Radio showmanship (Sept 1940-May 1941)

(£Jowboys Make Good Salesmen The Adventures of a Wild West Weekly Hero Are Put on Record and Backed with a Six-Shooter's Merchandising Aim It seems obvious now that a character iii a comic strip or a hero of magazine stories, whose name and adventures already have a tremendous circulation and popularity in its original form, can be converted into a radio star of the first magnitude. Today, of course, some of the nation's top radio shows are based on characters and situations that first saw the light of day in the pulp magazine or on the comic pages. Little Orphan Annie went directly from the comic strip to radio, was given a voice and distinct human personality and today is, and has been for the past years, one of radio's better kid shows. The producers of Superman were quick to see the possibilities of a radio program based upon the popular comic strip. Such programs have the advantage of a loyal group of followers who are already familiar with the character. Superfluous is the usual preliminary build-up period necessary when presenting a brand new radio program. The second advantage lies in the usually huge circulations of the magazines and newspapers from which the radio program originated. It's only natural that Junior, who has been following Superman in the local paper, should become instantly a loyal Superman radio fan. A pioneer in the field of the prc-sold radio program based upon magazine characters was the old and established Street & Smith Publishing Company, whose long list of magazines boast a combined circulation up in the multi million (lass. Street & Smith's entry into the radio field, was nor based upon a child hero. Instead the) angled for an adult andienre with a radio pro n revolving around a character ted m one oi their magazines tailed The Shadow, That was in 1931. The Shadow proved to be a popular program, perhaps because the principal character was portrayed by the magical voice of a youngster named Orson Welles, but mostly, and more probably, because The Shadow was an already accepted black and white hero before he was given a voice on the radio. The magazine had a circulation of 400,000 when the program began. It was while The Shadow was rising to a Crossley rating of 17.7 that William De Grouchy, broad, burly, affable, 200-pound Street & Smith promotion man, decided to convert the program into a transcribed series, air it live over eastern stations, then offer the program to local merchants in exclusive, noncompetitive markets. Its success as a transcribed show in the hands of local merchants led him into his next venture. Street & Smith standby and oldest of allfiction magazines in existence is Wild West Weekly. The 40-year-old publication is read by more than 350,000 people weekly. It has the largest circulation of any all-fiction weekly western magazine. Ace character in Wild West Weekly is a lanky, taciturn, Robinhoodish cowboy named Sonny Tabor. With 350,000 people awaiting breathlessly his next week's adventures, Sonny Tabor seemed to promotion man De Grouchy an ideal character for radio. But on the other hand he was not content in bringing to the air just another action-crammed show, even though it be a western, a phase of story telling as yet not fully exploited by radio. He began his search tor an angle that would make the series different, applicable to tinselling of a variety of products, lifting as main advertising budgets as possible. So Sonny Tabor's adventures were packed into a !;;■< minute show! Yet each episode was so arranged that in addition to its five mintttt usage, /,, o of the programs could be put 140 RADIO SHOWMANSHIP