Phil Harris and Dennis Day rode the popularity of Jack Benny on their own programs on NBC. In fact, for the first two years of its run, Harris' show immediately followed Benny's.
Broadcast History: 1932 - 1958
From the early 1930's to the late 1950's this popular radio show format broadcast over fifteen years of entertainment to the nation with dramatized stories adapted from "The American Weekly Magazine."
The ensemble cast entertained us with a variety of stories that included comedy, melodrama, adventure, strange-goings-on and of course crime.
Broadcasts typically were an adaptation of a story which would appear in the Magazine the following week and so the radio shows were in some way a kind of prolonged advert for the publication.
An interesting aside is that Paul W. Keyes, one of the writers, began his career here with this show, but then later in life worked as a White House consultant. What I find interesting in that is that quite a few of these shows deal with aspects of officialdom or include portions that are closely associated with how government and officials should deal with the people. In the very first episode showcased here When The Comet Strikes you'll hear exactly what I mean. When fiction writers go into politics 'life certainly can begin to imitate art'
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