A-E-I-O-U
One of the best old-time radio horror series out there is Quiet Please! It’s given us some of the scariest episodes of audio drama I’ve had the pleasure to listen to, and Northern Lights happens to be one of the best of those episodes.
It’s a story about two scientists researching a time machine in a cold, northern location. Their goal is to send a cigarette lighter ahead a few seconds in time, but they also bring back an odd little visitor with them, one who perplexes them to no end. The rest you have to listen to yourself.
if you like that, some other scary episodes are “The Thing on the Fourble Board” and “Tanglefoot.” If you’re not keen on horror, National Public Radio did an absolutely wonderful audio drama of the Star Wars films that had much of the original cast, and expanded on them by including scenes not present in the movies. There are both BBC and American adaptations of the Lord of the Rings series for fantasy lovers. I think audio drama is an excellent alternative for Christians worried about content, as you can’t visually display extreme sex or violence due to the nature of the media, and you have to focus on mood and atmosphere instead shock and transgression. It also forces you to engage your imagination more, and can be made at a fraction of the cost of a single television episode.
Unfortunately with the death of radio as a mass medium, it’s never really recovered. While the internet has acted as a big archive for the old programs, most of the new ones have no real distribution method outside of websites or the odd college radio station. Sort of like Christian spec fiction in a way; you need to have a distribution network that pushes content to people, not one where people have to pull content to them. It doesn’t even matter about the quality of the stuff pushed:
Tina Fey is spectacularly unfunny; compare 30rock to just about any sitcom made ten years ago, and prepare to cringe.
Family Guy is anti-funny, to the point of inducing pain.
Most geeky series can’t even do better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that series was fluff. Compare Arrow to it, and Arrow is a clunky, unrealistic mess.
Pretty much any “big” series in the last five years has been mediocre.
Yet TV keeps soldiering on. Same as movies:
Guardians of the Galaxy SUCKED. Hint: Rocket Raccoon is called Rocket because he wears rocket skates on his hindpaws. If you want a drinking game for that movie, take one every time the camera shows a shot of him looking down the barrel of a gun. Batista sucked as Drax, Zoe Saldana managed to make Gamora unsexy, “What a bunch of a-holes,” “Star-lord, man *whines*”, Ronan looking constipated, etc. I don’t know why its liked when it’s The Phantom Menace of Marvel live-action films.
Somehow, Michael Bay can keep making movies. In fact, he seems to be the most influential director out there. The Hobbit movies? Straight from the Bay playbook; overlong, absurd action sequences, etc.
It’s so bad that Oscar winners are movies no one cares about. It’s not a matter of passing over popular to choose less popular, it’s picking unknown or movies designed to appeal to critics over movies people actually spend money to watch.
It’s so bad that the shelves of most movie stores are lined with crap. Go into a Wal-mart movie section and you’ll see:
Five different Z-grade Syfy monster movies. The old B-grade films, the ones done by Corman of others, they were flawed but have charm. Modern ones? Blame Troma, who pioneered everything Syfy did, and made unlikable bargain-basement films without a hint of camp or art.
Multiple modern Chinese wuxia films. Buy cheap, bring over cheap, watch and they are a mess.
Endless indie horror flicks. Yeah, they had them earlier on too, but you had some real gems among the endless slasher retreads. Now it’s like we get endless retreads and precious few cult films. Where is our Evil Dead?
Tyler Perry, and much more.
The distribution network trumps all. It’s like a massive rock rolling down a hill; once its started, it can keep going indefinitely. Audio drama these days is impossible to start, because radio as a cultural force is dead. You know what radio stations are none for now? Spamming your Facebook feeds with stupid memes.
It’s sad because it’s really a wonderful medium. Quiet Please actually is BETTER than the Twilight Zone, because it uses a great formula of having a small cast with a single narrator to make intimate, chilling tales. I think I’d love to make Triune into an audio drama at some point, as well as write others. I guess it’s just me liking contrary things though.
This turned more into a rant than simply sharing a link, but here it is.
