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Post by spackle on Mar 6, 2010 18:53:37 GMT -5
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Post by caucasoididiot on Mar 6, 2010 20:02:35 GMT -5
Hey thanks! I'll check those out.
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Post by afriendlychicken on Mar 8, 2010 2:40:35 GMT -5
I agree wholeheartedly. I can remember when I was young, at around 6:30 in the morning , waking up and hearing Chicken Man episodes. The "he's everywhere he's everywhere" part used to scare the hell out me. I've been buying radio programs for years from Radio Spirits. There is nothing like old radio shows to stir the imagination. Every Halloween, I listen to my CD of War Of The Worlds and Suspense's Zero Hour. I especially love radio adaptations of SF and horror. Thankfully I bought all of their SF collections before they went out of print. I can listen to just over 100 SF episodes and they're all based on stories by 1940's and 1950's authors. The Golden Age. Of course, that's where 'Hitchhikers' belongs. I even think the fourth, fifth and sixth books work better in their recent radio adaptations. Horror and Mystery collections are still readily available being the most popular. Inner Sanctum and The Shadow are my favorites. And I'm a big admirer of Jack Benny. Thinking about your adaptation problem in movies, I notice radio shows do a really good job on that front. I have a few shows which used Edgar Allan Poe and H G Wells stories. I feel they are much closer in style and feel to the originals then the movie versions. I guess it works better on radio because, like books, the pictures are created in the listeners mind. And the picture changes, in both forms, each time you encounter the story. So, films may be the worst form of adaptation. You are forced to view the story through the eyes of one person, the Director. Then, you are forever stuck with that image. It can never change for you. It's just, there.
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Post by caucasoididiot on Mar 8, 2010 10:29:56 GMT -5
That's a good point on radio leaving more scope for the listener's own imagination. I have a few CD collections of old radio shows and really enjoy them. I was lucky enough to find a 10 disc comedy set at my local library's last sale and have been savoring those. I wish my mom were still around as I can remember her talking about some of these shows. She also might have helped me get a few dated references.
Another point that's occurred to me about movies as the new literature is that they're a fundamentally collaborative art form. An individual can write a novel (though in practice the publisher will have a lot of influence), but a director commands an army of cast and staff. To the extent that I've followed them it seems like the most successful are those who can really dominate a setup like that and impose their personal vision on it. But then it's interesting how, as you observe, it's a more restrictive art form on the viewers' end.
Has anyone read Whyte's The Organization Man? It's a study of the shifting of American values from a strongly individualistic to a more corporate outlook. Because the grey flannel suit is in the attic these days it seems to get passed over as outdated, but while the markers have changed I think it's still a very relevant book. He has one section in which he looks at how the theme plays in books and movies of the period, and since reading it it's a facet I tend to look for in anything from that period. It seems to me that the changing nature of modern media also influences that in some interesting ways.
But I think I'm drifting into a side stream here.
As a further aside, you're so right about Benny. I've scrounged up a lot of his old TV material too and just love it.
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