Technology has allowed us to advance in many ways, including in storytelling. With broadcast and recording equipment we can bring stories to a wider audience. Silent movies allowed us to take the world of theater and bring it to everybody with the same performers, then they invented a way to record audio and create the “talkies”, the way we watch movies today, although processing color would come later. Until then you had someone near an organ playing music that went along with the film, although I don’t know for sure if that was true everywhere.
Meanwhile another medium was being born, the radio. Sitting in a studio you could broadcast your show to everyone within range of the transmitter, later enhanced by stations that could capture the signal from farther distance or be given recordings and playing them within their own circle, serving as a relay to get broadcasts around the country or even around the world with a strong enough transmitter. You didn’t come here for the science or history of broadcast and I’m just trying to fill in the intro so that’s probably not an exact description. The point is this was used to bring music and news to the masses but it also brought the precursor to the TV show, the radio show.
Sometimes done in front of an audience and sometimes just in a recording or broadcast booth, you had comedies, soap operas (in fact General Hospital started as a radio drama and you can find those old shows on the Internet Archive), science fiction, horror, crime dramas, and shows for kids, adults, and families. It’s where the Shadow, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the Green Hornet got their debut. Most of Superman’s iconography came from comics but the old audio dramas deserve a lot of credit. This form of storytelling fell with the invention of television but never really went away. It just evolved into things like book and records, audiobooks, and on occasion original stories. As the way we share recordings changed, eventually the audio drama made a comeback. While not nearly as widespread as it used to be, with most radio stations only playing music, hosting talk radio, or carrying sports, it has still managed to remain an important method of storytelling, because like every other format audio dramas (and audio comedies, but I’m just going to stick with the one term) has it’s advantages for both the tellers and the tellees.
