Complete radio series??

[p71towny]

Ok, I've been piecing together what I can find of radio shows on the internet over the years. However, I would gladly purchase complete series of radio shows if I could find them. You can purchase old T.V. shows but I've yet to find radio shows in a box set. They might have the most popular ones, but no complete sets. So are they out there, or am I doomed to cram my flash drive??

 

[Wally_Hood]

Google Radio Spirits. They have an extensive inventory. Complete runs, I don't know.

 

[p71towny]

Yeah, I've been there along with a whole bunch of other sites. It would be nice to have whole series preserved for future generations.

 

[Widebrim]

Yes, there are sites which offer complete sets. I've got sets of The Whistler, Richard Diamond, and Dragnet on MP3. I don't recall which site I got them from:eusa_doh:, but...do a search under OTR.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Complete Series" is a phrase that gets applied very loosely among old-time-radio people. There are actually very few Golden Era radio series that survive in their entirety -- most of those that do are either obscure short-run syndicated programs or short-run series from the 1950s. There are many programs for which a large number of episodes do survive -- but even those series have missing episodes. In most cases the best you can hope for is a large chunk of a run existing rather than the entire series.

Another consideration is that many long-running series ran for a very long time, in much longer seasons than modern shows. A series like Suspense, which has about 900 surviving episodes, would require around 450 discs for a full release in CD audio format. (The retailers who release copyright-authorized sets of OTR don't do MP3 format due to quality considerations.)