Theater of the Mind

Folks that deny the value of audio because it isn’t text just plain don’t appreciate the theater of the mind. I love it and have basically my whole life. I love radio dramas, becoming interested as a child in the 70’s. At that time, CBS radio had a revival of Mystery Theater which frequently featured Mason Adams. In fact, any time I saw him on Lou Grant I thought of him as the “Mystery Theater” guy.

Yesterday while I was doing my work, I listened to an old episode of Hopalong Cassidy that came down from the Sentinel’s Ward podcast feed. I don’t know if that’s still a going concern or if it has changed URLs or something but I haven’t gotten anything down that feed since January. I love old time radio and even new time radio, such as ZBS productions and the Atlanta Radio Theater Company and Seeing Ear Theater.

A few years ago I was involved in a group that did CD trees of old time radio on MP3s. In fact, when I bought my iRiver SlimX it was these CDs that were the primary driver. I even took some of the CDs with me to test it out at the store of these MP3s at weird bitrates and such, and when it played them all I bought it. I ultimately resigned in disgust from group, because I had a dispute with the organization. They were preparing a distribution of Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe from ZBS Productions. In every CD tree I ever participated in, the shows were things that are no longer commercially available. In this case, the organization that produced the shows is still in business and still selling copies of those shows. I found that inappropriate and when no one else seemed to be bothered by this, I left the group. I do love the form though, and I’m delighted to be able to listen to some OTR whenever I can.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “Theater of the Mind”

  1. I’m a big fan of ZBS in general, and the Ruby series specifically. It’s great to see that I’m not the only one.

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