In the old days, when TV was young, and kids still delivered newspapers on bicycles, most people got their media from the radio. Many radio programs told exciting stories of heroic cowboys, hard-boiled detectives, and, yes, superheroes pulled straight from the pages of comics. Nearly every family had a radio, and just about all of them were used for more than just the news.

This golden age of radio represented the first time in American and world history when information truly made just for fun could be heard easily by large groups of people.

Many old-time radio shows were adapted into comics, and as time went on, they were made into movies and TV shows. While not many of these survived the roughly 80 years from 1940 into this age of cinematic universes and franchised storytelling, many laid the groundwork for modern-day superheroes and have special places in cinema history. It wouldn’t be impossible to bring them back, either.

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Many have had film remakes as recently as 2013. Several characters follow similar narrative threads as well and could conceivably exist in the same universe.

The Popularity of Neo-Noir and Mystery Could Help Launch Films

     Lionsgate 

Radio shows weren’t unlike modern movie franchises. They regularly revolved around a singular protagonist and often took their ideas from comic books or popular works of fiction. Superman and Batman had their own radio shows, but there were also programs that adapted Les Misérables, Sherlock Holmes, and The Count of Monte Cristo. It was, after all, the most popular form of media throughout most of the 20th Century.

But more popular than these recognizable names were many of the original programs at the time, like Dick Tracy, The Green Hornet, and The Shadow. And many of those programs had something in common with the modern era: the rise of the noir genre.

The rise in noir storytelling in the golden age of radio coincided with the end of WWII. Many protagonists in noir-style tales were retired soldiers who had returned to the United States to become cops or private detectives. These veterans spent their time skulking around dark alleyways, involved in violent altercations that the average citizen would steer away from. The world found these tales intriguing enough to make them popular across a wide swath of programming, from the aforementioned to shows like Johnny Dollar, This is Your FBI, and Counterspy.

Recently, for whatever reason – perhaps the return of our own soldiers from foreign soil – the noir genre is making a comeback in the form of neo-noir. Recent mystery stories like Knives Out, Where the Crawdads Sing, and True Detective (which had its own radio show) have all altered the way we look at the noir genre. One might argue that in the past decade, we’ve seen a huge change in how mysteries are told while retaining the same elements that make them recognizably film noir.

Many of those old tales, retold appropriately, could easily find a home among this group of modern neo-noir films, and many of them are long-running franchises that would beg for sequels. If done correctly, these old-time radio shows could be a gold mine of modern film classics.

How to Turn Radio into a Movie

     20th Century-Fox

Many of these radio programs already have a storied history in modern cinema. The Green Hornet was a popular TV show in the 1960s and served as a cornerstone of Bruce Lee’s career. The show featured a masked detective and his martial artist partner in their fight against the criminal underworld. Under the guise of his alter ego, the Green Hornet owned a publishing company in Los Angeles.

In this day and age, it would be a simple thing to take that newspaper company and turn it into a large social media corporation, making the Green Hornet’s fight one against disinformation and criminal media manipulation. When Seth Rogen remade the series as a film in 2011, it did poorly because it was stuck somewhere between modernization and nostalgia and made the unfortunate decision of trying to sell Rogen’s stoner comedy to an audience with no time for it.

There are plenty of examples of poorly executed remakes from the radio era. But in this day and age, when IPs are being revived all the time, the average studio writer seems to have a better metric for what it takes to make a reboot.

Recent shows have done it Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and The Lord of the Rings. It’s become so common to reboot an old IP that many people find it cliché. But what you get with these old radio shows is a primed fictional universe that at least two generations of viewers aren’t even aware of.

The worlds inside of programs like The Shadow and The Lone Ranger could be widely expanded. And films made today could pay tribute to the immersive performances of people like Orson Welles during War of the Worlds. The golden age of radio is a beautiful epoch in American fiction that deserves a look in this age of excessive remakes.