Screen Guild Theater: The 10 Cent Tour

Screen Guild Theater, like Lux Radio Theater, presents a radio version of a movie. Like LRT, the roles are normally played by Hollywood movie stars, with the original stars of the movie often reprising their roles for the radio. Unlike LRT, which takes a full hour to present the story, SGT attempts to boil movies down to fit into a 30 minute time slot.

So much of the story ends up being removed that only a person already familiar with it can hope to make heads or tails of it. If SGT were in charge of fairy tales, there would be a lot of “Once upon a time they lived happily ever after”. One doesn’t get a full and comprehensible movie story. One gets the 10 cent tour of a movie.

Back in the days before television and video rentals, when the nation as a whole went to the theaters en masse and you either caught a movie when it came out or risked never seeing it at all, people displayed a rather remarkable ability to recall the particulars of movies from many years in the past and could fill in the gaps in the radio version easily enough from their memories.

But for the modern listener of SGT, many of the movies treated in the series have not stood the test of time, becoming classics which are still watched and known today. When the series takes up one of these movies, listening to the program becomes somewhat of an exercise in frustration. Even the well-known classics can be a bit impenetrable if one has not viewed them recently. Can you imagine trying to follow an audio version of The Maltese Falcon presented in 25 minutes?

The Decline and Fall of Superman

As a child, I never really cared for Superman. I read the comics, but only because I had free and unrestricted access to the comic rack at my grandfather’s store. I never cared for the television Superman at all. I have never watched any of the Superman movies, and have no interest in ever doing so.

When I got into collecting and listening to Old Time Radio programs, I grabbed Superman for the simple reason that I was able to grab massive amounts of the program for free. I added the program to my listening rotation merely to flesh out the variety of programs.

Despite the to-be-expected juvenile nature of the program, I came to rather like it. The storylines weren’t particularly outstanding, and never quite lived up to the cliffhanger hype the announcer routinely gave them, but I enjoyed the series all the same.

But then, in early 1948, something happened. The program lost Kellogg’s as a sponsor and there was a noticeable decline in the quality of the stories. They went from being merely written for juveniles to, seemingly, being written by juveniles. I’m currently in July 1948, listen to all my series at pretty much a real-time pace, and for the last several months have been amazed at how bad the stories have become. It is almost to the point that I am considering dropping the remainder of my episodes from future listening.

I can’t help but wonder, though, did the loss of Kellogg’s bring about the decline in quality? Or did the decline in quality bring about the loss of Kellogg’s? It is hard to tell. Either way, the program went from having a first-tier sponsor to being a sustained (non-sponsored) program. How did this happen to the radio version of a very long-lived and lucrative franchise? A franchise that continues right into the present day, and whose main character is an icon recognized the world over somehow managed to drop the ball in its broadcast incarnation.

While I’m at it, I have some other questions about Superman that I would love to have answered:

1. Where the hell did he stow his business suit, spectacles, shoes, and fedora in that skin-tight costume? He could do a quick-change, fly thousands of miles, and have the whole Clark Kent ensemble ready for wear, apparently unwrinkled.

2. Did the man never close a window in his life? And did no one ever notice that the strange sudden disappearances of Clark Kent very often coincided with an open window? He was forever doing his “Up, up and away!” routine after opening the window in an abandoned storeroom or in someone’s office in the Daily Planet building, yet not once have I found an instance of him stopping to close the damned window behind him. I know he was brought up on a farm, but was he raised in a barn?

3. When he carried people into outer space beneath his cape, what kept them from either freezing to death or asphyxiating?

4. Why didn’t he just go ahead and end WWII single-handedly?

5. Why did the writers hang on to former Nazis and Nazi plots for so long after the war?

6. Was the x-ray vision something he had to turn on and off somehow? Or was it always active? When he slept, did his eyelids block the light at all? Or could he see right through them?