Oboler was active in the medium from the early 30’s through the end of World War Two, at which time he began writing and directing movies. Unfortunately, I never did buy Drop Dead! and so had to forgo finding out just what the hell it was all about… but I always wondered what I had missed.īut now, thanks to THE WONDERS OF THE INTERNET!! I have at last listened to all thirty-seven minutes of Drop Dead! I found it several years ago on one of those “oddball audio” sites, along with other gems like Liberace singing “You Don’t Send Me Flowers,” Orson Welles’ infamous frozen peas commercial, and hours of Judy Garland’s drunken tape-recorder rants, and you don’t even have to make that much effort – the whole of Arch Oboler’s magnum opus can now be found on YouTube or downloaded from Amazon.Īrch Oboler was indeed one of the giants of radio – the ad in Creepy didn’t lie. If I had had the cash, I definitely would have gotten the record that part about the ravenous chicken heart really put the hook in me. A sampling of some of the best! Features the legendary tale of the Chicken Heart that devoured Earth! Plus others. When radio was king in the late 30’s and early 40’s, America was scared out of its wits by Arch Oboler’s Lights Out. The cover featured a surly-looking skull peering out of the darkness, and the breathless ad copy declared, The album that always caught my eye (and that’s all it caught – $5.98 wasn’t easy for me to come by in those days) was called Drop Dead! Warren magazines like Creepy and Eerie were especially good in this regard, aimed as they were at a slightly more adult audience than comics like The Flash or Sub-Mariner were – or if Warren readers weren’t that much more mature, they probably at least had a little more money in their pockets than their slightly younger, allowance-dependent brethren did.įor instance, the last fifteen pages of my copy of Creepy #59 (January, 1974) consist of nothing but ads for such treasures as Planet of the Apes Hobby Kits (“TEN MILLION FANS ASKED FOR IT!”), Vinyl Movie Monster Masks (“NEW! FROM HOLLYWOOD!”), 8MM reels of stop-motion action scenes from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (“A FEAST OF FEARFUL IMAGINATION!”), EC Comics reprints, and pages and pages of paperback books and “Monsterific LP Record Albums!” The latter were mostly a mixed bag of ancient radio shows, “spoken word” renditions of Poe and Bierce stories, movie soundtracks, and those compilations of haunted house sounds that the copywriters assured us would be “great fun for parties!” As anyone who reads old comic books can tell you, the cheesy ads in the back pages are often more fun than the actual stories.
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