With Year Three launched, I thought I’d do a review of Year Two, much like I did with Year One, to discuss each of our episodes and how they changed from the originals.
EPISODE 16 – YOURS TRULY, JOHNNY DOLLAR “THE CAYLIN MATTER” (Original episode HERE) So the series “YTJD” went through many incarnations in its decades on the air. My first introduction to it was what is called the “Bob Bailey” years. When the show had gotten a rebirth as a nightly serial. So instead of a once a week 30 minute drama, the show aired Monday through Friday with fifteen minute episodes, leaving audiences with cliffhangers every night until the resolution on Friday. This format, along with the unmatched performances of Bob Bailey, has made this period of the series the most popular, and that certainly is true for me. I’d saved “YTJD” for our anniversary show because I was determined to do one of the full hour-fifteen minute stories. This meant my personally transcribing that long episode, and then adding Madison to the show, which always lengthens it more. I picked this episode because it was set in LA and Madison loves her adventures in old Hollywood. But it also meant more demands on the cast, especially the amazing David Pinion who took the role of Johnny Dollar, and OMG… editing. Some of these scenes were over ten minutes long. Just think, for a lot of audio dramas, that’s an entire episode, but for us it was ONE scene! I also explored the narrator having a story arc as well, essentially presenting a secondary plot that linked the five episodes together. The undertaking was a challenge, but I’m thrilled with how it turned out.
EPISODE 17 – THE GREEN HORNET “THE CORPSE THAT WASN’T THERE” (Original episode HERE) If you heard the episode, you know the plan here was to showcase Kato and how he was portrayed in the series as an Asian-American. I decided a creative way to do this was to have Madison actually embody Britt Reid, The Green Hornet, physically. So instead of her being Madison in the story, all the other characters saw her as the Hornet except for Kato. So when Kato spoke to Madison, he had perfect English. But when they were around other people, Kato spoke in broken English and Madison was believed to be the Hornet. It allowed me to let Kato drive the story and be the one who actually saves the day. One of my favorite lines from Kato is, “Everybody sees what they want to see.” I really was trying to point out that while OTR is horrific in terms of racial stereotypes and how women are treated, honestly, it was the best these writers’ rooms of white men could do at that period in time. They thought they were portraying Kato as a hero. It didn’t even occur to them how racist they were. And, from listening to the old series, we can see how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go. The idea of the bonus feature lead by Steve Jun, who played our Kato, with other Asian-American professionals in Hollywood, was part of the whole package when I sought to do “The Green Hornet.” It’s a fabulous one hour talk that I highly recommend listening to: “Kato and the History of Asian-Americans in Hollywood”
EPISODE 18 – THE STORY OF DOCTOR KILDARE “DR. CONLIN, QUACK” (Original episode HERE) This series was unfamiliar to me and recommended by a listener. As tastes go, I’ve never been a medical drama fan. But it was purely accidental that I’d never even run across this show in all of my OTR listening. It was a fun series, reminding me a lot of “Dragnet” which was meant to portray police as unbridled heroes of our society. Here was a selfless, determined young doctor, making heroes of all men of medicine. I listened to many episodes before I settled on this one. I thought, in the time of COVID and all of the crazy remedies peddled in the media, this one hit close to home. Quite a remarkable parallel. There will always be people lying to the public about medical care and, in turn, risking lives. And this episode reminds us it’s not just a recent problem. (Oh, and we see just how much Madison has the hots for doctors…)
EPISODE 19 – THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES “The Accidental Murderess” (Original episode HERE) Our first revisit of a series! So our Year One Sherlock Holmes did quite well, attracting a lot of fans of Basil Rathbone and the original series. So I thought it would be fun to do another. I really enjoyed Madison as Dr. Watson. I chose this episode because it did have a lot of action with Watson. Truthfully, that’s always the challenge when picking any episode to adapt. I need to make sure Madison is in there as much as possible, or else we’re just one of those groups that recreates the original show as written. I also enjoyed bringing back our poor announcer for Madison to continue to torment in between scenes. I knew Watson had bulldogs in the stories, so why not? Their addition was completely my creation for this reimagining.
EPISODE 20 – THE CHALLENGE OF THE YUKON “Maw Baker’s Pies” & “A Pack of Bacon” (original episodes HERE and HERE) More dogs! Another show I didn’t know that was recommended by one of our regular cast, Sharon Grünwald. This one, by the creator of “The Green Hornet” and “The Lone Ranger”, was a kids’ show, so the majority of the episodes were 15 minutes long. So why not do two? I have enjoyed working with Julie Hoverson of the audio drama anthology, “19 Nocturne Boulevard”, so for the first episode I found one I thought she’d have fun voicing. The second was one Sharon had recommended specifically because of the character in the original named “Standish.” Naturally, I had to give Sharon the narrator role in that one. It was a challenge to find good Husky voices to do justice to King, but overall, while I don’t personally like the kiddie shows, they are great to adapt for Madison.
EPISODE 21 – BOX 13 “Blackmail is Murder” (original episode HERE) While I am a fan of this series, I’d actually forgotten about it! Until it was recommended by one of our listeners. I picked this episode because it featured an old lady who (spoilers) was bored so she killed a man and then hired Dan Holiday to try and solve the case, all the while inserting herself as an amateur gumshoe. While, naturally, Madison wasn’t going to be a murderer, I found a fun way around this plot point by adding a layer of Dan, a writer of noir, having writer’s block and his bubble headed assistant and grumpy police lieutenant actually staging something for him to work on to help him get his creative juices flowing, ultimately hiring Madison as the key actor in the scenario. Of course Dan goes off script so there was a lot of great things to explore. The running gag of the “noir slang” actually is from the original episode. For them, having the old lady trying to sound all slick with slang was a funny bit. For us, Madison trying to write her own “English to Noir Dictionary” was a direct callback to our “Let George Do It” episode from Year One. And this is also the first time we did a lead in by having Madison waking up from a bad dream, aka her “Challenge of the Yukon” adventure, in Dan’s office.
EPISODE 22 – TALES OF THE TEXAS RANGERS “Blood Trail” (Original episode HERE) I actually really enjoy this series, having binged the full 90+ episodes just prior to starting Madison. I love “Gunsmoke”, which is why it’s one of the first shows we did, but this is also a fun “western” that has more of a cop-drama feel in what was then modern day. And I thought it was high-time Madison was in another western. This was a great script because the sheriff does work with Ranger Pearson the entire episode, actually opening the story with him. So having Madison being a sheriff (with explanations of “how the heck did THAT happen??”) was a great romp. I also enjoyed our narrator in this one. While Madison has made appearances in the narration monologues and even harassed a narrator or two, this time I thought it would be fun to have the narrator make snarky comments in the full professional narrator performance, that Madison couldn’t rebuff.
EPISODE 23 – THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP MARLOWE “The Ladies’ Night” (Original episode HERE) Woo! This one was fraught with problems. I picked this specific episode because I wanted to highlight my female cast. Most shows are male heavy, and as I’ve said before, I don’t change genders if it wouldn’t make sense to the period. I thought it’d be a nice way to use all of my ladies. Not so. Problem one: The Southern Belle. I actually didn’t have enough women in my regular cast. I had had a voice actor reach out to me and thought I’d give her a shot with this role. She promised she could do a Southern accent. Usually just a hint of any accent is enough, but this role required a VERY SPECIFIC accent or the scene and comedy wouldn’t work. I went back and forth with this person, sending YT videos, recording my own voice, it just wasn’t in her abilities, so I had to find someone else. This upset her enough to badmouth me all over the internet. It hurts me because I am a very sensitive person to actors and how hard they work. So to be slandered, even after telling her I’d definitely find her a role better suited to her, well, some people just aren’t professional. Problem two: Mona. She’s the Mexican-American character. In this woke age, while perfectly acceptable to cast POC as white characters, I was met with pushback when asking white women to play Latina. I don’t look at race. I just want the right voice for the role. And this was a BIG role. I’d already gone through so much with the Southern character, I was afraid if I reached out to actors I didn’t know, they might tank the episode. One actor refused the role. The other couldn’t do a believable accent. She’d said she wasn’t sure about doing the voice and asked for feedback. Apparently another delicate soul, she was deeply offended that I gave her any notes and, without even listening to them, removed herself from the project, leaving me in a lurch. By now I was regretting trying to have a female heavy cast at all! Well, listeners, I finally found someone to do the role. Me. With the magic of EQ in post, we lowered the voice so she wouldn’t sound like Madison. But, yes, I played both roles! (and the fabulous Bonnie Brantley did an ah-mazing Southern Belle)
EPISODE 24 – WAR OF THE WORLDS (Original episode HERE) Talk about recommended episodes! Overall, THE most requested show has been “War of the Worlds.” I wasn’t sure how I’d pull it off, since the original was designed to be interruptions of a music radio program. So not really a full plot. That’s when I decided I’d modernize the concept and make the radio news interruptions actually breaking into a podcast. I’ve been Twitter-buddies with Vintage Video Podcast since Year One, and threw it out to Patrick to see if I could use his show and get him to do some announcing as well. He loved the idea! Then I took the original Mercury Theater script (thankfully that one is easily found online) and decided to make it ours. Firstly, setting it in 1939 LA, to give it something new, and then actually doing a little “Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead” (a fave play of mine) by filling out the action that might’ve been happening around the news broadcasts. Of all the episodes of Madison, this is the one that is THE most rewritten with THE most original content. I think we pulled it off and hopefully have added to the H.G. Wells legacy!
EPISODE 25 – DEFENSE ATTORNEY “The Joshua Masters Case” (Original episode HERE) Another listener recommondation. This was a tricky show. Only 5 episodes have survived. It was recommended because the series does feature a female defense attorney. But I couldn’t really see a way to make Madison embody the lawyer (she could fake a sheriff, but not passing the bar!) so I decided to have her be the hired assistant covering for Marty while she’s out sick. While billed as a legal drama, critics agree the series really was more of a detective show where Marty would join her hot-shot reporter boyfriend to solve cases that came across her desk. So that worked putting Madison with the unwitting boyfriend. Another tricky part to this series is how DAs are portrayed in modern media. If you’ve watched the literal decades of any of the “Law and Order” shows, they HATE defense attorneys. The series took the stand that DAs set criminals free and make the jobs of law enforcement harder. Versus this early 1950’s show that saw them as “defending the defenseless.” So hopefully we did the original series (and DAs) justice!
EPISODE 26 – BATMAN & ROBIN AND WONDER WOMAN (Original episode HERE and HERE) Coming into our Christmas episode, I wanted to do something spectacular. I source most of my OTR on archive.org where I listen to full series, but some folks on there have put together compilations. So I searched “Christmas” and found a collection of a wide variety of OTR Christmas specials. But, remember, I wanted something spectacular! That’s when I found the “Batman and Robin” and “Wonder Woman” Christmas shorts. I fell in love with these before I realized they were actually produced in the 1970s. Which made sense since their “Batman” sounded suspiciously like the 1960’s Adam West that was, at the time, heavily in syndication. But the stories were actually taken from 1940’s comics, so with that, and the fact that they were audio-only stories, I decided they qualified! And it gave Madison a chance to not only reprise her role as The Boy Wonder, but to follow through with her comment when she realizes she’s The Green Hornet, “Given the choice, I would’ve gone with Wonder Woman…”
EPISODE 27 – RICHARD DIAMOND, PRIVATE DETECTIVE “Timothy the Seal” or “To Guard a Seal” (Original episode HERE) So I’d been listening to my Twitter-buddy’s audio drama, “Canary P.I.”, appreciating his own take on the 1940’s detective noir that I already love. I decided to see if he’d want to voice Madison’s next detective and he was on board! I’d been wanting to do Richard Diamond, which has a bit more whimsy that most detectives, and since Canary is such a hardened gumshoe in a supernatural/horror world, it might be fun for him to step outside of that. Then I found the Richard Diamond episode with Timothy the Seal. Maybe you already figured it out, I work as an educator at the Los Angeles Zoo. Love animals. This episode allowed me to correct the mistakes made in the original series. They never call him a sea lion, but all of the things he did couldn’t be done physically by a harbor seal (the native species to the NYC waters). That did leave us with a MUCH larger animal to have in our story, but all the funnier! And my husband, Jeremy, who also worked both at the L.A. Zoo, as well as the Long Beach Aquarium, was a natural to voice Timothy as he used to do the sea lion bark in presentations for laughs. J. Henry, the voice of Canary, fit in beautifully with the Diamond dialogue. And he had fun having to deal with the likes of Madison. We hopefully both gained some new audience to our respective shows, so maybe more crossovers in the future!
