The Man of Steel takes flight in this 1948 serial chapter of The Adventures of Superman. Lois Lane's sister Diana is back from Europe with a mysterious letter -- and a masked villain will kill to get it. With both Lane sisters held captive, Superman must race across Metropolis to break the case wide open. Bud Collyer stars as Superman/Clark Kent in part three of a Cold War-tinged spy thriller.

The masked man rides south of the Rio Grande when stolen rifles start fueling raids on both sides of the line. Posing as a horse trader, the Lone Ranger infiltrates a smuggler's camp while Tonto trails the wagons through the desert -- and discovers a respected freight agent is the secret ringleader. A 1942 episode of the classic western drama starring Brace Beemer and John Todd.

Springbok Radio's swinging-sixties spy-fi adaptation rolls on as Steed and Emma Peel hunt the killer of the British Venusian Society. Members keep dropping under a blinding flash of white light while gazing at the night sky -- and the trail leads to a very peculiar optician with a laser-equipped sports car and a personal grudge. Donald Monat and Diane Appleby star in this 1972 South African radio adaptation of the classic Patrick Macnee/Diana Rigg episode.

From October 24, 1951, one of the very first episodes of NBC's Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator. William Gargan stars as the smooth Madison Avenue private eye called in when a protection racket burns a tailor shop to the ground. The trail leads to a humble goldfish bowl -- and a roll of microfilm worth killing for. Cool, witty, early-fifties Manhattan detective fiction with brains over fists.

From March 21, 1954 — Jack tunes in his living-room radio and gets hooked on a soapy serial about a cantankerous, miserly old codger who terrorizes everyone around him. The trouble is, that mean old man on the radio sounds awfully familiar — tight with a dollar, allergic to gift-giving, perpetually 39. A sly bit of self-parody from one of the greatest comedy casts in radio history: Jack, Mary, Rochester, Dennis, Don, and the rest of the gang on The Lucky Strike Program.

James Stewart stars as drifting cowboy Britt Ponset in NBC's beloved 1953-54 Western. In this next-to-last episode of the series, Britt and a traveling peddler named Azel Dorsey ride into a frontier town and discover a young woman called Cindy being worked to the bone by her stepmother and stepsisters. What follows is an Old-West retelling of Cinderella — fairy-tale ending and all, played out in wagon ruts and lantern light instead of glass slippers and palace ballrooms. Stewart loved this story so much he returned to it for television five years later as Ford Startime's "Cindy's Fella."

The original American teenage sitcom — and the one that gave the world Henry Aldrich's famous voice-cracking "Coming, Mother!" In "Grouse For Dinner," Sam Aldrich is preparing a special wild grouse meal that is meant to be a small, intimate family dinner. Henry has one job: invite no one. Naturally, his best pal Homer turns up at the door, and the rest of the half hour is a master class in escalating domestic chaos as Henry tries to gently uninvite a guest who was never technically invited, while the kitchen falls apart over a missing rare herb. Classic late-1940s Aldrich Family comedy — the prototype for every awkward-adolescent sitcom that came after.

Two armed robbers are working the streets of Los Angeles, and Sergeant Joe Friday is on their trail. A reformed ex-con steps forward with a tip, and one small detail — a stutter — becomes the thread Friday pulls until the whole case unravels. This is Dragnet at its most methodical: no theatrics, just the facts, and the relentless procedural grind that made this show the template for every police drama that followed. Premiering on NBC in 1949 and built from real LAPD case files, Dragnet ran for nine seasons and set the standard for the entire genre.

A condemned man sits in San Quentin, hours from execution — and a desperate visitor walks into Sam Spade's office convinced the verdict is wrong. Spade takes the case and races against the clock to uncover the truth before the state makes an irreversible mistake. One of the final episodes from radio's greatest hard-boiled detective series, with all the wit, tension, and sardonic charm that made Sam Spade a household name.

Someone has declared war on the city's water supply — poisoning it in the name of The Shadow himself. But the real Shadow has other plans. Lamont Cranston traces the terror to a bitter city chemist whose wounded pride has curdled into something far more dangerous, leading to a white-knuckle showdown atop a water tower that only one man will survive. A 22-year-old Orson Welles stars in this chilling 1938 thriller — one of the boldest episodes in golden age radio drama.