“Adventure! Who among us has not felt the thrill of that word?” begins the introduction to the Strange Adventures radio program from the beginning of the Golden Age of Radio. In the throes of the Great Depression, Strange Adventures offered relief from the troubles of every day life by whisking listeners to faraway places where excitement beckoned and danger lurked around every corner. A barbershop quartet encouraged listeners to join them in the World Adventurers Club, where there was always some globetrotting explorer who had just returned from some thrilling adventure that he was willing to share. The World Adventurers Club was a gentlemen’s club of the type popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that represented the European colonial view of the world. Its members — and narrators — were from the same mold as heroes of Victorian and pulp fiction of the era. The tales told therein were dedicated to “that great god, Adventure”.

 

With such exotic titles as “Land of Doomed Souls”, “The Ghost Light”, “The Forest of Forgotten Men” and “The House That Screamed”, Strange Adventures told tales that included a ghost story about an Egyptian tomb with moving mummies and a perpetual motion machine; supernatural shoes made from Emu feathers; an expedition to find a hidden tribe of wild Amazon women that is saved by a white mouse named Nickodemus; and a woman adventurer tells of her capture in the Gobi Desert where she is forced to participate in a mad scientist’s plan to cross breed men with giant apes to produce the missing link!

 

Produced in 1932 by TRANSCO, Strange Adventures included actors Jay Novello, Gale Gordon, Frank Nelson, Junius Matthews, Jonathan Hole and Hanley Stafford. This ten-hour set includes all thirty-nine fifteen-minute episodes.

 

So, gentle listener, gather around the fire, settle back in your comfortable chair, take your brandy snifter in hand, close your eyes and join the members of the World Adventurer’s Club “in the pledge of fellowship” (as the quartet sang) as one of its own begins to tell his own harrowing tale of far-off danger.