Flashback Radio: "The House in Cypress Canyon"

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We kicked it off two weeks ago with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For our third selection, I chose "The House in Cypress Canyon." This was an episode of the series Suspense. Written by Robert L. Richards, and produced and directed by William Spier, it originally aired on December 5, 1946, on CBS radio. It stars film actor Robert Taylor and radio veteran Cathy Lewis. Despite being a well-regarded episode, it was only performed once on Suspense.

Despite their being a touch of the Gothic in it, the story here is relentlessly contemporary. A couple, moving for the husband's work to California, can't be picky due to the post-War housing shortage. Lucky for them, they happen upon a newly constructed house that has just been listed. Things take a take a bad turn when they begin to hear strange noises, and there's the matter of a mysteriously locked closet door. It appears the house is haunted.

Trey: So, Jason, as you sipped you Roma wine, as Suspense's sponsor would want you to do, and listened to this episode, did you get the sense that this one had more to say than our previous selections?

Jason:  suspect some listeners back in its day would be inclined to throw back a bracer a bit more potent than those produced by the master vintners of Grand Estates after wading through this piece of fiction!

Rather than the primordial terrors evoked by our previous entry, this tales has plenty of undercurrents that hint at more modern anxieties. As with many entertainments of the mid-twentieth century, the long shadow of World War II casts its pall here, the reconfigurations of domesticity and gender roles perhaps chief amongst them. 

The uncanny elements of the tale remain unexplained, and their ability to disturb benefits from this ambiguity. It's a haunted house story, but it's weird disturbances are triggered by future events, rather than those lingering from the past. 

I have to wonder if the story has lost (or gained) any of its ability to invoke horror for modern listeners, or at least those significantly younger than I, who are less steeped in 20th Century media, especially with modernity's open examination and long-term experimentation with non-traditional gender roles. Or am I completely off the rails? Help, Trey!

Trey: I'm afraid I'm in no better position to judge how the kids might take it, but I think it's a remarkable story, in the sense that it is at once, I think, fairly obvious while being utterly uncanny at the same time--even if the point of it might be lost on modern audiences.

What I mean is that it is clearly about anxiety over women's changing roles post-war in society. There's closet, where things must be kept in check. The flow of blood evoking menses. The milkman, frequent foil for jokes about infidelity, as the first victim.

But then there's the framing sequence, making the story not a haunting so much as a dire portend. Likewise, the specific malign spirit inflicted upon the wife is unexplained. Despite its utterly mundane setting, it makes no effort to make its horrors make sense. There's a nightmare logic to it.

Both for its strangeness and for the perhaps outdated nature of the concerns animating it, I don't think you'd get a story like this today.

Flashback Radio: "Three Skeleton Key"

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started last week with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For our second selection, I chose "Three Skeleton Key." This teleplay, based on a 1937 short-story by French author Georges-Gustave Toudouze, was original broadcast on Escape on March 17, 1950. It was a popular story, having previously been adapted for Escape with a different cast in 1949. It would again be adapted for Suspense, with Vincent Price again reprising the role of Jean, in 1956 and 1958.

The story involves a lighthouse on a tiny, rocky isle off the coast of French Guiana. The three keepers receive an unwelcome and terrifying visit from a derelict ship.

Trey: Well, did this make you want to go into lighthouse keeping?

Jason: Well, it wasn't a bad life, as Jean tells us early on, although I reckon the sliding scale of what constitutes a good or bad life has slid substantially since the era depicted here. 

This is another strong entry in our seasonal survey. The tale measures up in terms of mounting suspense, frightful imagery, and compelling performances. 

Like "The Thing on the Fourble Board," this story exchanges plausibility for nightmare fuel, and it is, in my view, a favorable trade off. We are expected to accept this terrible occurrence as a natural event and so must accept that we have entered a heightened version of reality.

Vincent Price delivers as per usual, especially as the simple-but-effective plot unfolds and conveys Jean's descent into (temporary) insanity with only the pitch and tone of his voice. 

The same high marks go to the supporting cast, who also must portray the maddening effects of increasingly weird and dire circumstances on their hapless characters without makeup, mugging, or bugging their eyes. Well, maybe they did all that, but we can't see a damn thing!

If performances are perhaps a bit over the top vocally, it is incumbent upon the listener to recognize the need for this stylized approach in the audial medium and it's easy to forgive what might seem like excesses in other forms of entertainment. 

Now, how about those sound effects and Foley artists, Trey? Bananas or what?

Trey: Ha! I think it's interesting that they used a relatively light touch here for rat sound effects. They could have definitely gone more over the top with that!

It's true events as presented are unlikely and seem inspired by fears of rodents that are perhaps seldom provoked for most 21st century Americans but were probably more common for urban and rural populations in the first half of the 20th century. Or perhaps this is the exaggerated tale our unreliable narrator Jean told later, rather than a documentary? 

In any case, it's effective in making a swarm of rats feel like an elemental force. 

Similarly, while I think you're right that the performances are of the era and medium, fiction often views the sanity of the lighthouse keeper as a precarious thing. Eggers' The Lighthouse (2019) is likely the most recent example.

Anyway, it's a good story. I can see why it was redone so many times, and why Price was brought back for a number of them.

Flashback Radio: "The Thing on the Fourble Board"

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, hasn't heard many of these before, so he was up for giving them a listen. 

The first one I selected is often considered among the great horror/fantasy anthology episodes: "The Thing on the Fourble Board." It was an episode of Quiet, Please broadcast on August 9, 1948. It concerns workers on an oil derrick having an encounter with something strange emerging from under the earth.

Quiet, Please was created by Wyllis Cooper who had worked on another, well-regarded anthology show called Lights Out (which we'll be sampling later in the month) before this one. For a long time, most episodes of Quiet, Please were thought to be lost but in the late 80s, recordings of the majority of the episodes were rediscovered. Now they can be found on the Internet Archive.

Trey: So, Jason, what did you think of the episode?

Jason: For our inaugural review, we got a doozy. I found the episode to be compelling from the beginning with its Lovecraftian invocation of deep time. I half-expected a rationalized fantasy along the lines of At the Mountains of Madness. What we got instead was decidedly more dreamlike, and firmly on the nightmarish side of the bed. 

The performances were excellent, cliched elements enjoyed new life, not a moment of its scant running time was wasted, and the twist ending brought to mind the very best of the EC horror comics. I'd go into spoiler territory, but with its long years of obscurity I suspect many will not have heard this before, and I recommend they do. 

If I would have heard this around the family radio as a child, I would have contemplated its subtleties long into the wee hours. As it was, I was suitably disturbed on my morning drive to work. Good fun!

Your thoughts?

Trey: I think two things standout to me, as making it work really well. The very grounded, realistic discussion of the oil worker's trade (including the definition of the obscure "fourble" of the title) and the uncanny vocalizations given "Mike", presumably by Cecil Roy.

Jason: The old-timey organ musical accompaniment had a potent, almost psychedelic effect during the description of the storyteller's dreams as triggered by the uncanny revelation. This episode was also a great example of how a strictly verbal/audial media avoided what could have been risible if presented visually, especially in 1948, regarding the description of the unknown entity. 

Trey: It is definitely a story well-fitted to its medium.  I think it will be interesting as we go through the month to compare how different shows take a different approach to sound effects and music to produce atmosphere 

Paperback Flashback: Beyond the Farthest Star

 

In 2021, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. released Beyond the Farthest Star: Restored Edition. It features two novellas Burroughs wrote in 1940, "Adventure on Poloda" and "Tangor Returns." The first of these was published in a reportedly abridged and altered form in Blue Book in 1941. The latter didn't see print until 1964, after his death.

The two stories are quite different from Burroughs usual Sword & Planet stories. Sure, a nameless Earth man is transported by occult means to a distant planet where he makes a life and (perhaps) finds love, but there the similarities largely end. First off, there aren't really any swords, making these stories more just Planetary Romances. Secondly, there is nothing of the swashbuckling adventure of John Carter or the wandering through weird societies of Carson Napier. And wooing of a beautiful princess? Forget it.

Instead, it's a relatively grim (for Burroughs) tale of a world ground down by endless war. A battle of civilization forced to live underground and devote itself to the war-effort lest it be destroyed by a relentless, totalitarian enemy. Tangor, as our nameless hero is called on this world of Poloda, joins the air force and flies a number of raids against Kapara, the enemy of hsi adopted home of Unis.

Clearly, Burroughs has the looming second World War on his mind. Is his typical, one might say simplistic, adventure-oriented fashion, Burroughs has his hero question the war or his side. His time is consumed with surviving. Telling, though, there are no heroic victories, no destroyed Death Stars or decisive battles. In fact, the story never lingers on the results of Tangor's sorties, mainly the difficulties he has making it home in one piece.

Illustration by Mark Schultz that doesn't capture much of the book's feel

The second novella "Tangor Returns" is even more remarkable among Burroughs' work. Tangor spends most of it as a spy living undercover in Kapara. He must deal with the constant surveillance and the inability to trust anyone. He is once beaten almost to death by the secret police after a jealous acquaintance has a fake diary planted in his home. He sees one of the few men he comes to trust there "disappeared" after his own son informs on him.

We are a long way from Barsoom or Pellucidar here. Tangor, while a man of accomplishments and ability is more an everyman than most of Burroughs' heroes, a status perhaps hinted at by his name which means "from nothing" in the language of his adopted people.

This is Burroughs more in the style of 1984 than Tarzan. It perhaps is a mode he is less suited to. Certainly, it doesn't capture the imagination in the way of his earlier works. But is interesting and short enough not to overstay its welcome.

Before the Red Skies: The Waning Pre-Crisis Universe

 

Over on my blog, I've been, for years now, doing a week-by-week chronicle of DC Comics between the Implosion and the Crisis. Now in the last month of 1984 (cover dates! The 1984 of the calendar has a few more months to go.), it's worth reflecting on Crisis' effects on the DC Universe.

Every New Beginning...

The biggest beneficiaries of Crisis were DC's big-name headliners. Of course, they didn't all benefit equally. The Superman titles of the early 80s seem to me stuck in an outmoded way of telling stories that didn't capitalize on the more serial (and more soap operatic) storylines preferred by readers that had made X-Men and New Teen Titans hits. Superman is mostly engaged in done-in-one stories by frequently changing creative teams that are lower on action, drama, and stakes. There were attempts made at innovation, particularly by Wolfman, but these didn't amount to much.

Batman, in contrast, had decent runs in the years before Crisis by Conway and Moench, though mostly in harmony with the 70s revitalization of Batman. There are some shakeups to the status quo. Dick Grayson becomes Nightwing and Jason Todd the new Robin, with a somewhat new dynamic with Batman. Catwoman is pushed aside as both a heroine and love interest (though it won't be until Barr's run post-Crisis where she is fully returned to villainy), but Moench introduces Nocturna, a new adversary and potential love interest, for perhaps a fresher variation on the same old theme. Both Killer Croc and Black Mask debut in what seems to be an attempt to create new, major adversaries.

Wonder Woman is somewhere between the two. Her title is less stuck in a rut, because (presumably) poor sales seem to lead to a number of "new directions" in the early 80s, but none of these are particularly bold, and they tend to come across as flailing rather than innovative.

The marquee team of the Justice League gets a risky makeover with the Detroit League that doesn't really work. An attempt to follow the "Cap's Kooky Quartet" template and harness the soap opera stylings of X-Men and Teen Titans is hampered both by poorly conceived characters and Conway perhaps not being the right writer for the job. (Ironically, Batman & the Outsiders both builds a better team from the Kooky Quartet template and does the character drama a bit better.)

While not necessarily required by Crisis, the bringing in of new creators and a willingness perhaps by editorial to entertain bolder pitches leads to a revitalization of these titles, though not without a cost. The rich mythology of Superman was jettisoned in a desire to strip him back to basics. Wonder Woman also lost most of her mythos, but also her place of prominence within the DC Universe. Batman got a personality shift, altering his relationship to other heroes, and a personality ans origin shift for his sidekick set Jason Todd on a course to an ignominious and gimmicky death.

...Some Other Beginning's End

More minor heroes, particularly those attached to the mythos of marquee characters were even less well served. The last issue of Supergirl and the last backup in Wonder Woman featuring the Huntress have editorials promising more to come for these characters, but both are erased in Crisis. While both returned, it's perhaps fair to say they've been hampered by too many revisions and new directions since. Power Girl, though she wasn't regularly featured pre-Crisis, has suffered a similar fate.

The Flash, whose title's sales struggled, I assume, died in the Crisis and got replace by his sidekick. Aquaman had a tough time before Crisis, and continues to do so after. Green Arrow and Hawkman are arguable brought to greater prominence (at least for a while) by the interesting takes in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters and Hawkworld, but at the cost of erasing much of their past. The grittier. more grounded take on Green Arrow also has the result of sidelining him for years in the DCU as the new version isn't really superhero team material, and the unfortunate decision to set Hawkworld in the present makes a hopeless tangle of the Hawks' continuity, and likewise, I think, sidelines them. It is true that none of these changes or poor editorial decisions were necessitated by Crisis, but the spirit of revision unmoored by any adherence to past continuity opened the door to them.

These new directions also condemned to obscurity the interesting stuff done in the Barr/von Eeden Green Arrow limited series, The Shadow War of Hawkman, Kupperberg's and Infantino's Supergirl, and the Cavalieri Huntress stories. Okay, maybe few of these are absolutely classics; Maybe none of them were! But they aren't universally worse than everything that's been done with these characters since.

World's Will Die

I was really only becoming aware of the DC Universe as an entity at the time just-pre-Crisis era, so Crisis sucked me in, and the just-post-Crisis period is one I have a great deal of nostalgia for. I'm certainly not one of those grumpy old fans (old at the time of Crisis!) that talked about the event and its effects with horror. However, it's fair to say that not every decision, in retrospect, was a good one, and every decision has unintended consequences. 

Like it's interesting to think about how the course of DC Comics might have been different had there been the courage to reboot at the end of Crisis, it's also interesting to consider how the DCU might have gone if a path to revitalization had been take that didn't entail wholesale revisions.

The Avengers in the Veracity Trap

The Avengers in the Veracity Trap is the latest graphic novel in Abrams Books' MarvelArts line. It's by Chip Kidd and Michael Cho. Like the previous MarvelArts release, Ross' Fantastic Four: Full Circle, it's a visual treat: the color and design is fantastic, and Cho's art perfectly captures the Marvel Age vibe, down to sort of meta touches like every character being introduced in a Mighty Marvel Pin-Up.

Storywise, it starts with an Avengers brawl with a host of Kirby-style Marvel monsters, courtesy of Loki, but soon develops in an even more metatextual direction as Thor pursues Loki outside the realm of the comic. The Avengers soon must come to terms with the sense-shattering reality of their existence and the fictional counterparts of Kidd and Cho finding the story becoming all too real!

What could easily have been either an extended joke or a saccharine nostalgia piece, manages to do a little of both, and avoid going too far in either direction. The affection the creators feel for these characters come through, but they keep it all moving.

In the end, Kidd and Cho get to do what they do best, as do the Avengers, and the team-up put an end to Loki's schemes.

Veracity Trap is available digitally, but something that's something looks this good and that is fundamentally about the love and impact of those Silver Age stories deserves to be read in physical form.

A Map of the Vega System

 This map by Todd Klein of the Vega System in the DC Universe appeared in a color version in Omega Men (vol 1) #33. This black and white version I believe appeared in the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game supplement Atlas of the DC Universe (1990).