Adventure Ahead 44/08/05 (ep01) Two Years Before the Mast

Adventure Ahead! was a brilliant Summer feature for 1944. Comprised of fourteen stirring adventure novels and stories from among America's greatest fiction writers, its somewhat more masculine orientation may have kept some of the young females of the era listening to Frank Sinatra that summer instead of Adventure Ahead!.

But it was indeed billed as 'famous stories for young people', not 'famous stories for young men'. And yet, how any rational programmer at NBC-Red could have construed the slant of this project to young people is anyone's guess. There is no discernible love interest, there are female protagonists, nor any female authorities or mentors for that matter. Of course, this was the 1940s after all, still in the throes of the fight for equality on many fronts. It's just quite obvious that NBC-Red programmers were simply completely out of touch with their era.

That having been said, each of these literary choices did have a uniting theme--defending Freedom, domestically and abroad. To be fair to NBC's programmers, there were several jingoistic, over the top, almost fascist 'public service programs' geared toward every facet of domestic population at one time or another during the World War II years and the Cold War Years that followed. So overlooking the slant for the time being, let's focus in on the selected stories and their themes.

Virtually all of these stories were male-oriented, 'coming of age' tales of one type or another. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast was one of the books virtually any father would expect his son to have read by the time he was eleven. A stirring tale of independent thinking, the courage to act on it, and the satisfaction of correctly asserting one's convictions is always a satisfying read for boy and man alike. For young ladies, even during the 1940s, not so much. All it would have conjured up was more of the status quo the Rosie the Riveters and their daughters across America were fighting against, sweating to defeat, and earning the right to overturn. Sadly this same theme can be set forth in the other twelve selections as well.

The better encodes of this remarkable Summer series are wonderful reminders of the type of inspirational fare of the 1940s during a world at War. Not preachy, not particularly jingoistic, but clearly selected and adapted to act as both a comfort and inspiration to the thousands of young people anxiously awaiting resolution of the War and the return of their brothers, fathers and uncles. In this respect alone, this gem of a short series is a definite keeper from The Golden Age of Radio.