Radio Drama · Old Time Radio Researchers · Adventure · Children's

Adventure Ahead

Networks
NBC (as its archives name them)
Heard
1944
Episodes
12

ADVENTURE AHEAD!

More about it

Adventure Ahead! was a brilliant Summer feature for 1944. Comprised of fourteen stirring adventure novels and stories from among America's greatest fiction writers, its somewhat more masculine orientation may have kept some of the young females of the era listening to Frank Sinatra that summer instead of Adventure Ahead!. But it was indeed billed as 'famous stories for young people', not 'famous stories for young men'. And yet, how any rational programmer at NBC-Red could have construed the slant of this project to young people is anyone's guess. There's no discernible love interest, there are female protagonists, nor any female authorities or mentors for that matter. Of course this was the 1940s after all, still in the throes of the fight for equality on many fronts. It's just quite obvious that NBC-Red programmers were simply completely out of touch with their era. That having been said, each of these literary choices did have a uniting theme--defending Freedom, domestically and abroad. To be fair to NBC's programmers, there were several jingoistic, over the top, almost fascist 'public service programs' geared toward every facet of domestic population at one time or another during the World War II years and the Cold War Years that followed. So overlooking the slant for the time being, let's focus in on the selected stories and their themes. Virtually all of these stories were male-oriented, 'coming of age' tales of one type or another. Dana's Two Years…

Episodes, in broadcast order

  1. Two Years Before the Mast

    · No. 1 · 29 min

  2. The Story of a Bad Boy

    · No. 3 · 29 min

  3. Inside the FBI

    · No. 4 · 28 min

  4. Robinson Crusoe

    · No. 5 · 29 min

  5. A Tooth for Paul Revere

    · No. 6 · 28 min

  6. Toby Tyler, or 10 Weeks with a Circus

    · No. 7 · 29 min

  7. Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with a Circus

    · No. 7 · 29 min

  8. The Talking Drums

    · No. 8 · 29 min

  9. The Biscuit Eater

    · No. 9 · 28 min

  10. Hill Lawyer

    · No. 11 · 28 min

  11. One of the 28th

    · No. 12 · 28 min

  12. Greenmantle

    · No. 13 · 29 min

Where it comes from 2

The archive items its episodes are played from, best first, with each one’s rights as its archive states them. An episode two sets both hold is played from the first.

  1. Adventure Ahead - Single Episodes

    Old Time Radio Researchers · Old Time Radio Researchers Group · 11 episodes here · archive.org

    the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it.

  2. Adventure Ahead 11 Eps

    Old Time Radio · 1 episode here · archive.org

    Uploader’s mark: Public Domain Mark 1.0: Marked Public Domain Mark 1.0 by its uploader at the Internet Archive; the record gives no basis for it.

A set by the Old Time Radio Researchers Group (otrr.org), at the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio collection.

More Adventure

Radio drama, old-time radio and historic broadcasts from the Internet Archive (its Old Time Radio collection with the Old Time Radio Researchers' sets, WWII Era Audio Recordings, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Radio Haiti Archive, German radio plays and listeners' uploads), Wikimedia Commons (with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's broadcasts) and the Library of Congress. Every episode plays from its archive, which this site does not copy; rights are as each archive states them. Nothing here is called public domain on this site's say-so. In the United States, sound recordings first fixed before 15 February 1972 have federal protection under the Music Modernization Act of 2018, for most until 2067 at the latest, so most American radio of the 1930s to the 1950s is not in the public domain there. Each set shows the licence, mark or statement its archive gives, and says whose it is. Horror, crime, war and westerns are for teenage and adult profiles, racist caricature for adults only, and children’s profiles hear what was made for children. More about these archives.