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    Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy: Old-Time Radio Listener's Guides, #1
    Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy: Old-Time Radio Listener's Guides, #1
    Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy: Old-Time Radio Listener's Guides, #1
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy: Old-Time Radio Listener's Guides, #1

    By Brian Schell

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    About this ebook

    Dark Fantasy was an American radio supernatural thriller anthology series. It had a short run of 31 episodes, debuting on November 14, 1941, and ending on June 19, 1942. Its writer was Scott Bishop, and it originated from station WKY in Oklahoma City and was heard Friday nights on NBC stations. The stories found a nationwide audience almost immediately, but only lasted until the following summer.

    This book is a listener's guide to the series. It briefly covers the creation and format of the series then looks at each of the existing episodes individually, including a synopsis, cast list, and commentary on each episode. The book includes links to hear the episodes (free of charge online), and the idea is to listen to the original episodes as you read through the book. If you enjoy short horror fiction, this is a great find— there are stories involving Atlantis and other worlds, talking gorillas, voices from the grave, werewolves, and ghosts aplenty. If you are anything at all like the author, you loved listening to scary stories as a child, and now you can do it again… with Dark Fantasy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrian Schell
    Release dateJul 10, 2018
    ISBN9781386174974
    Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy: Old-Time Radio Listener's Guides, #1
    Author

    Brian Schell

    Brian Schell is a College English Instructor who has an extensive background in Buddhism and other world religions. After spending time in Japan, he returned to America where he created the immensely popular website, Daily Buddhism. For the next several years, Schell wrote extensively on applying Buddhism to real-world topics such as War, Drugs, Tattoos, Sex, Relationships, Pet Food and yes, even Horror Movies. Twitter: @BrianSchell Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/Brian.Schell Web: http://BrianSchell.com

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      Book preview

      Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy - Brian Schell

      Old-Time Radio Listener's Guide to Dark Fantasy

      OLD-TIME RADIO LISTENER'S GUIDE TO DARK FANTASY

      BRIAN SCHELL

      Second Edition copyright 2023 Brian Schell

      All Rights Reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

      Visit my website at www.BrianSchell.com

      Printed in the United States of America

      Dark Fantasy radio program was created by Scott Bishop and originally aired on WKY Radio in Oklahoma City from 1941-1942

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Listener’s Guide

      Episode 1: The Man Who Came Back

      Episode 2: The Soul of Shan Hai Huan

      Episode 3 The Thing From The Sea

      Episode 4: The Demon Tree

      Episode 5: Men Call Me Mad

      Episode 6: The House of Bread

      Episode 7: Resolution 1841

      Episode 8: The Curse Of The Neanderthal

      Episode 9: Debt From The Past

      Episode 10: The Headless Dead

      Episode 11: Death Is A Savage Deity

      Episode 12: The Sea Phantom

      Episode 13: W Is For Werewolf

      Episode 14: A Delicate Case Of Murder

      Episode 15: Spawn Of The Sub Human

      Episode 16 The Man With The Scarlet Satchel

      Episode 17 Superstition Be Hanged

      Episode 18: Pennsylvania Turnpike

      Episode 19: Convoy to Atlantis

      Episode 20: The Thing from the Darkness

      Episode 21: The Edge of the Shadow

      Episode 22: Curare!

      Episode 23: Screaming Skulls

      Episode 24: The Letter from Yesterday

      Episode 25: The Cup of Gold

      Episode 26: Funeral Arrangements Complete

      Episode 27: Dead Hands Reaching

      Episode 28: Rendezvous with Satan

      Episode 29: I Am Your Brother

      Episode 30: The Sleeping Death

      Episode 31: The Demon Tree (Again)

      Sources and Additional Readings

      About the Author

      Stay Up To Date!

      Also by Brian Schell

      INTRODUCTION

      This book makes no attempt to be a comprehensive history of the Dark Fantasy show. This is a listener’s guide; The focus is on the individual episodes, not the behind-the-scenes drama of the show. The book in front of you contains details of every extant episode and includes summaries and commentary on each one. While I enjoy reading the history of OTR, I will have to admit that I’m in it for the stories, not the facts behind them. I will tell the history as best as I can piece it together from the sources I can find, and I’ll credit those sources, but keep in mind that I consider myself a fan of old horror stories, not a radio historian.

      I’m in my older 50s now, and I was raised in the Dayton, Ohio area. I clearly remember that during many of my childhood years, I would stay up past my bedtime to listen to CBS Radio Mystery Theater on WHIO radio on weekday evenings, usually from 11 p.m. to midnight. I remember not being able to stay awake through a lot of them, but I also remember being wide awake for hours after finishing some of them. Those were the only radio dramas I knew of that were on the air as I was growing up, as the age of radio dramas had mostly long passed by then.

      I was born thirty or forty years too late to experience radio’s heyday. On the other hand, with the rise of the Internet, I was able to get back into listening to old-time radio once again, and now I can do it in a much more organized and systematic way (to borrow a term from Netflix, we now have Binge-listening). I’ve downloaded and collected recordings of thousands of episodes of hundreds of shows since then, and still find new old shows as people post newly-discovered episodes of classic shows.

      I’ve written dozens of short horror stories myself (see Tales to Make You Shiver), so I have a somewhat professional interest in short horror. This interest owes a lot to Saturday night, horror-hosted, creature features, and those weeknights listening to Mystery Theater. That very same interest more recently turned me on to the Dark Fantasy radio show. This short-lived series of standalone episodes with creepy themes fits right in with the type of stories I write. Most stories have just a handful of characters, somewhat one-dimensional as a consequence of their short length, and a fairly simple plot, sometimes going right where you expect and sometimes ending with a surprise twist. Some of the stories take us to different worlds, while others explore this world in strange and uncanny ways. These situations rarely work out well for the main characters, but in one way or the other, justice is usually served in the end.

      ABOUT THE DARK FANTASY RADIO PROGRAM

      Dark Fantasy was a late-night horror show that aired on Oklahoma City’s WKY station and nationally on NBC. The show was unusual in that it didn’t have the ubiquitous host, and it aired at 11:05 p.m. Central Time or sometimes at 11:35, well after most children were asleep. This late-night time slot allowed for more adult stories, although they still seem pretty tame by modern standards. Each episode ran for about 25 minutes.

      Dark Fantasy only ran for about eight months and has surprisingly little surviving documentation. Even the major Encyclopedia publications make no mention of it. Everything contained in this book was gleaned by either my own listening to the stories or researching from one of the websites mentioned at the end of this section. The series was created by Scott Bishop, a pseudonym of George M. Hamaker, a longtime writer of radio scripts and pulp stories. Some of Bishop’s motivations and inspirations can be seen in the following article from the April 19, 1942 edition of The Capital Times (From DigitalDeliToo, see sources):

      Dark Fantasy Sees Light In Tea Room

      Scott Bishop, Author of Mystery Novels, Is Writer

      Dark Fantasy, radio's weirdest thriller series, heard late in the evenings over Station WIBA, was born in a Chinese tea room late on the stormy night of Nov. 3, 1941 while Scott Bishop, father of

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