Generations removed from the radio drama’s heyday, the internet and cult hits like Night Vale are reviving the tradition.
Justine Zweibel / BuzzFeed
Video may have once killed the radio star, but the internet is helping relaunch it for a new generation.
In America, beginning in the 1920s, the sky was saturated with transmissions of news broadcasts, quiz shows, comedy programs like The Jack Benny Show, adventure productions like Superman, and pulp dramas like The Shadow (which was voiced at times by Orson Welles). Families would gather around the radio every week, eager to hear stories unfold, each painting a different mental picture of the action carried through the airwaves.
But when television became the dominant form of home entertainment by the late '50s, radio serials slowly began to get crowded out of the atmosphere, kept alive largely by collectors and the reel-to-reel tapes that had captured the broadcasts.
There were small revivals here and there. Throughout the '70s, a few new serials (like CBS Radio Mystery Theater) cropped up and some local public radio stations would host horror theater shows. Joe Frank won awards for his absurd and dark monologues for NPR, and, of course, Garrison Keillor's variety show A Prairie Home Companion became an institution. But largely, while the U.K. continued to produce quality dramas on BBC Radio, the format remained dormant across the pond, save for local stations' late-night broadcasts of old favorites.
Fast-forward slightly to the 1980s, when a young man named Gregg Taylor was growing up in Toronto, listening to Sunday night transmissions of dated noir serials like The Green Hornet and collecting bootleg cassettes from regional conventions, recovered treasures of varying quality. That boyhood interest stayed with him into the late '90s, when he was a veteran regional stage actor who had just about grown sick of the soul-crushing audition process and the sacrifices a struggling performer must make.
"I realized that I never wanted to audition for a shampoo commercial in the first place, so I said, 'What do I want to do? If I could only have one project, what would it be?'" Taylor, who's now the creator of two successful audio programs, remembered in a recent conversation with BuzzFeed.
At the time, audio dramas were experiencing another short-lived rebirth, this time thanks to the first internet boom, with many amateur aural playwrights posting their work with the once-popular RealPlayer format. Taylor gathered a bunch of actor friends and had them perform a miniseries he wrote about a character called the Red Panda. It was a six-part homage to the noir tradition with the titular character essentially being an updated, Canadian version of The Green Hornet, a rich guy who doubled as a masked crime fighter.
An episode of The Green Hornet from 1940.
The recordings were a fun exercise with little initial payoff — Taylor joked that when he submitted them to radio stations, "They would look at you like you have nine heads, like, 'Are you from 1942, sir?'"
Around that time in the early 2000s, the rise of file sharing and MP3s enabled collectors to transfer years' worth of the old "Golden Age of Radio" classics into digital recordings, and, in the spirit of sharing, many were then made available on archival websites that had cropped up. Thousands of hours of history rest in dusty corners of the internet, relics with lessons and memories to share with any willing ear that stumbles upon them — Taylor's being one of them.
He listened to many of those shows, which, through osmosis, helped him better understand the intricacies of audio storytelling. Taylor initially kept his programs off the internet and left his stories in a quiescent limbo for several years, but when his local theater troupe — the Decoder Ring Theatre — launched its website in 2005, Taylor finally tossed them up on the site. Suddenly, he was getting emails from around the world, sent by people who had stumbled upon Red Panda and wanted more episodes.
Spurred by the sudden encouragement, he got to work writing both rebooted Red Panda adventures and a new series about a gumshoe called Black Jack Justice.
At first, his cast — selected from friends representing various regional theaters — recorded in a makeshift studio in his home, working for creative satisfaction in lieu of a paycheck.
"There was no money," Christopher Mott, a veteran Toronto theater actor who voices Jack Justice and several Red Panda characters, told BuzzFeed before a recording session recently. "We were recording in a basement next to a water heater, all doing it for fun, paid with coffee and donuts."
Both Red Panda and Black Jack Justice's format and old-time dialogue — recited in deep, heroic baritones and wise-guy cadence — are obvious throwbacks, but Taylor and co. have been determined to balance tribute with updating the medium for a more self-aware and socially progressive 21st century.
"A lot of people say it's nostalgia, but I say that the kids who are listening to this can't be nostalgic for things they've never heard," argued Taylor, who has a day job in marketing at a regional theater. "The old dramas have casual racism and the almost complete irrelevance of the women at the story, at best."
Decoder Ring Theatre releases one episode of each series once a month, with each new installment taking in about 10,000 streams and downloads in the 14 days that it sits atop the theater's website; in all, the Red Panda and Black Jack Justice shows have been listened to more than 5 million times. Decoder Ring receives fan art and invitations to conventions, and has an active Facebook page that allows listeners to interact with the cast.
Along with its Facebook page, the theater company has an official fan message board at a site called AudioDramaTalk.com, which hosts forums dedicated to several other micro-popular serials and theater companies as well. It serves as a hangout of sorts for many showrunners, including Grant Baccioco, who co-created the hit kids' program The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd.
When that launched in 2004, Baccioco said his short, kooky broadcasts reached just a handful of listeners; the popular embrace of podcasts — and smart phones that could easily download and play them — lifted the series north of 85,000 downloads per month at the peak of its run, which wrapped up in 2011. Along the way, there were several talent agents that took the show's creators on a tour of Hollywood in search of a television deal, but nothing came of that year-long quest. Now Baccioco runs another kids' audio show, the popular Deputy Guppy, which, yes, is about a cowboy fish.
