Old Radio Shows: Good Idea?

Jair · Post by **Jair** » April 2nd, 2011, 2:48 am

I'm a huge fan of old radio shows and would really like to do some projects from that era. I have found a treasure trove of scripts from shows like mystery theater to father knows best. Comedies, dramas, mysteries, etc... I have alot of free time and wuold be willing and able to add the sound effects after the sections are recorded. I work in the broadcast industry and have all sorts of things at my fingertips to use in production.

Post by **annise** » April 2nd, 2011, 3:17 am

It would be fun - it has been suggested before. It is quite difficult to show that these things are PD - it is much easier to show copyright was registered and or renewed than that it wasn't . All Librivox recordings are released into the public domain and things like music and sound effects have proved in the past to be very difficult in this regard. We don't have lawyers and we don't want to be sued.
This is not a NO just an indication of the pitfalls.
I'm moving this to book suggestions - we keep the Launch Pad for projects ready to go.

Anne

Jair · Post by **Jair** » April 2nd, 2011, 4:18 am

Yep, I know there would be issues with some things, but I'd only do the things that are definitely public, and as far as sound effects and music...I wouldn't use any canned material, I'd create whatever was needed myself.

BellonaTimes · Post by **BellonaTimes** » April 3rd, 2011, 10:24 am

I'm into OTR too and Annise is right about the PD issue. I've only found ***maybe*** one writer who didn't renew the copyright on his scripts; I think his name was Himan Brown, and they're for a suspense show he had in the late 40's - early 50's. I've also done a collection of the source-stories for X Minus One that are PD, including Tunnel Under The World. The first season of the series Escape was primarily made up of classic adventure stories that are public domain, such as Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King and Conrad's Typhoon. Such a collection is on my back burner at this time if you'd like to participate.

Jair · Post by **Jair** » April 4th, 2011, 10:30 pm

Yep, that's the type of thing I was thinking about. Old classicsc that were scripted to fit the radio show time frames. There is a website that I found a ton of scripts and it looks like most would be PD, looks the person who put them up just slapped a C on them, I doubt they were re copyrighted by him.

Jair · Post by **Jair** » April 23rd, 2011, 2:26 am

I did some checking and this is the info I dug up regarding CBS Radio Mystery Theater (another Himan Brown production)...

This work has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.
You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

They had some classic episodes. I would really be interested in re-doing them somehow, possibly re-write some of the content to make it a bit more modern...the last episode aired in 1982. So some of the technical things are a bit outdated. But they way they did the classic Poe, O'Henry, and others were so cool because they were written to be performed in less than an hour. Like Jane Eyre, or Wuthering Heights...long stories but condensed so well as to be easy to follow and understand.

Starlite · Post by **Starlite** » April 23rd, 2011, 3:41 am

We don't change the text here, even if there is an offensive word.

http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/Recording_%26_Text_Policies#May_I_change_the_text.3F

Esther

BellonaTimes · Post by **BellonaTimes** » April 23rd, 2011, 6:30 pm

There are four history plays by Henry Fisk Carlton on Project Gutenberg that apparently were done for OTR; one of them is about Nathan Hale.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28527

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moments_in_History this is the show from the late 1920's.

Naturally, I stumbled on this: http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/

thestorygirl · Post by **thestorygirl** » August 5th, 2011, 8:15 am

This sounds like it would be SO much fun!! How soon could anyone start a working project on it?