X Minue One
Years ago, I subscribed to a podcast that put up old episodes of the radio drama "X Minus One". It was a science fiction anthology that adapted short stories from the genre. From what I've read about the show, it wasn't particularly notable in the history of radio, but the production values are pretty good, and if it didn't have so much 1950's style to it, you could forget that it's a sixty-year-old show.
A while back I made a point of listening to every single audio file on my computer, and I've come to the point where "X Minus One" is about all I have left to cover. On revisiting the podcast, the first thing I discovered was that it did a piss poor job re-presenting the original material. Originally, I assumed that the series wasn't complete. A lot of old "Superman" radio episodes were simply lost over time, and that's not something you hear about much, because so much of the "Superman" series is extant, and radiophiles must see the glass as half-full. "X Minus One" has a different issue, where the series more or less survived, but it's been badly preserved for reasons no one seems to understand.
I learned about all of this on a website that discusses old time radio, Digital Deli. I found the site while trying to figure out what order the episodes of "X Minus One" are supposed to go in. I'm not a collector by any stretch, but I'm trying to keep things as organized as I can, and that means I want to strive for some level of accuracy. Digital Deli's main gripe is that the old time radio community has long perpetuated a canon of "lost" episodes of "X Minus One", which are simply other sci-fi dramas with the "X Minus One" opening and closing sequences tacked on. Since "X Minus One" occasionally rebroadcast its own episodes, it became a common practice for traders and dealers to try to include multiple copies of the same episode as reruns. This has gone on for so long that it's become difficult to separate fact from fiction, and a lot of big shots in the OTR community apparently swear by episode logs they can't substantiate. Having said that, the "certified" archive of episodes I downloaded from archive.org appears to have taken a lot of Digital Deli's critiques to heart.
What I know for sure is that the podcast I subscribed to back in 2009 was definitely guilty of a lot of the schlocky tactics Digital Deli was talking about. Each episode had like five openings before the episode would start. The first was sort of a "stinger", with a soundbyte of the original announcer saying "X! Minus! One!" with some sound effects added in. Then the guy who made the podcast would put in his own thing announcing the episode as "another Humphrey Camardella production". I don't know who Humphrey Camardella is, but his "X Minus One" podcast was filled with plugs and promos for all of his other old time radio podcasts, his OTR website, and whatever public domain tapes and videos he's trying to sell. The point I'm trying to make is that he didn't "produce" diddly-shit, save for his vanity bumper he stuck onto the original broadcast, and no one wanted to hear that in the first place.
So after that you'd think it's time for some "X Minus One", right? Well, that's what I thought, until I listened to the unaltered opening from archive.org. Camardella's version of X-1 starts with a short piano tune, and then an announcer grimly states "There is a sixth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination." It sounds like something you'd expect from a 1950's science fiction show, so I assumed it was authentic. Well, it turns out it is from a 1950's show, except it's the "Twilight Zone". Camardella must have liked it so much that he sampled the line and put it at the beginning of every single episode of his X-1 podcast. That, or someone else did it a long time ago, and Camardella himself obtained the altered files without ever knowing the difference. I should have known something was rotten in Denmark, because once the Twilight Zone line ends, the honest-to-God X-1 intro begins, and that comes with it's own announcer reading his own ominous copy about how strange and weird the show will be.
The other weird thing about Camardella's podcasts were that he would re-post the same episode two or three times in a row, or get the titles mixed up, or various other idiosyncrasies that made you suspect that he simply didn't give a crap about what he was doing. One time I listened to an episode that turned out to be two hours long--for some reason he looped the same twenty-odd minute broadcast several times. I don't see how you screw up a thing like that, or why you would do it on purpose, but there it was. His worst offense was his constant use of the podcast to plug things. For a while, he would end episodes with this awful Muzak version of "Hard Day's Night", and promote some sort of Beatles-related thing he had going on. First of all, I hate the Beatles, second of all, they have shit-all to do with science fiction radio dramas, and third of all I'm pretty sure if Humphrey Camardella managed to summon the ghost of John Lennon to sing "Imagine", he'd constantly interrupt the performance to try to sell Beatles fans a CD collection of Lone Ranger episodes. As it was, I think all he had going on was an interview with George Harrison's sister or something like that. On occasion, he'd run in-house commercials on the podcast without even framing them around an "X Minus One" episode. I'd get the new episode and it would just be Camardella plugging his site with "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" playing in the background. The dumb thing is that his website just sells the same stuff he put on podcasts for free. Maybe I'm wrong, and his business model makes a lot more sense that I understand. Then again, I just tried to look up his site, and I can't find it, so I'm pretty sure I'm right. Also, I may have discovered that "Humphrey Camardella" is actually two men's last names, like Hanna-Barbera. I think they still sell their wares on iTunes. I found a collection of "X Minus One" with their names on it for ten bucks, but why would I pay for that when they've been giving it away via podcast for years? And why would I bother with the podcast when a less annoying version is on archive.org?
I don't understand how the OTR community works. I'm just a casual fan who was looking for audio versions of Isaac Asimov stories. My guess is that the story went something like this. When radio dramas were actually popular they were seen as disposable entertainment, and no one considered that they'd be treasured by future generations. Some of it survived, a lot of it didn't, and what did last was valued only by nostalgia buffs or collectors. The thing I've learned about fandom is that some fans aren't above distorting the truth to get attention, and I'm betting some asshole spliced together a "lost episode" of "X Minus One" because he knew he'd be a hero for "discovering" it. Digital Deli marvels that anyone would have gone to such trouble for a relatively obscure program, but I know better. It's the obscurity of X-1 that made it such a viable target. A more popular series would have been better documented or at least more familiar. Someone would notice the tampering and cry foul. The other advantage is that you could realistically disguise a "Twilight Zone" episode as "X Minus One". Even if someone recognized the resemblance, you could claim that "Twilight Zone" re-used the script years later, just as a lot of X-1 episodes were repurposed scripts from its predecessor, "Dimension X". Over time, a thick layer of bullshit formed in the OTR community, as the older, more established fans would perpetuate the mythology they had failed to prevent.
Then the internet came along, and the entire model changed. Now you didn't have to pay some "expert" for a complete collection of episodes. You could download them from someone else who already had. With greater availability came greater scrutiny, and perhaps some of these "lost episodes" began to get called out for the frauds they were. Since money didn't have to change hands anymore, the people who could settle these issues needn't have an agenda. Also, age becomes less of a factor. I can imagine some old dork in the 1970's telling a younger fan "Listen, kid, I was there when it happened. End of discussion." By now, everyone who worked on old-time radio is probably dead or dying, and in another generation or so, the fans who listened to it live will be gone too. We've reached a point where anecdotal evidence carries no weight. It's like comic books. I'm not more knowledgeable than some teenager just because I've been reading the comics longer. If the teenager read a particular issue more recently, then he's probably got a better handle on the details than I do. Again, I don't know if this is exactly how it went down in the OTR community, but I'm betting it's pretty close to the mark.
The moral, I suppose, is that the truth will out. Bullshitters can only obfuscate a matter for so long. Eventually everyone with an agenda dies and the historians suss out the facts. Information can be lost but objectivity can be gained. This is a scenario where technology improved a situation instead of creating some dystopian nightmare. Mid-20th Century radio failed to document itself properly. Late 20th Century radio fans had to stumble in the dark to make sense of it all, and 21st Century technology made it possible to shed some light on things. In a sense, the whole thing serves as sort of a rebuke to the fearmongering themes of a lot of "X Minus One" episodes. It seems like every other story was about robots taking over, or alien infiltration, or human nature leading to our own undoing. The reality is that in the far flung year of 2013, mankind just likes to carry phones in our pockets and use them to look at cat pictures.
A while back I made a point of listening to every single audio file on my computer, and I've come to the point where "X Minus One" is about all I have left to cover. On revisiting the podcast, the first thing I discovered was that it did a piss poor job re-presenting the original material. Originally, I assumed that the series wasn't complete. A lot of old "Superman" radio episodes were simply lost over time, and that's not something you hear about much, because so much of the "Superman" series is extant, and radiophiles must see the glass as half-full. "X Minus One" has a different issue, where the series more or less survived, but it's been badly preserved for reasons no one seems to understand.
I learned about all of this on a website that discusses old time radio, Digital Deli. I found the site while trying to figure out what order the episodes of "X Minus One" are supposed to go in. I'm not a collector by any stretch, but I'm trying to keep things as organized as I can, and that means I want to strive for some level of accuracy. Digital Deli's main gripe is that the old time radio community has long perpetuated a canon of "lost" episodes of "X Minus One", which are simply other sci-fi dramas with the "X Minus One" opening and closing sequences tacked on. Since "X Minus One" occasionally rebroadcast its own episodes, it became a common practice for traders and dealers to try to include multiple copies of the same episode as reruns. This has gone on for so long that it's become difficult to separate fact from fiction, and a lot of big shots in the OTR community apparently swear by episode logs they can't substantiate. Having said that, the "certified" archive of episodes I downloaded from archive.org appears to have taken a lot of Digital Deli's critiques to heart.
What I know for sure is that the podcast I subscribed to back in 2009 was definitely guilty of a lot of the schlocky tactics Digital Deli was talking about. Each episode had like five openings before the episode would start. The first was sort of a "stinger", with a soundbyte of the original announcer saying "X! Minus! One!" with some sound effects added in. Then the guy who made the podcast would put in his own thing announcing the episode as "another Humphrey Camardella production". I don't know who Humphrey Camardella is, but his "X Minus One" podcast was filled with plugs and promos for all of his other old time radio podcasts, his OTR website, and whatever public domain tapes and videos he's trying to sell. The point I'm trying to make is that he didn't "produce" diddly-shit, save for his vanity bumper he stuck onto the original broadcast, and no one wanted to hear that in the first place.
So after that you'd think it's time for some "X Minus One", right? Well, that's what I thought, until I listened to the unaltered opening from archive.org. Camardella's version of X-1 starts with a short piano tune, and then an announcer grimly states "There is a sixth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination." It sounds like something you'd expect from a 1950's science fiction show, so I assumed it was authentic. Well, it turns out it is from a 1950's show, except it's the "Twilight Zone". Camardella must have liked it so much that he sampled the line and put it at the beginning of every single episode of his X-1 podcast. That, or someone else did it a long time ago, and Camardella himself obtained the altered files without ever knowing the difference. I should have known something was rotten in Denmark, because once the Twilight Zone line ends, the honest-to-God X-1 intro begins, and that comes with it's own announcer reading his own ominous copy about how strange and weird the show will be.
The other weird thing about Camardella's podcasts were that he would re-post the same episode two or three times in a row, or get the titles mixed up, or various other idiosyncrasies that made you suspect that he simply didn't give a crap about what he was doing. One time I listened to an episode that turned out to be two hours long--for some reason he looped the same twenty-odd minute broadcast several times. I don't see how you screw up a thing like that, or why you would do it on purpose, but there it was. His worst offense was his constant use of the podcast to plug things. For a while, he would end episodes with this awful Muzak version of "Hard Day's Night", and promote some sort of Beatles-related thing he had going on. First of all, I hate the Beatles, second of all, they have shit-all to do with science fiction radio dramas, and third of all I'm pretty sure if Humphrey Camardella managed to summon the ghost of John Lennon to sing "Imagine", he'd constantly interrupt the performance to try to sell Beatles fans a CD collection of Lone Ranger episodes. As it was, I think all he had going on was an interview with George Harrison's sister or something like that. On occasion, he'd run in-house commercials on the podcast without even framing them around an "X Minus One" episode. I'd get the new episode and it would just be Camardella plugging his site with "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" playing in the background. The dumb thing is that his website just sells the same stuff he put on podcasts for free. Maybe I'm wrong, and his business model makes a lot more sense that I understand. Then again, I just tried to look up his site, and I can't find it, so I'm pretty sure I'm right. Also, I may have discovered that "Humphrey Camardella" is actually two men's last names, like Hanna-Barbera. I think they still sell their wares on iTunes. I found a collection of "X Minus One" with their names on it for ten bucks, but why would I pay for that when they've been giving it away via podcast for years? And why would I bother with the podcast when a less annoying version is on archive.org?
I don't understand how the OTR community works. I'm just a casual fan who was looking for audio versions of Isaac Asimov stories. My guess is that the story went something like this. When radio dramas were actually popular they were seen as disposable entertainment, and no one considered that they'd be treasured by future generations. Some of it survived, a lot of it didn't, and what did last was valued only by nostalgia buffs or collectors. The thing I've learned about fandom is that some fans aren't above distorting the truth to get attention, and I'm betting some asshole spliced together a "lost episode" of "X Minus One" because he knew he'd be a hero for "discovering" it. Digital Deli marvels that anyone would have gone to such trouble for a relatively obscure program, but I know better. It's the obscurity of X-1 that made it such a viable target. A more popular series would have been better documented or at least more familiar. Someone would notice the tampering and cry foul. The other advantage is that you could realistically disguise a "Twilight Zone" episode as "X Minus One". Even if someone recognized the resemblance, you could claim that "Twilight Zone" re-used the script years later, just as a lot of X-1 episodes were repurposed scripts from its predecessor, "Dimension X". Over time, a thick layer of bullshit formed in the OTR community, as the older, more established fans would perpetuate the mythology they had failed to prevent.
Then the internet came along, and the entire model changed. Now you didn't have to pay some "expert" for a complete collection of episodes. You could download them from someone else who already had. With greater availability came greater scrutiny, and perhaps some of these "lost episodes" began to get called out for the frauds they were. Since money didn't have to change hands anymore, the people who could settle these issues needn't have an agenda. Also, age becomes less of a factor. I can imagine some old dork in the 1970's telling a younger fan "Listen, kid, I was there when it happened. End of discussion." By now, everyone who worked on old-time radio is probably dead or dying, and in another generation or so, the fans who listened to it live will be gone too. We've reached a point where anecdotal evidence carries no weight. It's like comic books. I'm not more knowledgeable than some teenager just because I've been reading the comics longer. If the teenager read a particular issue more recently, then he's probably got a better handle on the details than I do. Again, I don't know if this is exactly how it went down in the OTR community, but I'm betting it's pretty close to the mark.
The moral, I suppose, is that the truth will out. Bullshitters can only obfuscate a matter for so long. Eventually everyone with an agenda dies and the historians suss out the facts. Information can be lost but objectivity can be gained. This is a scenario where technology improved a situation instead of creating some dystopian nightmare. Mid-20th Century radio failed to document itself properly. Late 20th Century radio fans had to stumble in the dark to make sense of it all, and 21st Century technology made it possible to shed some light on things. In a sense, the whole thing serves as sort of a rebuke to the fearmongering themes of a lot of "X Minus One" episodes. It seems like every other story was about robots taking over, or alien infiltration, or human nature leading to our own undoing. The reality is that in the far flung year of 2013, mankind just likes to carry phones in our pockets and use them to look at cat pictures.