Damn You, God Damn You All To Hell

(Reposted/edited from July 28, 2011 over at my OldTimeRadioDiner blog, no longer active. I started that back when I thought I could keep two going at the same time.)

As you probably know, I'm trying to treat myself to a new CBS Radio Mystery Theater (CBSRMT) episode each day. I am delighted by two things:

1
The appearance of stars that I know from other places. Agnes Moorhead (who was of course Endora[1] in Bewitched) appeared in Episode 1, "Old Ones are Hard to Kill," and the other night, I listened to Kim Hunter in Episode 4, "Lost Dog." Moorhead was a fitting star for the first outing, as she is best remembered in her radio days as the frightened housewife in "Sorry, Wrong Number." If you listen to enough OTR on late-night AM radio, you'll hear it, since it's a classic and deservedly gets replayed quite a bit.

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Click here to Listen to Kim Hunter in "Lost Dog," from CBS Radio Mystery Theater >

2
The production values are magnificent; I'd forgotten just how carefully crafted these where. Footsteps recede or approach, doors creak in just the right ways, and outside sounds are left outside when doors close. It's a far cry from the organ-festooned episodes of radio's hay-day in which there was so much to choose from that it wasn't hard to find bad writing and worse sound effects, compensated by organ music that took the place of real drama (similar to how special effects are used in some movies today).


3
And if I can be indulged to list a third, #3 would be the nightly trip back to boyhood, a dark upstairs bedroom lit only by a radio dial, and the voice of EG Marshall and the descending strings. Those memories are so early that they are equally dim, but the experience is indelible.

I often fall asleep to my OTR mp3's, as it's the last thing I do at night, but an advantage to that is I just as often must restart the OTR episode about where I fell asleep, so I listen to some parts more than once.

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Oh, about "Lost Dog" – my introduction to Kim Hunter was as Dr Zira from Planet of the Apes, of course.

I can still remember me, my brother Tom, and our friends, Rich Nickel (my age) and Dave Nickel (Tom's age) lying upstairs in that same dark bedroom where I listened to CBSRMT, dissecting the end of Planet of the Apes. We couldn't figure out what it meant; why was there a Statue of Liberty on this planet, was it a parallel universe with a twin Earth? Rich figured it out and explained it to us. Rich was very bright and smarter than most kids I ever met, if not the smartest.

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What I still don't get (and you are welcome to enlighten me, Rich or anyone else) is why the female astronaut dies in the beginning. Her glass-encased sleep chamber is cracked, I get that, so something inside got out, or something outside got in. I can only guess that life support outside the chambers was turned off to conserve energy and only the chambers retained air and nutrients, so when hers cracked, she suffocated. Do I have that right?

She shouldn't have aged that much, though. The male astronauts had a month's beard growth or so, and any space travel that slowed down their beards would have slowed down her decomposition.

 

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Oh, and Nova was a babe. Any prepubescent boy that didn't yearn for pubescence upon seeing this beautiful creature wasn't paying attention.

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[1]
The pastor of my church at that time - Pastor Kenneth L Andrus - bless his heart, he was a very nice and spiritual man - preached against popular media portrayals of witches and other Satanic images. He called out Endora specifically, whose name was of course drawn from the biblical Witch of Endor. That was when Pastor Andrus was preaching at Bethel Baptist Church at 737 East 26th Street, in Erie, PA, before Bethel West was set up across town and he was preaching at both locations.

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