The Weird Circle

Not crop circles, or social circles, or driving in circles but "Weird Circles." Over two seasons it cranked out a total of 78 episodes. It was a program that rehashed classic horror stories into short radio plays. they took the works of Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Honore de Balzac and others... Their reliance on the classics made the program a tad classier than the pulp programs of the day.  It was pure gothic horror, and one of the first. More here.

The program was 30 minutes long and ran Sundays. Accounts differ as to when the program initially ran. Digital Deli dates the series as running from 1943 to 1945. Other sources state it ran from 1946 to 1947. I've tried to find corroborating references. An issue of Billboard puts it on WNEW-AM in 1944, and it lists it in a set of script writing prices in December 1943. Interestingly a 1953 issue of Billboard puts it as running at 8:00 PM on WTOP-AM. This was confusing at first but I found a reference in Monster Wax that confirmed the show was re-run.

"...The Weird Circle was syndicated again decades later to independent stations on reel to reel tape. I know this because I found dozens of boxes of the tapes stored at KZSU Stanford in the early 1990s... They were probably originally sent in the 1970s when there was a resurgence of interest in OTR created by The CBS Radio Mystery Theater and Zero Hour. The actual stories sounded like they were the same 1940s recordings, but the introduction and closing segments had a different voice of an older man, and were probably re-recorded to allow a standardized point for commercials to be inserted..."

For these reasons I agree with the Digital Deli data. More here and here. Radio archives agrees and puts the airing of the first program as Sunday, August 29, 1943, the last on Sunday, February 11, 1945.

The Chickenheart that ate Arch Oboler

Have you ever heard the Bill Cosby Routing on the Chicken heart that ate New York City? Its a joke.. but what many younger people dont realize.. is that it's a spoof of a real radio play by a man named Arch Oboler. In the golden age of radio, Arch Oboler was radio's king of horror and science fiction.

If you don't know what I'm talking about please visit the Blog of Mr. Snuh and download the audio of both Bill and Arch. We can all proceed on equal footing afterwards.

Oboler sold his very first radio scripts while still in his Chicago high school in the 1920s. He was prolific. While at the University of Chicago he cranked out more than fifty plays! His career in radio took off when he took over the NBC horror anthology Lights Out in 1936. The show was already a sensation because of creator Wyllis Cooper's dark and violent content. If anything, Oboler trumped him. http://www.bmonster.com/scifi5.html

Each episode of Lights Out began like this:
"This is Arch Oboler bringing you another of our series of stories of the unusual, and once again we caution you: These Lights Out stories are definitely not for the timid soul. So we tell you calmly and very sincerely, if you frighten easily, turn off your radio now. "

In 1939, Oboler started a second program Arch Oboler's Plays, which ran on the competitor CBS. He had felt restrained in the horror-only format of Lights out. Lewis Titterton gave him a shot to branch out. Here he wrote tragedy, comedy and of course.. more horror. But in Oboloers Plays the horror content was less horrific, more topical. The content was still horror, but much less gothic, often focusing on WWII in Europe. You can hear an episode here, and another here. Many of these plays are flat out anti-Nazi. As such, stars like Joan Crawford and Alla Nazimova begged to be casts. The program ran opposite the Jack Benny show which eventually killed it. arch Oboloers plays ended in March, 1940. But It re-appeared again on the Mutual network in 1945 as a summer series. It was re-done as re-issues into the early seventies with a much older Oboler introducing each episode.


By 1950 Oboler was called to Hollywood to do feature scripts for RKO. Oboler being Oboler this material was as ghastly as ever including the first post nuclear apocalyse film titled Five. He went on to do TV, write books, more screen plays, records and even a strange number of 3-D features. He died in 1987.