Just Imagine (or how your great-grandpartents were entertained during the Great Depression)

This movie has elluded me for more than a decade. The Flickering Window has posted the first 16 minutes of Just Imagine, the first Science Fiction blockbuster, and just about the only Science Fiction Musical.

Here is the first of 2 clips:





The second one is here: Just Imagine clip 2

Remaster Of X-1 The Old Die Rich, written by H. L. Gold

So for the first story I pick in more than a year its going to be something timely . . . and about time. Time, starvation, depression (the financial kind), yup perfect note to restart on. Written by H. L. Gold, The Old Die Rich follows the investigations of an actor and sometime P.I. who tries to discover why elderly people are turning up dead, starved to death, when they have bank books showing tens-of-thousands of dollars in their accounts.

He discovers a woman with an interesting scheme, and gets sent back in time to 1931 (note the bank clerk who says on May 15 of 1931, "this temporary recession is bound to abate, sound banking policies will see us through."). One side effect of this form of time travel leaves one with a hunger for more.

While not exactly a god of the golden age, H. L. Gold founded Galaxy Magazine, still regarded as one of the best fiction magazines of its or any time. Galaxy Magazine took Science Fiction in the direction sociology, phsychology and philosophy, paving the way for the fantasical and mind-bending writing of later decades.

Listen or download below:

WJSV Complete Broadcast Day Remaster

I'll be getting back to Science Fiction soon, but I took on this project, and interested or not, here it is. All 19 hours, slightly high on the reverb, but the original files didn't offer much to work with. They actually reported a 0kbps bit rate. Never seen that before. How is that done?

The radio station got a bit of a boost when I broadcast it for three days straight last week, about a half dozen listeners spent five hours or more with it. So I'm not the only one who finds this fascinating. Less than a hundred years ago, this broadcast feels like Science Fiction, another planet, aliens. I was born smack in the middle of then and now. Does anyone who might have heard this original broadcast feel like they're living on another planet?

Download is located at the top of the blog.

Remaster of X-Minus 1 The Map Makers based on a story by Frederick Pohl

The Map Makers is story with ideas that seem much more like they belong in the last twenty years than the from the 1950's. Human brains modified to act as computers, and something experienced very much like the 1990's version of future cyberspace. Interesting how one finds that some ideas are much older than expected.

Download is located at the top of the blog

Remaster X-Minus 1 of Issac Asimov's Nightfall

I've never seen this story done justice. Maybe it is something that will always be a better read than movie, teleplay or radio-play. I remember a god-awful movie of Nightfall I saw sometime in the eighties. This is a decent, if melodramatic, adaptation.

Download is located at the top of the blog.

Remaster of X-Minus 1 Episodes, written by Philip K Dick

While tens of thousands mp3's of OTR radio shows exist out there on the internet, more than half of them are unlistenable. X-Minus 1 has some of the poorer audio quality of the any of the series that circulate. Unfortunate, as it is one of the best. Sci-Fi legends had written many of the scripts, and the series stands up today as engaging and entertaining. So I've taken two of my favorites, both by my favorite Science Fiction writer, Philip K Dick, and remastered them for the clearest possible audio. My goal is to provide shows where each actor's voice can be heard at a level volume, and I think I've done this, though because of unevenness in the original recording, some voices come across as tinny.

For those who don't know Philip Dick, he is likely the third largest Science Fiction movie franchise behind Star Wars and Star Trek. Nicholas Cage's new movie, Next, is based on his story "The Golden Man". Last year A Scanner Darkly was released. Blade Runner and Total Recall were based on his novels. Through the nineties his name on the screen brought loud applause and cheers. His stories still bring in movie goers, but now his name tends to be buried in the credits and brings only scattered applause. Seems the public mind is too full of other celebrities to include mere writers anymore. I'll bet you a nail from my coffin that one hundred years from now the designer who does the background color shading in the third remake of the Harry Potter series will have bigger credits than JK Rowling.

All my remastered files will be kept at the top of the blog until such time that I make so many I'll have to move them to another page.

Dragnet

This is the city . . .


Link: http://www.archive.org/details/dragnet