The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (9) Time and Again

Episode 22:  Time and Again
First aired:  27 January 1974
Author:  Ian Martin
A clock maker times the time:

And the last thing I heard that night... was the triumphant beat of the clock, sounding my inner ear.  Or was it the sound of my heart?  -- Ethan Vigil

Back in 2000, I was thrilled to learn that someone at a Pacific 12 university had posted almost the entire run of CBS Radio Mystery Theater.  As a relatively affluent and experienced Internet user, I was happy to have an ultra-fast 56k modem with which to download.  Sure, it took 45 minutes to pull in one episode; but at two (maybe even three!) a night, I could have the whole set loaded onto Zip cartridges sometime in 2003.  Woo-hoo!  Progress!

Well before then, I had downloaded my favorites, and even put a few of them on a CD I took to Chicago as 2000 came to a close.  As usually happened every Christmas holiday season until 2003, my sisters brought their kids (and one grandchild), and we had a family reunion.  My original plan was to listen to my freshly downloaded episodes on my father's computer his den, by myself.  Now that the kids were also in town, I came up with a better idea.

One night just before the New Year, at a few minutes to midnight, I convinced three cousins -- aged 8, 8 and 6-1/2 -- to join me.  While I sat at the computer, they formed a small arc behind me.  As second- and third-graders, my nieces and nephew were too young for most horror stories, but "Time and Again" held exactly the right amount of terror and excitement for supervised kids that age.  They shook and fidgeted with fear, combined with a grim, shared determination to stay until the end.  To their credit, they stayed -- and then they asked me to play "Time and Again" for them again.

The youngest of them will graduate from high school next May, but all three still cherish the memory of that amusing night.

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So far as I know, "Time and Again" is entirely original, but the if teaser has brought a Twilight Zone episode or two to mind, that would be easy to understand.  Like the hyperlinked teleplays, Ian Martin's play, his fourth for Radio Mystery Theater, centers on someone who finds an object that can stop time.  But only in "Time and Again" does the using that object exact a price.

Oddly enough, this story about time doesn't specify when the action takes place.  It's certainly in the past, because host E.G. Marshall tells us that he's reading a note left behind from one Ethan Vigil (John Beal).  The note quickly tells its reader that Ethan ekes out a living by making and repairing clocks.  His work, in fact, doesn't pay the bills -- he has to share expenses and his home with his chronically ill wife Henrietta (Grace Matthews) and her hard-nosed sister Harriet (Bryna Raeburn).  Even then, they've been able to wire a telephone into their residence, but must still rely on kerosene lanterns to fulfill their lighting needs.  Some people have cars, but not the Vigils.  All the clues point to a Prohibition-era urban setting, but nothing more definite.

As the story begins, Ethan has closed his shop for the night when a derelict barges in with an unusual clock with several unusual features -- including the number 13 at the top of its face.  His decision to buy the clock draws Harriet's ire, not least because he's been burning too much kerosene for her comfort.

No matter how much Ethan tinkers with it, the clock itself refuses to work -- until sickly Henrietta sticks her hand in its hourglass-shaped case.  The moment she pricks her finger inside the case, the clock starts.  It runs, all right, but with a bizarre rhythm.

Like all the other working clocks, this one eventually strikes midnight, as Ethan and his doctor are playing chess.

For everyone but Ethan, time stops.

Ethan finds himself able to move about freely, but for exactly one hour, the world stops frozen around him.  That hour passes for him and him alone, and he can now explain the number 13 on his clock's face.  It happens again at noon, then at midnight, and so on.  Twice a day, the rest of the world freezes, leaving Ethan to do whatever he wishes, unopposed.

It all seems like harmless fun until Henrietta falls ill again.  Whatever is ailing her this time proves unstoppable, sapping her life force until she's finally too tired to take another breath.  Although it doesn't happen right away, Ethan eventually discovers a connection between his extra two hours a day, his wife's passing and "that damnable machine."  Meanwhile, we listeners get to observe the destructive power of Ethan's new addiction -- something that proves well beyond the reach of any twelve-step program.

One of my big objections to horror stories is that so many of them require stupid protagonists to work.  "Time and Again" comes awfully close to that cliché, but much of its suspense comes from watching Ethan finally "get it."  Anyway, it worked out for my nieces and my nephew when they were grade-schoolers.  They got to experience the creepiness, while avoiding the gore that had become too common in horror movies even in 1974.  It would work as well in a Goosebumps novella as it did for adults 37 years ago.

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The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (8) The Woman Who Wanted to Live

Episode 1322:  The Woman Who Wanted to Live
First aired:  14 June 1982
Author:  Bryce Walton
Dude, it's on!

I should do you a favor?  Walk to my place of execution? -- Liza to Ray Bardon

Hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving.  Here's a hint for the future:  Achiote and cilantro turn out to be excellent ingredients for your turkey-basting sauce.  It sounds crazy, but the meat is delicious.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater had almost a year's notice of its cancellation.  CBS permitted the 1982 season to proceed, but declined to extend it into 1983.  Perhaps not surprisingly, producer Himan Brown opened RMT to all sorts of experimental scripts.  With Tammy Grimes assuming Marshall's host duties, the 1982 season featured some of the series' worst episodes, some of its best, and a few that reached just beyond their grasp.

"The Woman Who Wanted to Live," which aired in June, might be the best of the 1982 lot, so it was disappointing to learn that it was originally an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Two decades after penning the original screenplay for the half-hour AHP, Bryce Walton expanded it into the hour-long radio episode.

It's literally a dark and stormy night on the Gulf Coast.  Convicted murderer Ray Bardon (Larry Haines) has escaped from prison, but at serious cost.  The gunshot wound he's just suffered doesn't require immediate attention, but it has left him too weak to keep running on his own.  If he is to avoid recapture, someone else will have to drive him to another state.

His first chance to bum a ride comes at an isolated gas station, whose hapless attendant informs him that the vehicle parked outside is actually disabled.  A disbelieving Bardon kills him; but before he can hide the body or move on, the titular woman (Roberta Maxwell) pulls into the station.  By now, word of Bardon's escape has spread, and young Liza makes the mistake of identifying him out loud.  Bardon is ready to kill her on the spot, too, but Liza stays calm.  She convinces him that killing her would be a mistake; that would still leave him stranded.  Instead, he carjacks her.

To buy time, and maybe a way out of her situation, Liza agrees to help Bardon -- but she doesn't submit.  As she drives him past this flooded-out road and that police checkpoint, she's engaged him in a serious battle of wits, and he knows it.  But does he really understand the severity of this battle -- or the lengths to which she will go to survive the encounter?

The joy of the story isn't in its outcome, but in the path Liza takes.  She may start out as a damsel in distress, but that image fades quickly.  She quickly gains advantage and initiative, but we have to wait until the end to discover whether she can use either.  It's Liza's trip that makes "The Woman Who Wanted to Live" one of RMT's best episodes.

Rating:  98/100.

Notes:

1. The 1962 television version featured Charles Bronson as Bardon.
2. Act I is one of only two in the entire series -- 4197 acts -- that consists of a single, continuous scene.  The other is Act I of "A Ring of Roses" (Episode 13).  [Perhaps not coincidentally, "Ring" is also one my favorites.]  Furthermore, these are two of only 22 RMT episodes in which all three acts share the same musical curtain.  [To be fair, as a sign of the series' declining fortunes, 16 of those aired in its last 18 months.]
3. Bryce Walton was probably best known as a frequent contributor to the science-fiction pulps of the 1940s and '50s, though he also wrote mystery stories in the '60s.  "Woman" is one of four RMT episodes he wrote, and one of six from Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  [But it's the only one to appear in both series.]
 

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The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (7) All Unregistered Aliens

Episode 779:  All Unregistered Aliens
First aired:  9 February 1978
Author:  Victoria Dann

Play the teaser

A doctor helps anywhere.  What is so special about here?  -- Uncle Stefan

This past week saw a Federal judge set aside most of Arizona's infamous SB 1070, one day before it was to take effect.  The news reminded me of one of the most unusual episodes from the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

"All Unregistered Aliens" starts as a hospital drama, but writer Victoria Dann needs only a couple of minutes to steer away from that well-worn path.  For one thing, the center of this drama isn't a hospital, but a free clinic in a struggling urban neighborhood now dominated by immigrants and street gangs.  Dr. Anne Quiller (voiced by Ann Williams) grew up in the area when it was a little more prosperous, and, for reasons she doesn't quite understand, she has just come back to run the clinic.  Her uncle Stefan (Court Benson), proprietor of the local cafe, never left, and she finds herself turning to him for advice on navigating a terrain she no longer recognizes.  Apart from an immigration-obsessed cop's efforts to convince her to snitch on her clients, Quiller's life has settled into a comforting, if not entirely comfortable, cadence.

A botched warehouse prank sets triggers the main story.  One of the would-be pranksters, a teenager named Cleo, has been shot, and his brother Eli (Earl Hammond) must try to get medical attention.  A full-scale hospital isn't an option:  it could treat his wounds properly, but it might also expose his status (and Eli's) as an illegal alien.  Eager to avoid deportation (effectively a death sentence for them), they go instead to Dr. Quiller's clinic.  Without the resources to treat him, she can only leave poor Cleo to die at Eli's side.

Suddenly, Quiller finds herself in a difficult spot.  Cleo dies, but his body disappears.  The police won't help her; in fact, they think she's hiding Cleo.  She must solve the case herself, and that means answering some uncomfortable questions.  Who are Cleo and Eli, really?  What is their nationality?  And why has Quiller herself really returned to her old neighborhood?

The story feels more like a tour than a mystery, but it does exemplify Radio Mystery Theater's willingness on contemporary social issues every now and then.  "All Unregistered Aliens" made its debut just ten days after the ultimate midpoint of the RMT run.  By then, the series had already addressed not just illegal immigration but also even touchier subjects like race and abortion.  RMT certainly didn't do that every night, but it did so more directly than most crime-drama series do today.

Score:  89/100.  Not great, but solid, provocative and, for 1978, even innovative.

Why do I call it "innovative?"  The reason includes a spoiler, so I'm putting it beyond the fold.

Pleasant dreams, Himan Brown

Himan Brown died last Friday at his New York home, although it didn't become public knowledge until yesterday.  As creator of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, Brown single-handedly extended the age of viable radio drama by almost a decade.  The creaking-door sound effect that Brown turned into RMT's signature became an audio icon for those of us who were too young for the Baby Boom but too old  for Generation X.

One thing I didn't realize until I started downloading RMT episodes in 2000 was how important Brown was to American radio.  Decades before RMT, he was responsible for popular radio dramas like Inner Sanctum -- RMT's immediate parent -- The Adventures of the Thin Man and Grand Central Station.  While he wasn't able to transition to television as it displaced radio, he really didn't need to.  (The picture above is from 1943, at the height of his long career.)  It's easy enough these days to hear old-time radio on the Internet, and Himan Brown is a big reason why.

My condolences to Himan Brown's family and friends.

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Belated May Day greetings

Okay, quickly:  who here's heard of "Law Day?"  That's right, none of you.  Such a day does exist here in the U.S., and it falls on 1 May.  We observe Law Day with about the same passion as, say, National Pet Dental Month.  Small wonder. The American Bar Association had Law Day created specifically as an alternative to the Communist-associated May Day.  Back in 1974, the ABA even put out a radio spot calling of Americans to celebrate Law Day:

1974 May Law Day ad

When I first heard this as a kid, in between acts of a CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode, I found the tone of the ad pretty condescending.  I knew then that some of us observed May Day as a minor equinox holiday, complete with maypoles and homemade baskets of flowers.  Apparently, the ABA feared that, if we didn't celebrate Law Day, we'd all turn into little communists.  If the ABA of the day were really more interested in promoting public service than mindless anti-Communism, it would've run a version of this ad all year long, not just ahead of 1 May.

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The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (6) Journey to Jerusalem

Episode 518:  Journey to Jerusalem
First aired:  14 September 1976
Author:  Sam Dann

Play the teaser

You still do not accept Jerusalem?  It is not a place on a map!  It exists in the heart, the soul.
     Mme. Solanos to Elwood Joris

Happy Easter, y'all.  This year's Blog Against Theocracy is live for the weekend, and I had originally thought to post something over there.  Heaven knows that there's plenty to blog about.  For example, the thought of replacing Thomas Jefferson with Phyllis Schlafly in textbooks is so offensive, it barely merits the response, " 'Seriously?'."  The lolcatty "Srsly?" would be more appropriate if the stakes for U.S. education weren't so high.

It's the much wider range of possible topics that ultimately sunk that full-blown blog post.  My attempts to choose a subject sent me in too many different directions.  As I was still making up my mind, coincidence put "Journey to Jerusalem" on my iTunes playlist.  It occurred to me that this would be a good episode to review on Easter Weekend.

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Like quite a few RMT episodes, Episode 518 carries a strong Abrahamic undercurrent.  That larger group of episodes consists of three subgroups: (1) a pair of inspirational stories so awful, they wouldn't make the cut on Unshackled; (2) straight crime dramas in which characters attribute their fates to Godly intervention; and (3) horror stories pitting ordinary people against Satan, demons, dybbuks and/or other forces of Hell.  A few of these episodes derive from Jewish legend, while others occur in Christian settings, but none specifically mentions Jesus Christ.

"Journey to Jerusalem" belongs to the larger category, but not any of the subcategories.  Instead of demons or divine intervention, it concentrates on Jerusalem, and its meaning two the two main characters.  As becomes apparent during the course of the plot, Jerusalem is far more than a holy city to them.

The main character is Elwood Joris (Vincent Gardenia, in his only RMT appearance), a self-made billionaire whose rags-to-riches life has left him lonely and even a bit paranoid.  Now in middle age, he is discovering that his riches cannot buy back the things he sacrificed to make them.  Joris especially wants his youth back, but no one is selling.

Enter Madame Solanos (Joan Shea).  At first glance, she is merely a dark-haired, dark-eyed crank.  Newly evicted on her landlord's suspicion that she is also a con artist, she has appealed to Joris for help.  Her pleas go ignored until, at the end of Act I, she threatens to blackmail Joris's receptionist.  Once she does meet with him, Mme. Solanos demands that Joris help her, and tells him what she has done to those who oppose her.

Although Joris judges her threat and her power to both be credible, he resists.  In fact, he threatens to use his connections to jail Mme. Solanos.  But persistence, and an eloquent appeal to his better angels, convice him that she can acutally help him regain his youth.  They join forces, finally -- but to what end?

It's not clear exactly who or what Mme. Solanos is.  She regards Jerusalem not just as a city, but as "the spirit of justice."  She wants to help others find Jerusalem, especially Joris.  Gifted with supernatural powers, she also regards herself as an instrument of God.  But if that's true, why does she care about helping Joris, but not anyone else?  Why use her powers to blackmail his receptionist, or bring grievous harm to two of his associates?  So far as we can tell, the only things that distinguish Joris are his material wealth and his loneliness.  Whatever she is, Mme. Solanos is certainly no angel.

As for Joris:  why does he want his youth back?  Is it just regret, or does he fear for his soul?  For some reason, a famous phrase comes to mind, one that appears in three Gospels of the New Testament.  I'll just quote the one from the Gospel of Mark, in which he is advising a rich young man who wants to reach Heaven:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  (Mark 10: 25)

According to Mark, Jesus made this declaration at a stop on a journey to Jerusalem -- just before he again predicted his death and resurrection to his twelve apostles.

Back to this story, though.  RMT generally didn't believe in multi-part stories -- its five exceptions were all week-long epics -- but this almost felt like Part 1 of a two-part episode.  It works very well as is, but its ambition certainly left it open to a two-hour plot.  Either way, it's one of the more challenging episodes in the series.

Grade:  93/100.  "Journey to Jerusalem" was one carefully selected title for an ambitious story.

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The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (5) The Ghost-Grey Bat

Episode 1176:  The Ghost-Grey Bat
First aired:  25 March 1981
Author:  Ian Martin

Meet the bats

I knew it was too good to be true. -- Dr. Alec Grant

Episode 1176 of CBS Radio Mystery Theater is, as you can easily guess, one of the namesakes for this blog.  (The other is Scooter herself, my 12-year-old cat of many colors.)  It's not a particularly innovative horror story, but the plot is an interesting variation on the haunted-house theme.  Without lead actor Don Scardino's outstanding performance, "The Ghost-Grey Bat" would be merely average.  Thanks to Scardino, it's one of my favorite episodes, in that guilty-pleasure sort of way.

At least on RMT related message boards, this episode is a fan favorite.  It actually is well done, but it misses my top-ten list.  To me, it's a bit like The Empire Strikes Back, which had hit movie screens less only ten months earlier.  Without the John Williams soundtrack, it's merely good; with it, Empire is one of my favorite movies.  That's how important lead actor Don Scardino's performance is to "The Ghost-Grey Bat."

Ian Martin, RMT's second most prolific writer, penned this tale of a time-share arrangement gone wrong.  He tells it through the eyes of Dr. Alec Grant (Scardino), a New York City professor.  The time has come for Dr. Grant to take a sabbatical, and with a nudge from his new wife, Maura (Jennifer Harmon), he has arranged to swap living quarters with an Austrian couple.  Even though they never meet the Austrians, they push on with their plans.

Soon enough, the Grants have settled into a comfortable but isolated cabin in the Alps.  Their only companions are Frau Zauber (Joan Shea), a kindly, elderly housekeeper who maintains the cabin, and an odd creature that flies around it.  Frau Zauber first raises Alec's suspicion when, at the end of Act I, he notices that she isn't casting a shadow.

More red flags go up when Alec decides to check how his Austrian time-share partners are doing in New York.  To do this, he must travel several kilometers to the nearest phone; but Frau Zauber keeps insisting that he remain in the cabin.  Meanwhile, the flying bat has attacked Maura, who, in turn, has been rapidly losing energy.  What started as a effort to contact the Austrians has mutated into a rescue effort -- one that Frau Zauber is determined to thwart.  Alec does escape the cabin, and he does get help.  By then, the truth about Frau Zauber, the bat and those Austrians has become all too apparent.  Sooner than anyone, including the listener, realizes, the story becomes a desperate race against time, as Alec must save not only Maura but also himself.

"The Ghost-Grey Bat" works well enough as a suspense story.  Minute by minute, element by plot element, our picture of Frau Zauber and that bat puts itself together.  By the time it becomes clear enough, it's almost too late to save anything.  As a horror story, it doesn't work as well.  Frau Zauber is supposed to emerge as a horrible, monstrous figure, but the timing that provides the suspense is just too slow for that.

What saves the episode is Don Scardino's turn as Dr. Grant, who recounts the incident in narrative fashion.  Scardino's delivery dazzles listeners, keeping them focused on Alec's emotions -- and distracting them from a basic plot hole.  It would've been better for the Grants to verify that their time-share partners actually exist before they shipped off to Austria.  Despite Alec's best efforts, that doesn't happen, and it subtracts enough from the story to keep it off my top-ten list.

Score:  86/100.

Some bits about the lead actors

If Don Scardino showed up in an RMT episode, it was a good sign.  Except for Fred Gwynne and Mercedes McCambridge, no one did a better job of selecting RMT scripts.  Scardino played in just 29 RMT episodes, but most of them are very good.  For a Scardino episode, "The Ghost-Grey Bat" is actually a bit below average.

Time has been kind to him.  These days, he's a director, working mostly on the hilarious 30-Rock.  When he's not putting Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and company through their paces, he's lending his still-youthful voice to TV and radio ads for the likes of Geico and KFC.

Jennifer Harmon, who played in 21 RMT episodes, is also alive as of this posting, but her most recent TV role was on Oz as a counselor.  It's rather easy to mistake her for perennial poker champion Jennifer Harman.  Poker fans insist on spelling "Harman" with an 'o,' confusing Internet search engines to no end.  Looking for the actress (Harmon) often turns up the poker pro (Harman) instead.

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The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (4) Pull!

You are standing in the doorway of the diabolic, the dangerous, the deadly.  -- Host E.G. Marshall

One of the goofier reactions to Nazi Germany is to imagine that Adolf Hitler somehow survived the fall of Berlin.  According to the cliché, he either hid for the rest of his life, waited to be recreated via genetics, or had his soul hidden somewhere.  In the 1970s, it provided the basis for both campy radio shows (such as one of the subjects of this post) and more serious science-fiction movies.  It survives to this day, having most recently appeared in a Venture Bros. episode several weeks ago.

In that Venture Bros. episode, the characters recognize the convention.  Doc Venture mocks the uniformed Nazis who've ordered him to build a new body for Hitler.  Hank claims that his video-game expertise qualifies him to fight them for real.  When I watched that happen, it occurred to me to take another look at one of the campiest episodes ever run on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, one that assumed that Hitler still lived in 1975.

My research for that proposed post turned up another interesting fact.  With 1399 episodes under its purview, it shouldn't be surprising that CBS Radio Mystery Theater had a few pairs of episodes that are almost exactly alike.  The most obvious example is 1976's "Afterward" (Episode 441) and 1979's "The Man in the Black Cap" (1010), which both descended from the same Edith Wharton story.  And some pairs are even worse than that.

The best such pair of such episodes aired just two months apart in 1975.  The first one, "The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich," is the one that I had planned on reviewing alone.  As it turns out, however, its plot follows the same outline as "Goodbye, Carl Erich."  Both stories carry the same three elements:

1. The broken man:  Act 1 introduces us to a German man who, whether through childhood abuse or decades of self-neglect,  has withered into a barely functioning person.
   
2. The rescuers:  For whatever reasons, two other Germans come to their broken countryman's aid.  Whether their role in his recovery is direct or not, the result is the same.  Over the course of Act 2, the broken man begins to heal in spirit and/or body.  He becomes not merely competent but also powerful in his own right.
3. The betrayal:  Just as the newly empowered man is about to lavishly reward his benefactors, they utter a secret about themselves.  In minutes -- not incidentally, the last ones of Act 3 -- their revelation undoes all their progress.
   

In short, the victim's life takes a trajectory like a clay pigeon, one that's launched into the air then shot just as it reaches its maximum height.   Pull!

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Episode 275:  The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich
First aired:  16 May 1975
Author:  Henry Slesar

Play the teaser

But I thought you were a good German, a loyal German. -- Adolf Hitler

In "Rise and Fall," the Hitler-still-lives meme combines with weird science to produce CBS Radio Mystery Theater's second campiest episode.  (1974's "The Breaking Point," which revolves around a surgically enhanced chimp, may be the campiest episode ever.)

• The broken man:  Adolf Hitler lives, all right -- in squalor.  His flight from the fires of 1945 Berlin went on and on, ending in México, D.F.*, only because he ran out of energy and hope.  As voiced by Robert Dryden, languishes in the Mexican capital's worst slum, exhausted, virtually blind, and at the edge of senility.  He has forgotten his past so completely that he now calls himself Marcos.
  
• The rescuers:  Aside from his impoverished landlady, the only people who care about him anymore apparently work for East Germany's infamous Stasi.  One of its agents (Paul Hecht), representing himself only as "Günther," has found Hitler, and now plans to restore him.  Dr. Bundeschaf (Joe Silver), a one-time Nazi scientist, joins Günther in Mexico.  Having perfected a rejuvenation serum on apes during World War II, Bundeschaf applies his expertise to Hitler himself.  Within ten days, "Marcos" begins to benefit from Bundeschaf's work: he realizes that he is really Adolf Hitler.
  
• The betrayal:  When a jubilant Hitler tries to give Günther his own Iron Cross, he discovers the truth about his rescuers.  Günther reveals that he is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.  Bundeschaf's past provides no comfort, as can be heard in the clip below.  Günther stabs Hitler, Bundeschaf allows him to bleed to death, and Hitler can only ask about the point of all this.  Here is the end of Act 3, including RMT host E.G. Marshal's remarks:
  Episode 275's last 106 seconds

"And so, Adolf Hitler dies," declares Marshall at the final curtain.  As a twist, it wasn't worthy of The Twilight Zone (whose music you hear at the end), the later Outer Limits or even a M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It was too good for any of those.

As a kid hearing that for the first time, I shouted in joy, pumped my fist triumphantly in the air and even made woofing noises.  I wouldn't do that again until a decade later, when the Chicago Bears made their legendary Super Bowl run.  The thought of Hitler suffering a punishment that even remotely fit his crime brought joy my heart.  It fell to my parents to explain that maybe I shouldn't celebrate anyone's death that much.

Grade:  96/100.  If it weren't so intentionally campy, it would get a much lower grade.  As camp, though, it beautifully executed.

A few final notes:

• The episode does feature some of the worst Spanish ever spoken on English-language radio.  Yo, Henry Slesar, it isn't el este muerto.  "He this dead?"  Really?  The proper sentence is el está muerto.  Even in 1975, writer Slesar should have known better.
  
• Just how did Hilter manage to keep his Iron Cross?  Shouldn't he have lost it after 30 years on the run?
• Bundeschaf is German for "national sheep," or, more exactly, "federal sheep."  Ooooooo-kay.
  
• Although neither East Germany nor the Stasi are mentioned in the script, Günther's nationality and occupation can easily be inferred from the background he sketches of himself.  He might be a West German counterspy, but why would he then hide this operation?

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Episode 309:  Goodbye, Carl Erich
First aired:  16 July 1975
Author:  Sam Dann
Play an excerpt

What's so funny about a human being in distress? -- Karl-Erich Müller**

In tone and genre, "Goodbye, Carl Erich" could not be any more different from "The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich."  The genre shifts from pulp-fiction to straight drama; the setting, from post-Nixon México, D.F, to Weimar-era Hamburg; the twist, from the triumphant to the tragic.

• The broken man:  When 7-year-old Karl-Erich Müller (Hecht, in a completely different role) lost his father in World War I, he withdrew so completely that he lost the ability to even speak.  He has reached adulthood with a strapping body but a feeble mind.  Desperate for some way to help him, his impoverished mother (Bryna Raeburn) pesters our protagonist until he finally agrees to visit him at his home in late January, 1928.
  
• The rescuer:  Psychologist Heinrich Stammler (Kevin McCarthy) doesn't begin treating Karl-Erich until Act 2 begins.  15 weeks later, in a poignant moment featured in the Except above, Karl-Erich manages to order a loaf of bread on his own.  By February 1929, Karl-Erich has gained independence.  By 1931 (and deep into Act 3), he has gone much further, having risen high into the ranks of the ascendant Nazi party, and won the heart of one of Germany's most popular actresses.  All along, Karl-Erich keeps reporting his progress to Stammler, whose otherwise rightful pride blinds him to the Nazi threat.
  
• The betrayal:  This one isn't as intentional as the one in "Rise and Fall," but it's almost as twisty.  When Stammler announces his intention to emigrate to America, Karl-Erich tries to bribe him into staying.  Stammler responds by telling him that he has "committed a crime:" he was born a Jew.  He leaves his protégé sitting on a chair, shocked back into perpetual silence.  Stammler has given, he's taken away, and when the final curtain falls, he's gone off to the safety of America.
  

Karl-Erich may have taken a bad path once he won his independence, but I keep wondering why Stammler waited until the end to tell Karl-Erich about himself.  Did he have such little faith in Karl-Erich's stability, or his ability to accept the truth?  Maybe writer Dann -- by far the most prolific scribe of RMT episodes -- addressed that issue when he expanded "Goodbye, Carl Erich" into a full-length novel.

Grade:  94/100.  Dann isn't my favorite RMT writer, but this one works pretty well.

* D.F. = Distrito Federal, or Federal District.  México, D.F., is the local name for Mexico City.
** I'm assuming that writer Dann has Americanized Karl-Erich's name.  Could a German speaker please straighten me out?

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The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (3) The Chinaman Button

"Mr. van Haas, I'm making this as easy for you as... pushing a button." -- Phil Thurston

Someone presents you a box with a single button. Pressing the button triggers two chains of events. One chain leads to the legal deposit of a potentially life-changing sum of money into your bank account; the other, to the death of a random person, whose identity cannot be revealed.

Do you press the button?

This little device, and the dilemma it presents, is central to The Box, the Richard Kelly movie that opens in theaters in two weeks. Episode 15 of CBS Radio Mystery Theater, doesn't feature either a button, a box or even an Asian, but it centers on similar dilemma. That's why, when I first saw ads for The Box, I decided that I should post a review of this episode. The little button below doesn't kill anything, but it does play the teaser.

Teaser for The Chinaman Button

The title writer Henry Slesar gave Episode 15, "The Chinaman Button," was racist, and he surely knew it. He further knew that, when the episode first aired, that term had long since fallen out of favor. I can only imagine that he chose the title for its ability to attract audience attention. After all, as of 20 January 1974, RMT had been on the air for only two weeks.

Slesar gets away with this offense for only one reason: the only character who regularly uses the term "Chinaman" in the story is its villain, a crooked advertising executive. As "The Chinaman Button" opens, Phil Thurston (voiced by Paul Hecht) returns from vacation to discover that he has lost his most valuable account. Unfortunately, much of that value came from Thurston's overbilling his client -- a fraud exposed by Walter van Haas (Mason Adams), a humble accountant that the client had just hired.

Not content to have escaped jail time (or even firing), Thurston launches an elaborate retaliation. Rather than kill or injure van Haas, Thurston decides to try to expose him as a venal person.

To that end, Thurston creates a virtual "Afrikaner Button" for van Haas to push. Posing as a representative of a South African law firm, Thurston "informs" van Haas that he is the only heir to a wealthy cousin, many times removed, who lives in Johannesburg. Thurston refuses to identify this cousin, but does tell van Haas that his cousin will soon meet an untimely death. To receive millions of dollars, van Haas needs only to wait for his cousin to die. Unfortunately, van Haas can only receive the money if he keeps silent about his relative's impending death. In accepting this offer, as Thurston hopes, van Haas would expose his own base nature. The exposure would be doubly sweet for Thurston, since both the South African law firm and van Haas's "relative" are entirely fictional.

Initially, van Haas angrily rejects the deal, and tells Thurston to buzz off. Fate, however, has other plans, setting off a battle of wills between the ethical van Haas and the corrupt Thurston. If van Haas rejects the deal, he wins, but if he agrees to it, Thurston gets his revenge. But as one of RMT's most satisfying endings shows, both men have overestimated their positions. By the time "The Chinaman Button" ended, I almost forgot about its questionable title.

This episode may be entitled "The Chinaman Button," but the Internet has caused it to age prematurely. Before the Internet, creating fake stationery, an essential element of Thurston's scheme, required no small amount of money, along with influence like his. These days, anyone with a simple computer can create such stationery. And as Nigerian scammers and others have long since proven, even stationery isn't required to convince gullible users that they can get money from rich Africans who don't actually exist.

Score: 91/100. "The Johannesburg Button" would've bumped it up to 96.

Musical note: Here's the second-act curtain. Although this short, dizzying piece of music separated scenes in many episodes, it was never used as a curtain again.

Curtain 2 from The Chinaman Button

The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (2) Radio-dial games

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater succeeded as well as it did for a wide range of reasons, most of them having little to do with the plots of its episodes.  At some point, I'll have a complete list of success factors, but tonight, I'll start with three.

As its name implies, RMT aired on CBS Radio affiliates* that broadcast their signals on the AM spectrum. (In 1974, radio stations preferred AM signals to FM -- though that was changing.)  CBS Radio let its member stations run RMT at any time they desired.  Most stations did this every evening, at seven minutes past some hour.   Chicago's WBBM was the big exception, to which I'll come back presently.

If you've ever played with an AM radio at night, you know that, unlike FM stations, you can easily catch stations from hundreds of kilometers away.  Even today, some of the most powerful AM stations in the US count on having nighttime listeners well outside their home markets (and away from the Internet).  For me, a third-grader listening in exurban Chicago, it meant that, on a given night, I could catch an episode at 20:00 aired in Louisville or Detroit, hear it again at 21:00 from Minneapolis or Denver, then catch it a third time from WBBM -- at 22:30.  It's hard to imagine that RMT didn't get a noticeable part of its audience from nighttime road travelers.

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But back to Chicago and WBBM.  Since Chicago is in the Central time zone, and not the Eastern or Pacific, 22:30 was (and remains) the airtime for NBC's Tonight Show.  In other words, WBBM scheduled RMT to intentionally challenge Johnny Carson's popular late-night show.  With David Letterman and ABC's Nightline still well into the future, WBBM's gamble succeeded brilliantly.

At least it did with the grade-school set.  In 1974, as now, most families put their younger children to bed at 22:00 on school nights, if not before then.  Watching TV of any kind at 22:30 was a no-no for kids.  Back then, few families had more than two television sets in the whole house; sneaking peeks at Johnny Carson was simply impossible.  Sneaking a listen to RMT, by contrast, was easy.  While few bedrooms had TV sets, almost every bedroom could have at least one cheap radio, like the one at left.  Even with a radio that big, it was a trivial matter for a kid like me to curl up to it, set it to WBBM hide everything, myself included, under the blanket.  Mom and Dad didn't suspect a thing.  It wasn't hard to imagine that kind of scene repeating itself thousands of times every night, in Chicagoland alone.

Elsewhere, I suspect, a weaker version of the same thing happened.  RMT succeeded partly because it became "appointment radio," and partly because, in an era when broadcast networks still dominated television, there just wasn't anything better on the boob tube.

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But did I simply listen to the RMT episodes?  Well, at first, I did.   Soon enough, I realized that certain curtains -- those pieces of music that marked the end of each of an episode's three acts -- frightened me.  What's really weird is that only one these particular curtains, three of which you can hear below, showed up in horror stories.  Most of them occurred instead in crime dramas.


Curtain 1 from And Nothing but the Truth
Curtain 1 from The Lady Is a Jinx
Curtain 2 from The Lady Is a Jinx

Over time, I turned my fear into a game.  As the end of any act approached, I put my had on either the volume dial or the tuning dial.  The moment I thought a curtain would start, I turned the dial, waited a second, then moved the dial back to its original position.  If I avoided the start of any of these curtains, or if a less scary curtain turned up instead, I "won."

The thing is, in RMT's early years, its curtains used very sharp music, such as the samples above.  I have no doubt that, not unlike John Williams' efforts in Star Wars I-III, that music effectively masked an awful lot of awful plots.

*The big exception was RKO Radio flagship WOR, which carried RMT in New York.

The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (1) Separating generations

As I composed the first draft for this post, some research reminded me that another piece of CBS history is being made today.  The Guiding Light, the longest scripted series ever, will close its run after 72 years on both radio and television.  The radio episodes alone (almost two decades' worth) accounted for more air time than CBS Radio Mystery Theater, itself one of the longest running radio fiction series ever.

Nevertheless, RMT made an impressive run--1,399 episodes aired over 2,969 nights--all long after scripted network radio supposedly died.  The show even did well enough to enjoy rerun-based revivals in 1989 and 1998.  As it turns out, however, the end of RMT in 1982 did, indeed, spell the death of scripted radio, at least on the fiction side.

For some of us, the show didn't always leave us with the "pleasant dreams" host E.G. Marshall (and his successor, Tammy Grimes) wished us, but they did leave happy memories. Fans of all ages curled up with their little transistor radios at night, listening to RMT episodes when they were supposed to be sleeping.

Those memories make RMT a rather useful tool for separating the generations. RMT's youngest fans--including me--were grade-schoolers when its episodes first aired in 1974, and teenagers at the end of the show's run. Older fans were part of the Baby Boom or earlier generations; those too young to remember RMT belong to Generation X.  But we, the youngest RMT fans in the 1970s, don't fit easily in either category.

Back to The Guiding Light, which everyone remembers but, apparently, no one watches.  Any show that takes more than seven decades to finally lose its audience had to be doing something right.  Nice run.

"Eat Yer Burritos," Take Two

Hi! "Take one" was something called "Shaddup and Eat Yet Burritos," which also lived on Blogspot. I had hoped it would be a general-purpose blog, but somehow, it turned instead into a football blog. That really wasn't what I wanted. At the beginning of this year, I had to turn my attention to more pressing matters, like moving halfway across North America. Of course, I could have just added new posts to the old blog, whose last entry was in January. On further review, however, I decided to move the blog to a new place. For one thing, it was inspired by the fact that I was living in Maricopa County, home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his anti-immigrant obsessions. While Illinois has plenty of immigrants, the obssession isn't as strong, so the title doesn't mean as much. More to the point, it occurred to me that I have something else to talk about in a blog. One of my favorite things about the 1970s was the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the nine-year, 1400-episode extravaganza that marked the end of radio drama in the U.S. I have quite a few things to say about CBSRMT, enough for years' worth of weekly or bi-weekly posts. Hence: The Ghost-Grey Cat. The new title is a play on "The Ghost-Grey Bat," one of the best horror installments of the entire CBSRMT run. I'll discuss this episode, and CBSRMT in general, in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the NFL season has started again, so I'll first talk about Victory Weighting, my proposal for making sudden-death overtime periods fairer to the teams that have to endure them. Happily, the Titans and Steelers gave me more material last night. Anyway, welcome to The Ghost-Grey Cat!