The Shadow remake

[Henry88]

[The Shadow]

I don't know who wrote the blurb but they are incorrect about the Shadow's origins. You'd think the the writer could at least take minute to check Wikipedia (not that Wikipedia is perfect, but it's better than nothing).

Publisher Street & Smith had a pulp magazine called Detective Story Magazine that ran several stories in an issue. As part of promoting that magazine they created the radio show Detective Story Hour which adapted stories from the magazine for the episodes. For DSH a bodiless announcer was introduced called "The Shadow" who merely opened and closed the program and did not take part in the episodes.

The show proved popular with listeners and even though Detective Story Magazine was referred to during the program there were many people that would go to newstands asking for "that Shadow magazine" as the bodiless announcer proved to be memorable with listeners. This is just like what happened with Knight Rider in the 80s with people going to GM dealerships and asking for the Knight Rider car instead of the Firebird Trans-Am.

Word of customers asking for "the Shadow Magazine" got back to Street & Smith about this trend and circulation manager Henry William Ralston saw a great opportunity. Ralston then commisioned to Walter Gibson to create the character, all Street & Smith had was the name at this point, and write stories about the Shadow. Originally the magazine, The Shadow Magazine, was going to be a quarterly and the first few issues followed that schedule but they proved so immensely popular with readers that the fourth issue went as a monthly and just several issues after that the magazine shifted to a bi-weekly schedule (2 issues a month). The Shadow Magazine was first published in April of 1931.

So the character of The Shadow was created for a pulp magazine, the only thing that existed before was the name and the vague idea of a mysterious character.

The long running show that also featured Margot Lane didn't appear until 1937, six years after the pulp magazine first launched. But this series was not the first radio show based on the Shadow --there was an earlier series that ran around 1933-34 that was based directly on the pulp magazine. This earlier series not only featured the Shadow but his agents as well and appears to have been done in serial format.

Unfortunately no recordings of the first Shadow radio series are known to have survived. S&S ran a series based on Doc Savage about the same time and while there are no recordings for this series either the scripts did survive -- they were published a couple years ago as Doc Savage: The Lost Radio Scripts Of Lester Dent.


Unfortunately I don't think there has been much news on either the new movie adaptation of the Shadow nor the new Doc Savage movie for a year or so now. Too bad really -- perhaps with Captain America being successfully made as a period movie work will begin a new on the two iconic pulp heroes' movies. A script "review" of the new Shadow movie hit the internet a year or so ago, it was sounding depressingly like Frank Miller's movie of The Spirit; fortunately at least nothing seems to have come of that script.

[Henry88]

The Shadow returns!
http://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/a ... 850056.php

well not a movie but still very cool.