Saturday Night Radio

I recently found this at Dollar Tree for $1...$1.25.

Radio Days is one of my favorite movies.

It's a good one, one of Woody Allen's most mainstream movies. It's episodic, like several short films with elements in common.

When it came out in 1987, those radio days were in the medium-distant past; the stories in it take place around 1938-43. Evening radio dramas were still strong into the early Fifties but began disappearing quickly around 1954-'55. If you were a ten-year-old even as late as 1955, you grew up with radio, especially if you were in one of the many less populated or geographically isolated places that still didn't have TV. So in 1987, you only had to be in your mid-forties to have some memory of those times.

DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

Radio Days is one of my favorite movies.

It's definitely my favorite of his. Family.

Anything by Dick Hyman, who did the music, is worth a listen.

When did radio become the kind of radio we know? There's no exact answer but I think it's an interesting question. In the early Twenties, it was a miracle just to hear distant voices and music. But by around 1930, radio programming had settled into a pattern: Shows were familiar, because they went on the air at the same time every week or every day. They fit time slots, generally 15 or 30 minutes; they didn't wander all over the clock. They began and ended on time. They began and ended with a musical theme to fit the mood of the program.

And they had commercials, commonplace to everyone reading this, but a peculiar novelty a century ago. Vaudeville theaters had advertisements painted on the backdrops--"Dr. Keller's Pain Remedy"--but they didn't interrupt the acts to have the actors read them aloud.

All of these new habits of listening carried over to television.