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Lights Out: Cat Wife and Chicken Heart; Vic and Sade: Melvin Landed a Job

Presented by Beowulf Alley Theatre Company at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company

March 1, 2011

Lights Out, an early example of a network series devoted mostly to horror and the supernatural, predated Suspense and Inner Sanctum. Versions of Lights Out aired on different networks, at various times, from January 1934 to the summer of 1947 and the series eventually made the transition to television. Lights Out, was first broadcast on WENR in January, 1934, on Wednesday evenings, and continued until 1947. It was run on television from 1949-1952. Written by horror specialist, Arch Obeler, Cat Wife and Chicken Heart are two of the venerable series' classics. Cat Wife is a tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, horror show, meant to amuse as well as scare the audience. Boris Karloff flew all the way to Chicago just to perform this show because it was a take-off of the movies he had acted in over many years. In Chicken Heart, Oboler's unique choice of monster was inspired by a Chicago Tribune article announcing that scientists had succeeded in keeping a chicken heart alive for a considerable period of time after its having been removed from the chicken. Part of the episode's notoriety stems from a classic stand-up routine by comedian Bill Cosby, an account of his staying up late as a child to listen to scary radio shows against his parents' wishes and being terrified by the chicken heart. "It's-later-than-you-think!"

Vic and Sade was an American radio program, created and written by Paul Rhymer. It was regularly broadcast on radio from 1932 to 1944, then intermittently until 1946, and was briefly adapted to television in 1949 and again in 1957. During its 14-year run on radio, Vic and Sade became one of the most popular series of its kind, earning critical and popular success: according to Time, Vic and Sade had 7,000,000 devoted listeners in 1943. For the majority of its span on the air, Vic and Sade was heard in 15-minute episodes without a continuing story line. The central characters, known as "radio's home folks," were accountant Victor Rodney Gook, his wife Sade and their adopted son Rush. The three lived on Virginia Avenue in "the small house halfway up in the next block." The program was presented with a low-key ease and naturalness, and Rhymer's humorous dialogue was delivered with a subtleness that made even the most outrageous events seem commonplace and normal. "Well, sir, it's late afternoon as we approach the small house half way up in the next block."