The Shadow was long believed to have debuted on radio as a
program in its own right
September 26,
1937, on the
Mutual Broadcasting System. But the character actually premiered in
September 1931,
on CBS, as part
of the hour-long The Blue Coal Radio Revue (named for the show's sponsor),
featuring Frank Readick -- the "Shadow" announcer of Detective Stories -- as
The Shadow, and playing Sundays at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The
stories also appeared on Thursday nights for a month, when Love Story Drama
(another Street and Smith creation) took the Thursday night slot -- but also
featured occasional portrayals of The Shadow.
Blue Coal had a long relationship with the Shadow, moving
the radio series to
NBC in October
1932 with Readick playing the character on Wednesday nights now. Two
years later, NBC ran the stories on Mondays and Wednesdays, both at 6:30
p.m., with LaCurto taking occasional turns as the title character. Three
years later came the beginning of the half-hour drama radio buffs have
remembered so well, with the then-unknown
Orson Welles as The Shadow, the show moving to Mutual, and the famous
catch phrase now in full play accompanied by the strains of an excerpt from
Opus 31 of the
Camille Saint-Saëns classical composition, "Le Rouet d'Omphale".
Welles did not speak that signature line -- Readick did,
using a water glass next to his mouth for the echo effect. But Welles did
make a credible Shadow, two years before his notoriety as the mastermind of
Mercury Theatre on the Air's production of
War of the Worlds.
After Welles left the role for a career in the cinema, The
Shadow was portrayed by such actors as
Bill Johnstone,
Bret Morrison (the longest tenure, with ten years in two separate runs),
John
Archer, and
Steve Courtleigh as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow. The radio show also
introduced female characters into the Shadow's realm, most notably Margot
Lane (played by
Agnes Moorehead among others) as Cranston's love interest and
crime-solving partner (the character was eventually integrated into Gibson's
pulp novels). Lane was described as Cranston's "friend and companion" in
later episodes, although the exact nature of their relationship was left
unclear. In the 1994 movie, Margot's name was spelled "Margo." However,
early scripts of the radio show clearly show that the character's name was
spelled "Margot".
Once The Shadow joined Mutual as a half-hour series, it
did not leave Sunday evenings radio until
December 26,
1954, outlasting the magazine that gave birth to it: The Shadow Magazine
ended with the summer
1949 issue,
although Gibson wrote three new "official" stories between
1963 and
1980. Gibson
started off a short series of updated Shadow novels for Belmont with Return
of the Shadow under his own name, followed by The Shadow Strikes, Beware
Shadow, Cry Shadow, The Shadow's Revenge, Mark of The Shadow, Shadow Go Mad,
Night of The Shadow, and Destination: Moon. The Shadow had mental powers in
these books, to cloud men's minds so he effectively became invisible, to
conquer pain, etc.
The Shadow
