I'd like some examples of these conventions that owed a great deal to radio. That's an awfully broad and vague characterization to make without any supporting arguments.
Sure. I'm an Old Time Radio fan and have listened to a lot of OTR thrillers, detective, and SF. In fact, if you've never heard
Dimension X and
X-Minus-One, your next link needs to be
here, at the Internet Archive.
From 1950-1951, then 1955-1958,
Dimension X and
X-Minus-One dramatized the best classic pulp SF of the day. To quote the intro from X-Minus-One:
Announcer: "Count down for blast-off. X minus five... four... three... two... X minus one... Fire!
(Music pounds, building up like a rocket blast, while chorus raises its collective voice with "aaaaaaaaaahhhhh!")
"From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future, adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with Street & Smith, publishers of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine present:
"X-- X-- x-- x-- MINUS -- MINUS --Minus-- minus-- ONE-- ONE-- One- one"
Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Piper, all the greats of the day and dozens of lesser-remembered authors were dramatized every week straight from the pages of
Astounding Stories. The dramatizations were professional, high-production-value productions that were highly faithful to the original work.
One in particular bears note: "
The Green Hills Of Earth" by Heinlein. The story itself is of course classic ... but I guarantee you've not experienced it until you've
actually heard Rhysling sing.
Furthermore, the medium itself was perfect for the story. It's a tale about a blind folk singer bumming his way around the Solar System. The fact that the listener can no more see the subject of his songs than Rhysling heightens the dramatic impact.
(In fact, my only qualm with the story is that it was episode 9 rather than episode 1 of the series. It was tailor made for radio. I wonder if Heinlein had that in mind when he wrote it?)
Go. Now. Listen.
In any case, this segues well into the subject of how this impacted TOS. Let me give a couple of quick, concrete examples:
The battle between Kirk, Decker, and the Planet-Killer in "The Doomsday Machine" is a good one. While there is some decent visual, the battle was written for radio. Kirk and Decker are constantly explaining what's going on. I paraphrase, but lines like these occur throughout:
"Scotty, let's see if we can draw that thing away from the
Enterprise, can you get me phasers?"
"Kirk drew that thing away from us, now let's see if we can get it away from him." Then, immediately after succeeding: "Did it! Hard to starboard, put some distance between us and that thing!"
"Our phasers have no effect. They're just bouncing off of it!"
Now, part of this was SFX budget limitations and part of it was the way the writers had been used to working in radio.
In radio, action sequences were accomplished one of two ways: by narration or sound effect.
The really effective fights and action sequences that actually set the listener on the edge of their seat only used sound effects. The sounds were so specific, timed, and executed, that the listener knew exactly what was happening in a fistfight -- just from the sound effects.
Of narration, there were two kinds: omniscient and first-person.
The most dramatic first-person narrator in radio history was
Jack Webb in
Dragnet.
Hell, Jack Webb invented the police procedural drama, pretty much single-handedly.
The show didn't rely just on Jack Webb's voiceovers. Sometimes Friday and his partner would get into a scuffle and the fight would become a combination of effective sound effects and dialogue.
You'd hear as suspect's footsteps suddenly take off, then the cops footsteps a beat later. Friday might shout, "He's rabbiting!"
Then the sound of the footsteps would change, and from a distanct Friday would shout, "He's headed up the stairs, into that abandoned warehouse, Ben!" "I see it!"
Seconds later: "Watch it -- he's pushing that oil barrel -- !" followed by a dramatic thumpety-thump and a metallic crash. "You ok, Ben?" "Just nipped my arm, let's go!"
Back at "The Doomsday Machine" battle and applying this:
In a visual medium, the viewer doesn't need the battle explained to them the way a radio listener does. They can see it instead.
Since the viewer can see the
Enterprise approaching the planet-killer, they don't need to be told about it.
Since the viewer can see the phasers hitting the Planet-Killer's hull and having no effect, they don't need to be told they're having no effect.
Since the viewer can see the Planet-Killer turning toward the
Constellation, they don't need to be told about the change in course. Since they can see the
Enterprise shooting at it and see it turn back, they don't need to be told that it happened.
It's just a mindset thing that you can really see in some of the best Old Time Radio. The writers were still thinking in terms of what the audience
heard rather than what they
saw.
It's just a mindset thing, and it's present in a lot of early TV. This isn't a criticism, by the way, just a note about the evolution of drama in the 20th Century. Stage turned to film, which was basically just aiming a static camera at a stage and inserting title cards where acting alone was insufficient to explain the action. Eventually, the conventions of the new medium of film were developed.
At about the same time, there was a branching into radio, which at first was more about written literature. An omniscient narrator would tell a story involving characters voiced by other actors. This evolved into some of the conventions of the medium that I mentioned.
A lot of radio writers went into television. They took their radio writing skills with them. It took a good ten years to discover how the conventions of TV worked best. With shows like
Mission: Impossible and
I, Spy, the writers were pretty successful in letting the pictures speak for themselves. By the 1970s, the conventions that applied solely to radio had been ejected.
(Except for police procedural drama, which maintain radio conventions to this day:
("Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent."
("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."
(
Law and Order like frak. It's
Dragnet!)
I'm actually rather excited to see how online media will develop. As I say, at the moment, YouTube looks a lot like TV -- but there's no reason this need be the case.
If I were to predict, I would guess that the new medium that is YouTube will begin to take advantage of things only the Internet can offer: hyper-linking (which you already see with YouTube's annotation, but it will be more compex), insertion of content to be viewed at the viewer's discretion ... basically dramatic conventions that embrace the medium's key difference between it and any previous: complete interactivity.
The genre of online media will thrive in directions that exploit the interactivity of the medium. Stories may no longer be precisely linear. The viewer will be heavily involved in the direction of the content.
I don't know what it will look like any more than Edison could have predicted Yaoi. But I know it will be very, very interesting.
In any case, you still need to go listen to "
The Green Hills Of Earth." If you've never heard it, your ears will love you for the rest of your life.
Dakota Smith
