April 6 – Radio Debuts

Posted on April 6, 2016

Remember when there was no internet, and there was no TV...only radio?

Yeah, neither do I! That was a looooong time ago!

But from around 1920 to around 1950, radio was one of the most important ways that people got information and entertainment. For a while there, radio was king.

During these decades, there were a lot of shows that people looked forward to and tuned into. Fictional radio shows told stories through dialogue and narration and music and sound effects.

On this date in 1931, Little Orphan Annie debuted on the NBC Blue radio network, and on this date in 1945, This Is Your FBIdebuted on ABC radio. (Notice that NBC and ABC have both become big-time television networks in the U.S. Did you know that they started as radio broadcasting networks?)

Little Orphan Annie is probably familiar to you from the many movies called simply Annie. The adventures of the bold, curly-haired Annie and her dog Sandy started as a comic strip in 1924. The radio show was 15 minutes long. It was one of the first comic strips adapted to radio – and it was on the air for 12 years! Millions of listeners tuned in, and some of those listeners were little kids. Apparently there wasn't much in the way of radio programming for kids back then.

This Is Your FBI was a crime drama taken from the perspective of Special Agent Jim Taylor. I was surprised to read that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover allowed the producer-director to look at the actual FBI files and to base storylines on real cases!

Check out the shows here and here. And remember – these were cutting-edge technology at the time!

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