WYLLIS COOPER - THE FIRST TO TURN "LIGHTS OUT! " IN 1934.
LIGHTS...OUT!
When thinking of programs from Network Radio’s Golden Age that were intended to frighten their audiences, it’s natural to consider Suspense, (CBS, 1940-1962), Inner Sanctum, (Blue-ABC & CBS, 1941-1952), The Mysterious Traveler, (Mutual, 1943-1952) or The Witch’s Tale, (Mutual, 1934-1938). Predating them all was what was arguably the goriest of the bunch, Lights Out! which built its audience and its reputation during the post-midnight hours from Chicago.
Late night radio audiences have always been a breed apart - clannish and fiercely loyal to their programs in the very late night and early morning hours while most of the listening world sleeps. NBC discovered this at midnight on Monday, January 1, 1934 when it premiered Lights Out! on its WENR/Chicago. The 15-minute weekly trip into unexplored territories of horror, (expanded by listener demand to a half-hour on Wednesdays four months later), was actually a one-man band production orchestrated by 34 year old writer-producer-director Wyllis Cooper. Cooper conducted his ghoulish plots accompanied by gory sound effects to the delight of a growing number of listeners who expressed their appreciation with sacks of fan mail that rivaled leading prime time programs. (1)
After 15 months of broadcasts limited to Chicago, NBC promoted Lights Out! to its full (Red) network on April 18, 1935, at 12:30 a.m. It remained in that late Wednesday-early Thursday timeslot for the next four and a half years, providing initial network exposure to many of the Chicago radio acting company, who included Hal Peary, Willard Waterman, Mercedes McCambridge, Betty Winkler and Raymond Edward Johnson, among others. But the show’s creator, Wyllis Cooper, left the show for a Hollywood screenwriting career after a year into its NBC run on June 3, 1936. (2)
The show remained at its post-midnight timeslot of 12:30 a.m. on June 10, 1936, when young NBC staff writer Arch Oboler, 27, took over its writing and direction. Any question that Oboler couldn’t pick up where Cooper left off was erased with his first drama, Burial Services. The plot, concerning a paralyzed young woman being buried alive, (with all its attendant sounds), resulted in 50,000 letters, (mostly indignant complaints), sent to NBC.
The subsequent three year run of Lights Out! is considered by many critics to be the series’ prime period when NBC gave the sustaining late night show a remarkably high production budget. The funds allowed the program to fly Boris Karloff into Chicago to appear in a series of five encore broadcasts of popular Lights Out! stories including Oboler’s Cat Wife from April 6, 1938. We won’t spoil the stories, but along these same lines, a shrewish woman was also the target of Oboler’s It Happened! starring Mercedes McCambridge from May 11, 1938.
What would be the program’s longest network run, 274 episodes over four years on NBC, ended on August 16, 1939. Lights Out! disappeared from the air until October 6, 1942, when Sterling Drug’s Ironized Yeast brought Oboler and the series back to CBS on Tuesday nights at the unusually early hour of 8:00 p.m. Samples from this 52 week run include Bon Voyage from November 10, 1942, Meteor Man of December 22, 1942, and He Dug It Up from February 9, 1943.
Casts in this Hollywood-based series were limited, often no more than three actors per programs, but Oboler’s scripts and liberal use of the skilled CBS sound crew gave them strong dramatic weight. Oboler wrote reference to himself and the program’s use of gory sound effects into the May 11, 1943 drama, Murder In The Script Department. Then he pulled out all the stops and wrote himself, (going mad), into the script of the final broadcast in the CBS series on September 28, 1943, The Author & The Thing. Be advised that both plots have twist endings and involve the dark of late night.
But the eight o’clock hour of broadcast, (7:00 p.m. in the Central Time Zone), often came at sunset or twilight and worked against the title and spirit of Lights Out! despite its warning chant, “It’s…later…than…you….think…”, heard at the beginning and end of each episode. The program’s only rated season, 1942-43, indicated that the early evening listeners weren’t yet ready for stories of ghosts, monsters and gore at that hour. Family audiences gave vocalist Ginny Simms’ variety show on NBC a 14.2 Hooperating against Lights Out! which registered a 10.0. (Both beat the 5.0 scored by Blue’s combined quarter hours from newscaster Earl Godwin and Lum & Abner.)
Lights Out! disappeared from the air again except for short summer runs on NBC in 1945 and 1946, then ABC in 1947. These broadcasts are distinctive because they contained past and new material from Wyllis Cooper, creator of the series in 1934. Samples from all three runs are posted, represented by Man In The Middle from August 25,1945, The Coffin In Studio B from July 13, 1946 and July 16, 1947’s Death Robbery, featuring the return of Boris Karloff to the freshly produced ABC summer series sponsored by Eversharp shaving and writing instruments.
The lights were finally turned off on the series after a total of 350 original and repeat episodes on August 6, 1947. But like the characters in so many Lights Out! stories, Arch Oboler brought a number of his stories back to life almost 25 years later in transcribed syndication as The Devil & Mr. O. This 1970’s revival of his scripts from the 1942-43 season is represented here in The Hole, from December 3, 1971, Three Thousand Dollars, heard again on January 21, 1972, and Cemetery, from February 25, 1972 which fittingly enough, concludes in a mausoleum.
And so, Lights Out! met its end and was laid to rest. If you ever wish to visit the remains, a full compliment of episodes can be found at www.otrrlibrary.org
(1) John Dunning relates in his Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio that frying bacon, snapping carrots in two and halving heads of cabbage with a cleaver were among the unique sound effects used to simulate different acts of torture in Lights Out! scripts. Unfortunately, none of Wyllis Cooper’s early productions are available in general circulation to enjoy today.
(2) Wyllis Cooper’s screenwriting credits were stuck in the horror and crime genres: The Son of Frankenstein, The Phantom Creeps, two films in the Mr. Moto detective series and three episodes of the NBC-TV series, Lights Out! which ran from 1946 to 1952. He returned to radio with the sustaining series Quiet Please, which ran on Mutual for the 1947-48 season and ABC for the 1948-49 season.
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
When thinking of programs from Network Radio’s Golden Age that were intended to frighten their audiences, it’s natural to consider Suspense, (CBS, 1940-1962), Inner Sanctum, (Blue-ABC & CBS, 1941-1952), The Mysterious Traveler, (Mutual, 1943-1952) or The Witch’s Tale, (Mutual, 1934-1938). Predating them all was what was arguably the goriest of the bunch, Lights Out! which built its audience and its reputation during the post-midnight hours from Chicago.
Late night radio audiences have always been a breed apart - clannish and fiercely loyal to their programs in the very late night and early morning hours while most of the listening world sleeps. NBC discovered this at midnight on Monday, January 1, 1934 when it premiered Lights Out! on its WENR/Chicago. The 15-minute weekly trip into unexplored territories of horror, (expanded by listener demand to a half-hour on Wednesdays four months later), was actually a one-man band production orchestrated by 34 year old writer-producer-director Wyllis Cooper. Cooper conducted his ghoulish plots accompanied by gory sound effects to the delight of a growing number of listeners who expressed their appreciation with sacks of fan mail that rivaled leading prime time programs. (1)
After 15 months of broadcasts limited to Chicago, NBC promoted Lights Out! to its full (Red) network on April 18, 1935, at 12:30 a.m. It remained in that late Wednesday-early Thursday timeslot for the next four and a half years, providing initial network exposure to many of the Chicago radio acting company, who included Hal Peary, Willard Waterman, Mercedes McCambridge, Betty Winkler and Raymond Edward Johnson, among others. But the show’s creator, Wyllis Cooper, left the show for a Hollywood screenwriting career after a year into its NBC run on June 3, 1936. (2)
The show remained at its post-midnight timeslot of 12:30 a.m. on June 10, 1936, when young NBC staff writer Arch Oboler, 27, took over its writing and direction. Any question that Oboler couldn’t pick up where Cooper left off was erased with his first drama, Burial Services. The plot, concerning a paralyzed young woman being buried alive, (with all its attendant sounds), resulted in 50,000 letters, (mostly indignant complaints), sent to NBC.
The subsequent three year run of Lights Out! is considered by many critics to be the series’ prime period when NBC gave the sustaining late night show a remarkably high production budget. The funds allowed the program to fly Boris Karloff into Chicago to appear in a series of five encore broadcasts of popular Lights Out! stories including Oboler’s Cat Wife from April 6, 1938. We won’t spoil the stories, but along these same lines, a shrewish woman was also the target of Oboler’s It Happened! starring Mercedes McCambridge from May 11, 1938.
What would be the program’s longest network run, 274 episodes over four years on NBC, ended on August 16, 1939. Lights Out! disappeared from the air until October 6, 1942, when Sterling Drug’s Ironized Yeast brought Oboler and the series back to CBS on Tuesday nights at the unusually early hour of 8:00 p.m. Samples from this 52 week run include Bon Voyage from November 10, 1942, Meteor Man of December 22, 1942, and He Dug It Up from February 9, 1943.
Casts in this Hollywood-based series were limited, often no more than three actors per programs, but Oboler’s scripts and liberal use of the skilled CBS sound crew gave them strong dramatic weight. Oboler wrote reference to himself and the program’s use of gory sound effects into the May 11, 1943 drama, Murder In The Script Department. Then he pulled out all the stops and wrote himself, (going mad), into the script of the final broadcast in the CBS series on September 28, 1943, The Author & The Thing. Be advised that both plots have twist endings and involve the dark of late night.
But the eight o’clock hour of broadcast, (7:00 p.m. in the Central Time Zone), often came at sunset or twilight and worked against the title and spirit of Lights Out! despite its warning chant, “It’s…later…than…you….think…”, heard at the beginning and end of each episode. The program’s only rated season, 1942-43, indicated that the early evening listeners weren’t yet ready for stories of ghosts, monsters and gore at that hour. Family audiences gave vocalist Ginny Simms’ variety show on NBC a 14.2 Hooperating against Lights Out! which registered a 10.0. (Both beat the 5.0 scored by Blue’s combined quarter hours from newscaster Earl Godwin and Lum & Abner.)
Lights Out! disappeared from the air again except for short summer runs on NBC in 1945 and 1946, then ABC in 1947. These broadcasts are distinctive because they contained past and new material from Wyllis Cooper, creator of the series in 1934. Samples from all three runs are posted, represented by Man In The Middle from August 25,1945, The Coffin In Studio B from July 13, 1946 and July 16, 1947’s Death Robbery, featuring the return of Boris Karloff to the freshly produced ABC summer series sponsored by Eversharp shaving and writing instruments.
The lights were finally turned off on the series after a total of 350 original and repeat episodes on August 6, 1947. But like the characters in so many Lights Out! stories, Arch Oboler brought a number of his stories back to life almost 25 years later in transcribed syndication as The Devil & Mr. O. This 1970’s revival of his scripts from the 1942-43 season is represented here in The Hole, from December 3, 1971, Three Thousand Dollars, heard again on January 21, 1972, and Cemetery, from February 25, 1972 which fittingly enough, concludes in a mausoleum.
And so, Lights Out! met its end and was laid to rest. If you ever wish to visit the remains, a full compliment of episodes can be found at www.otrrlibrary.org
(1) John Dunning relates in his Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio that frying bacon, snapping carrots in two and halving heads of cabbage with a cleaver were among the unique sound effects used to simulate different acts of torture in Lights Out! scripts. Unfortunately, none of Wyllis Cooper’s early productions are available in general circulation to enjoy today.
(2) Wyllis Cooper’s screenwriting credits were stuck in the horror and crime genres: The Son of Frankenstein, The Phantom Creeps, two films in the Mr. Moto detective series and three episodes of the NBC-TV series, Lights Out! which ran from 1946 to 1952. He returned to radio with the sustaining series Quiet Please, which ran on Mutual for the 1947-48 season and ABC for the 1948-49 season.
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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