama (and any scifi audio drama i have listened to) all sound most excellent. there is hardly any that doesn't. as long as you have some decent voice acting and a few sound effects, you are good.
See also Science Fiction Theater. Here's the episode that played the night of the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance that George McFly would have seen in Back to the Future:
I was raised on re-runs of Dragnet, The Shadow, The Six Shooter, and The Whistler. Years later I got hands on X Minus One, CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, and others. For a spell there was the "modern era" 'Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theatre' too.
Great times. I revisit from time to time. Buy Blue Coal -- anthracite!
It's called the Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accent and was designed as a way to blend the American accent with British Received Pronunciation. It was deliberately cultivated by the upper class and actors in the early 20th century; there was a book called Speak With Distinction that taught people how to speak like this.
It started dying after WWII and was basically gone from the media by the late 60s. Maybe because post-WWII America was less dependent on ties with Britain for its national identity, or maybe because people decided it sounded silly and fake. No-one spoke with the accent naturally, so it really only took a fashion change for it to disappear.
I put Suez (1957) as an end bracket for the british empire, which would agree as an inflection point with "started dying after WWII and was basically gone from the media by the late 60s."
(When Orwell describes Airstrip One as always having been a part of Oceania, he's taking the early adopter "after WWII" viewpoint. This year we'll learn if the airstrippers will have always been eating chlorinated chicken...)
I share your curiosity. I've marveled at people's diction in man-on-the-street interviews from the 30s, 40, 50s. Maybe the effect of an editorial filter or change in acculturation, or more likely co-determined by things I haven't guessed at.
Wikipedia has a handy list of X Minus One episodes based on stories by famous writers [1], and a list of all the episodes [2]. These might come in handy since the Archive.org listing just lists the episode titles.
There are hits and misses in here, but I love listening to these. A few big names in there too. I seem to recall there's an episode in there that's preceded by an announcement about the Korean War.
That comes at an amazing timing. In my opinion, this time period was a golden age of science fiction. And I agree with Peter Thiel that we are currently mostly viewing the future as too negative.
As a side a lot of us could view the future in a more positive way if people like Peter Thiel would use their immense power for good instead of just enriching themselves / helping others spy on us.
Valid point. Yet, the 50s and 60s had, from the viewpoint of now, a more exploratory and positive outlook on the future that is worth living and investing in. Currently, all future scenarios are dystopian nightmares. In my opinion, that needs to change.
The first radio story is literally about Commie, oops, I meant alien, infiltrators disguising themselves in human society to destroy it from the inside
"Better Living Through Chemistry" - There was a feeling in the first half of the 20th century that man could do no wrong. Yes some chemicals may be destructive, but there's no way we could do permanent damage to something as big as the earth; yes some people may be hurt here or there, but it will be a temporary effect on the way to a bright and shining future. We may deplete some animal populations, but they'll bounce back. Things are getting better in so many ways, the ends justify the means!
That bright shining feeling has been tarnished by cancer hot-spots, mutated frogs, depletion of the ozone layer, nervous system damage from ethyl lead.
I grew up on science fiction and I still love it, but the easy science fiction of the 1950's looks pretty simpleminded sometimes.
Note: I am not anti-chemistry or anti-science, but we do need to be careful and safe.
That bright shining feeling has been tarnished by cancer hot-spots, mutated frogs, depletion of the ozone layer, nervous system damage from ethyl lead.
They were right, though: none of those are permanent. The Earth will survive us without difficulty.
The earth doesn't care one bit, it's just a bunch of rocks, mainly. It will absolutely go on without us. We can make it really suck for ourselves to live on though.
I absolutely love science fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s. In my spare time, I try reading "Galaxy science fiction" from archive.org. It is a pleasure to read classics like "The Fireman" by Ray Bradbury, which eventually became Fahrenheit 411, in their original versions. One, now largely forgotten, novel I enjoyed from that period is "Day of the Triffids".
I wonder what the copyright status of these shows is? I wish I'd been a little more aggressive with wget a few months ago when IA was posting a lot of textbook .PDFs. The same consideration might apply here if you're a fan of this type of material. Once it's been yanked from the archive, you have to assume it's gone for good.
X Minus One is great! A friend of mine runs "Retrostrange" - a radio station that plays old sci-fi shows and often features it. I find it really relaxing to throw it on in the background while I work.
The BBC & the CBC produce a lot of dramatic radio with full casts & music & sound effects, but not all that much science fiction - see BBC Radio 4 Extra, for example. CBC’s Vanishing Point is the most recent dedicated speculative fiction show I’m aware of with that level of production values.
There have actually been a lot of really good independent audio dramas in recent years. To name just a few:
Edict Zero - A police procedural on a far flung colony planet.
Orphans - A group of people with no memory crash land on a mysterious planet where they're being hunted.
Archive 81 - Starts as a story about a guy investigating paranormal tapes, then eventually moves into more of a dark fantasy type setting.
Theater of Tomorrow: A SciFi anthology series, with some relatively long multi-part stories.
StarTripper!! - Lighthearted show about a desk clerk in the future who grows bored of his day job and buys a spaceship to travel around the galaxy.
Our Fair City - Set in a futuristic city standing alone in a post apocalyptic wasteland, it's a bit of a screwball comedy/drama dealing with the various residents who reside there.
MarsCorp - SciFi comedy about a woman who's been reassigned to assist the Martian colony effort and finds the entire project on the verge of collapse.
As you can probably tell, I tend to listen to shows in the SciFi/Fantasy genre. There's a lot out there, but I picked ones that are relatively well written (in my opinion) and give the feeling of a big production (full cast and sound effects).
I once read a Harlan Ellison essay on the power of the spoken (and written) word applied to radio stories. He had a line about the imagination having a much larger special effects budget than any movie studio could ever achieve. It always stuck with me.
i have a similar thought on role playing video games. if you remember text based MUDs, they allowed for a lot more imagination like a book vs movies.
now i wonder, we have book, audio drama and movies, and we have text and graphic games, but i have not yet seen any pure audio game. something even a blind person could enjoy
On SiriusXM there's an old time radio channel that plays this show and tons of others (Ch 148 Radio Classics). I love X Minus One, Dimension X, Suspense, and Escape. You can also find them on The Internet Archive.
I would mention that archive.org also has Escape! as a series, which includes a good adaptation of the short story, 'The Most Dangerous Game' amongst its episodes.
My favorite science fiction radio, though, is Michael Hanson’s Mind Webs. You can listen to all of the episodes at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410) & I compiled a list of my favorite episodes to guide you on your journey at https://blog.robador.com/2015/04/the-best-of-mind-webs/. Not full cast, but great stories told well with good music. They even made some new episodes a couple years ago before Michael Hanson died.