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The Fantastic Four Radio Show
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The Fantastic Four Radio Show was a series that ran on syndicated radio for 13 weeks in 1975. There's an extremely interesting interview with the Producer, Peter B Lewis, at Kleefeld On Comics where he discusses how it came to be made, cast, and broadcast, and how it pretty much ruined him financially. The short version is that he originally hoped to make a "Silver Surfer" radio show but thought the FF would be a better place to start, got together some actors (including a young Bill Murray), put the whole thing together himself, and then never really got the funding he needed to make it work. The full interview is well worth a read!
The shows were originally broadcast daily in five minute sections, with each week's episodes making up an adaptation of a single comic, taken from the very earliest issues of the series. You can listen to all of the episodes for free over on Archive.Org, and they are also well worth a listen as they're a lot of fun, although I'm not sure how much actual sense they would make if you haven't read the comics already - I was reminded quite powerfully how much comics relies on visuals, especially when you have characters who stretch or turn invisible!
The adaptations themselves are pretty interesting, as they follow the original comics fairly closely, but not literally. A lot of the dialogue, for instance, is altered to help carry the story more clearly, or to share the lines out more equally, with the characters often describing what's happening to each other. The sound production helps it along (and is generally pretty great) and, like the Power Records audio version, Stan Lee is on hand as narrator, but even for someone who's read these stories several times already, in several different formats, there are moments when what's going on becomes unclear.
The episodes that are relevant to us on this blog are adaptations of Fantastic Four #5, Fantastic Four #16, Fantastic Four #17 and Fantastic Four #19 which all feature Doctor Doom (if only slightly for issue 19). The character is played in all of these episodes by Jerry Terheyden, who gives him the menacing air of an old b-movie villain, with a posh, superior voice and a lot of cackling. It works really well, even though sometimes the ring modulator effect on his voice makes him sound a little bit like a Dalek.
The other performances are pretty good too, with Bill Murray clearly enjoying himself and Cynthia Adler basically doing celebrity impersonations for the minor characters - for instance, Alicia Masters is performed as a semi-comatose Marilyn Monroe and Princess Pearla, bizarrely, talks exactly like Mae West!
As I say, the episodes are, for the most part, pretty faithful adaptations of the comics, except for the adaptation of Fantastic Four #5, which has the ending of Fantastic Four #10 pasted in instead of its original ending - the team-up between Namor and Doom is skipped (possibly due to rights issues?), and so instead of jumping out of a window to escape his burning castle at the end of the story, Doom is shrunk, ready to reappear in The Micro World. Another change is in Fantastic Four #17 where Doom still blackmails the president, but this time it's Richard Nixon (impersonated by a member of the cast) rather than John Kennedy.
The most curious thing, to me, about this series is the fact that they went right back to the start of the comics for their adaptations - just as most other media versions so far have done - rather than dip into other aspects of the (at this point) 14 years of publication. This tendency means that there are plenty of adaptations of some fairly clunky stories (especially "The Micro World Of Doctor Doom") while later stories in Lee & Kirby's run, which some people (me) would argue are much more worthy of adaptation, don't get touched.
I won't be going into the individual episodes in any further depth because, as I say, they are for the most part adaptations of existing comics, but they're definitely worth a listen. Next time we're back to the comics themselves, as we find out whether Namor realises how wrong he was to dump Doom!
link to information about this issue
posted 6/6/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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