Podblast! Thrilling Adventure Hour

Some days, you just have to tune out everything and listen to something that makes you happy.

For that, they invented the podcast, the carry anywhere, listen anytime  radio program.  And there are podcasts about everything.  You want a podcast with Jillian Michaels from The Biggest Loser telling you how to get your life in order?  She has one.  You want a podcast from some record collectors discussing rare vinyl they've come upon?  There's a bunch of those.  You want a podcast about die-hard fans of a particular show who go by names of characters you might find in said show?

Well, they exist, too, and may God have mercy on your soul for listening to them.

In Podblast, I discuss podcasts I carry around on my little mp3 player, and discuss just what it is I like about them.


Now, I love classic radio and classic television.  That time period when what's now considered "old" media technologies were new, there were limits to how far you could broadcast, and every program including cartoons was sponsored by cigarettes.

Yeah, you didn't just imagine that.

One thing I really love were the classic adventure radio programs, where characters like Tarzan and Dick Tracy would get into thrilling adventures.  Also, keep in mind that this is in a day where you couldn't record anything.  If you didn't hear that episode, it was gone forever.

Why do I talk about this?  Because of the Thrilling Adventure Hour, a recent addition to my podcast list.  It's everything I love about old serials with a modern sense of humor and a rather ridiculous level of talent.

Recorded live in front of an audience in Hollywood, the Thrilling Adventure Hour takes regular serial ideas that could only happen during the early days of radio, raises the cheesiness level by a multitude of ten, and then turns it around to pay homage to an art form the entire crew obviously loves.  Whether it's the superheroic battles of Captain Laserbeam or the cross-time adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock, there exists a level of camp which, to use a phrase, "is not ironic at all."

And then there's the talent.  You have Nathan Fillion showing up to be Jefferson Reid, Ace American, a super-soldier who enjoys only one thing more than punching Nazis, and that's America (and Patriot brand cigarettes).  Paul F. Thompkins and Paget Brewster regularly show up in Beyond Belief, which I can only imagine was pitched as "What if the married couple from The Thin Man lived in a world full of the undead?"  And for the record, Paget Brewster has an unsettling way of making alcoholism sound incredibly attractive.

The episodes aren't very long (I suspect they record a whole bunch at once in one show), and you don't need to have listened to earlier ones if you want to jump in now (but trust me, the old ones are just as great to listen to as anything new).  And where else are you going to find a marshal on Mars, a millionaire who gives it all up to ride the rails searching for the Hobo Princess, or film noir-style murder mysteries set in classic Hollywood (don't mess with Angela Lansbury, or Harpo Marx will mess you up)?

This series is easily in my top five because you can feel the love the actors have for the genre.  Every quirk and habit from classic days of radio is recreated, both through flubbed lines, cheesy advertising, and tinny-sounding theme songs (when they aren't sung live).