We're jumping into our little time-sleigh today to zip back to a couple of days before Christmas 1949, when the series "Suspense" presented comedian Eddie Cantor in an amusing little story about a couple of button-down accountants who get rooked into betting some of the company's funds on a racehorse. This is a sharp departure from Suspense's usual tense thriller format, as they did occasionally depending on the guest or a holiday. This one is all light-hearted Christmas fun.

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We are back to Christmas comedy today with one of radio's most popular couples, George Burns and Gracie Allen. Their special guests in this Christmas episode are Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, as Gracie uses some backhanded manipulation to get Charles to be Santa Claus in an amateur theatre production. Also, we are doing a Baby Snooks skit about Snooks getting caught raiding the Christmas gifts. It's a double-bill of merry mayhem.

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Today we are pausing briefly to observe Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. There were a whole lot of shows with great WWII themes, and a few times a year we have a chance to feature one of them. This one is from The Cavalcade of America war years. Normally this series dramatized events from American history or historical figures. But for a while after the US entered the war, they did mostly action-packed stories revolving around the war, designed to boost morale. This is one such show, and it is a beautifully written piece starring the film actor Ralph Bellamy. 

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It's December, and that means we are officially plunging into our Christmas bag of goodies. This year we will be featuring popular shows of the era, including some dramas. We are starting out with one of the best traditions on radio (and later TV), the Jack Benny shopping episode. For 2024, we are featuring the 1948 version of this Christmas classic. So come with us back in time when folks still did all of their Christmas shopping at the department store... and this one is a little crazy.

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Happy Thanksgiving! We are celebrating with a program that is a little lighter than last year's offering. It's a Thanksgiving program from Edgar Bergen, 1945. Edgar Bergen was radio's ventriloquist, and his lead act was the puppet Charlie McCarthy. This was before ventriloquist dummies became the subject of horror movies. The guest in this show is 7-year-old Margaret O'Brien, and they do a very silly retelling of The Courtship of Miles Standish. Gather your kids and your parents. This one's a great one for just about everyone.

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We are ending our month-long tribute to Vincent Price with a zany comedy. It was a successful movie from 1950, adapted for radio here in 1951, about an intellectual named Beauregard Bottomly (played by Ronald Colman), who goes toe-to-toe with the slimy president of a soap company, Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price), set on a background of  radio/TV quiz programs. The humor, just like the film, is hit-or-miss, but it's a big radio adaptation, with many names (Audrey Totter, Barbara Britton), and Art Linkletter even reprises his role in the film. 

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Our month-long tribute to the classic horror villain Vincent Price continues today. And this is your more traditional Vincent Price story, and a great role where he gets to exude menace and suspicion. Starring alongside Price, and the reason we picked this particular story, is another one of our favorite villainous character actors, the original Invisible Man, Claude Rains. It has to do with a serial killer on the loose, and it's great fun to see these two great horror movie actors performing together.

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We are featuring actor Vincent Price all through the month of November. Of course, he is well-remembered today for being a spooky character in film, but that reputation began later in his career. Often people forget that he played all sorts of roles before he was typecast in the more grisly roles. Today we are bringing you a comedy show with Price as a guest, and here in '51, he was already building this reputation. But here he gets to poke fun at himself, and this is a really fun show for Price fans.

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We've featured some Norman Corwin dramas here in the past (links in the description). Corwin was particularly noted as one of radio's most literary figures. He was certainly known for some hard-hitters, but did some light scripts, such as this one. Of course, having a reputation to uphold, he could not settle for anything easy, and so you have the entire thing written in verse. The cast is impressive: Vincent Price, Groucho Marx, Robert Benchley, Keenan Wynn, Sylvia Sidney, and Norman Lloyd. And you will probably be thinking in verse for awhile after listening to this, so we apologize for that.

Other Norman Corwin plays we've featured:

https://goodolddaysofradio.podbean.com/e/episode-78-on-a-note-of-triumph/

https://goodolddaysofradio.podbean.com/e/episode-88-we-hold-these-truths/

https://goodolddaysofradio.podbean.com/e/episode-95-the-best-of-lucille-fletcher-my-client-curly/

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Author Leslie Charteris had a popular and long-running book series about a suave character named Simon Templar, nicknamed "The Saint." During a time when quirky literary detectives got a treatment on radio, "The Saint" had a brief run starring Vincent Price. Of course, any similarity between the Saint of the novels and radio was purely coincidental. But the dialogue was surprisingly snarky, and worked well with Price's persona. Especially this episode where the Saint and "Louie" the cab driver explore a haunted house.

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