Adventure Ahead 44/09/23 (ep08) The Talking Drums
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 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.
-
6:55
Dr. Nick Zyrowski
22 hours ago#1 Worst Sign of High Cortisol Your Doctor Never Warned You About
22.2K7 -
5:19:53
tacetmort3m
22 hours ago🔴 LIVE - THIS GAME LOOKS AWESOME! - A QUIET PLACE THE ROAD AHEAD
32.6K4 -
4:12:12
Price of Reason
13 hours agoMainstream Media PRAISES Kamala Harris After Fox News Interview! Is Dragon Age The Veilguard DOOMED?
123K20 -
LIVE
Rumham - Shmah Hatred
11 hours ago[VRumbler]💚Resident Evil 2!!💚
541 watching -
4:29:12
Fresh and Fit
13 hours agoEscaped From Twitch Jail Stream!
102K56 -
LIVE
Right Side Broadcasting Network
3 days agoLIVE REPLAY: Trump Addresses the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in NYC - 10/17/24
4,511 watching -
57:54
Nerdrotic
13 hours ago $31.25 earnedAncient Apocalypse: The Americas REVIEW Part 1 | Forbidden Frontier #078
112K19 -
49:06
Man in America
18 hours agoReplicon Vaxx, FEMA Civil War & Mask Mandates—the Elites Are DESPERATE w/ Todd Callender
86.2K93 -
1:16:12
Flyover Conservatives
1 day agoDebating with the Left: How to Change Minds Without Losing Your Cool - Denise Gitsham | FOC Show
95.1K5 -
1:33:40
Precision Rifle Network
19 hours agoGuns & Grub S3E3 - More Weird Crap
71.2K8