Dragnet the 50's radio show
Various
Old Time Radio Programs. Detective series. 298 episodes of Dragnet.
This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.
Chapters
Reviews
Thoughtful and engaging
Trekbikefan
I remember watching old re-runs of the Dragnet 1967 TV show with my dad when I was a kid, then recently I watched a few episodes from the original 1950's TV series after finding some cheaply produced DVD versions of a few of them. Then I found these old radio programs on the internet recently. I must say that these are as good as, if not better than, either of the TV series (although the cigarette advertisements are somewhat laughable today). I enjoy listening to these while riding my bicycle or mowing the lawn, they definitely help to pass the time. The action sequences are a bit hard to follow (with canned gunfire soundbytes interspersed with the protagonists' talking to each other, leaving what is actually happening a little ambiguous until the end.) but this is forgivable, since they comprise only a minute portion of the programs. The dry documentary style of the shows is what sets them apart from most police dramas, both past and present. I actually enjoy the fact that an episode will devote a 2 minute sequence to SGT Friday waiting on hold for an operator to transfer his call, or another similar sequence to SGT Friday and Romero talking to each other from the inside of a car trunk where they are awaiting some unsuspecting criminals...this adds to the realism of the shows...a lot of police work is pretty boring stuff; as the son of a cop myself, I realize this very well. Indeed, most of us will admit, even those of us with the most exciting jobs will have a large part of our day that is fairly mundane. The Dragnet shows capture the mundane aspects of life that most dramatizations miss. I think that these shows are a throwback to a different era; although many have criticized our ancestors (and rightly, at times) for such wrongs as racism and ethnocentrism, listening to these shows has shown me the better side of 1940's and 50's U.S. society. The episodes show a keen awareness of the darker side of life (tackling such crimes as pedophilia, pornography production and distribution, serial killings, and cop shootings), yet they deal with these topics in a sensitive and tasteful way that stands in sharp contradistinction to the tasteless dramatizations that one often sees of such crimes on TV today. Criminals and lowlifes are not glorified with quasi-voyeuristic depictions and descriptions of their vile work, as is so often the case today in law enforcement television programs. I think I have learned a lot about 1950's America just by listening to these episodes, because you pick up on the little subtleties that you're not necessarily going to find in a history book (and the subtleties are just as much in what the characters do say as in what they don't say...there were certain things you just didn't talk about back then, because there were rules of polite behavior that were a bit more conservative, and possibly superior in many ways, to what we have now). The show also makes vague occasional references to the social stigmas associated with being a police officer (One can hear the resigned frustration in the voice of SGT Friday, when, at the end of one program, he simply reflects back at her a lady's accusation: "You're right; I wouldn't understand...I'm a cop).
Great radio show, scary commercials
2muchtv
In hindsight it's somewhat difficult to appreciate just how creative, risk-taking and innovative this remarkable radio show really was. The visionary recipe started by bringing together the institutional documentary style of programs like the Westinghouse "Adventures in Research" with the character dimensions and musical score of a radio soap opera. Webb then mixed in gritty elements considered inappropriate at the time, interviewing 'dance hall girls' and having characters say things like "Do you mind if I eat while we talk?" Targeting the voracious crime-drama appetite of post war America and served with a heaping helping of Roosevelt-era social engineering, Webb used mass media to disseminate cautionary tales to encourage good behavior among the masses. Rendered a cliché by the longevity borne by its overwhelming success, Dragnet is a fascinating study of rapid character development; plot pacing and exploiting the time worn adage that truth really is stranger than fiction. Oh goodness! Those Fatima (Pronounced fa-tee'-ma) cigarette commercials. Using lessons from WWII propaganda, interrogation techniques and the new science of the psychology of consumer behavior, Liggett & Myers (L&M) Tobacco Company tried to resuscitate an aging brand from the late 19th century using radio. According to Wikipedia, "Fatima was the sole sponsor of the early years of the Dragnet radio series. The creator and star of Dragnet, Jack Webb, voiced a number of on-air pitches for the brand and appeared in print advertising as well. There was also a short-lived mystery anthology series called Tales of Fatima, hosted by Basil Rathbone. The brand's old-fashioned image caused it to lose market share from the mid-1950s onward, and L&M eventually phased it out by around 1980."
Very important historical interrupted show
X-ray John
If you listen to Episode 182, April 19, 1953, The Big Rip, also listed as episode 200 overall, you will here an announcer interrupting the show at 13 minutes 41 seconds, to say that he had additional names of sick and wounded US GI's that were being released by the North Koreans. If there was ever an emotional moment that even topped this great radio show, this was it. Corporal Vernon C. Warren of St. Louis Missouri Roy M. Jones of Minneapolis, Minnesota PFC David Ludlum of Fort Wayne, Indiana PFC Roy Medina of New York City They were being released to Freedom City.
Timely topics even for today ...
LeGrande
buildings under bomb threats, teenage and adult drug use, pedophiles, sexual abuse ... it seems like things weren't all that different in the late 40s and 50s than it is today. While the machine-gun patter is a comedy cliche today (think about the Mathnet parodies on CTW's Square One TV show), it did allow the show to squeeze in a lot of dialogue and action in a short period of time. Dragnet is one of OTR's best series, and should be included in any collection.
Well done series, esp. the ones with Sgt Romero
bippy
The first few seasons of Dragnet were the best with Romero as Friday's partner. The best show I heard was the chilling 'Claude Jimmerson Child Killer', where the cops meet in the house of a neighbor of a missing child to organize a search party and it turns out it's the killer's house, as Sgt Friday somewhat embarrassed, realizes he missed some clues right under his own nose.
Sound of Footsteps
joj91
Jack Webb must have had some kind of fetish about the sound of footsteps because they are EVERYWHERE on his "Dragnet" radio show, and VERY LOUD! It's bad enough having to listen to that very badly played theme song all the time (also loud, and apparently never played the same way twice, which also seemed very unprofessional). And then those mindless commercials telling us how wonderfully safe these certain cigarettes were, I even think it was cigarettes that killed Jack Webb at a very young age (though he always sounded like an old man, even in the beginning). But I can understand, if you're going to listen to old-time radio you have to take what came with it, and back then that's what they did. I know it's been said he was all about authenticity, if it took 22 steps from one room to another he would use exactly 22 steps on his recordings. It still kind of sounds obsessive but at least I can understand his reasoning. But what I don't get is, every single episode would start out with this series of loud (and phony-sounding) footsteps walking or running somewhere. They sounded like they were trying to mimic the sound of cheap dress shoes detectives might have worn back then, though they also sound too slippery to handle many of times they were involved in chasing crooks, mostly on hard waxed surfaces, they would have fallen on their faces. So what you get on the radio is this constant loud clomping of mens shoes drowning out all the dialog and other sound effects for the show, and to be honest, as listeners, we don't really care. Yes, there should be some indication that people were walking or running when necessary, but it should not ever be the dominant sound effect on this or any other radio or television show. The stories have their own problems but are tolerable, apparently Jack Webb was a massive control freak and it shows in every minute of his shows, for good or for bad, but in the case of the footstep sounds, after a few episodes it literally becomes unbearable and ruins the show, you just can't listen any more. I don't like this old-time radio web site re-design, it's very had to use or find or download anything. Every time I download a simple zip file it says "invalid file," and it's almost impossible to download individual episodes anymore. TV.com did this a few years ago and to this day it's a fairly useless web site because it's so difficult to use or find what you're looking for. So you go to a better web site like TV by the Numbers.
Old Time Radio
Eklectic1
Very well done dramatic episodes, tight writing. I thought Jack Webb was a ham (based on watching Dragnet 1967, 1968, and so on; I was a 60s kid), and then I got curious about these episodes on the radio. They are great, and a real eye-opener! We've become so cynical, it's refreshing (and amazing) to think that just a few years before I was born, people had ideals of a much higher kind. People weren't better, mind you; they just had much higher expectations of how to behave. We were much more socially connected, and in the fragmented society of Los Angeles in the early 50s, you can see the fraying edges of what was to come. Listen, learn, and enjoy. A true cold lemonade to the thirsty, time-traveling mind.
Dragnet Radio
Dave UK
Great to have so many episodes, to listen to every day, instead of only once a week, as was the case when the show was first recorded. I never heard them in the UK when they first came out, but remember the TV shows. I like to listen to one episode every night before going to sleep and don't know what I'm going to do when they run out. Maybe start from the beginning again! The shows are well produced and convincing, especially because they use real events.