Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 108
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Popular Culture Review
American popular culture, were symbols of truth, justice, honor, and other bour
geois virtues. Products of a middle class, commercial, and competitive society,
radio heroes embodied the essence of those morals and values upon which the
society was founded” (42).
During the two decades of radio’s golden age, scores of radio heroes cel
ebrated their exploits over the air, but one emerged as the archetype of them all:
The Shadow. The Shadow was one of the earliest radio heroes and his career
spanned virtually the entire golden age of radio. The character successfully made
the transition to other genres—such as the pulp magazine, the paperback novel,
the hardcover book, the comic book, television, and film—^but he was a creation of
radio. When some of the classic radio shows were revived in the 1960s, The
Shadow was one of the most popular. Consequently, most Americans, if they
know of no other radio hero, are familiar with The Shadow.
The Shadow in his earliest form was an all-knowing narrator for the radio
program Detective Story Hour. This series premiered on CBS on July 31, 1930,
and featured dramatizations from Detective Story, a pulp magazine published by
Street and Smith. The Shadow character, though just a narrator, caught the public’s
fancy. Newsstand vendors began to report that people were asking for “that Shadow
magazine” when referring to Detective Story. Less than six months eiftQT Detective
Story took to the airwaves. Street and Smith executive Henry W. “Bill” Ralston
decided to feature The Shadow in his own magazine to establish a copyright on the
character (Nanovic xxii-xxiii).
In December 1930, Walter B. Gibson, a magician and writer who had
worked for Houdini and Thurston, was hired to develop The Shadow character and
write four novel-length stories, to be published on a quarterly basis in the new
magazine. Street and Smith executives were astonished when the first issue nearly
sold out in the first month it was on the stands. The second issue was even more
popular and the magazine quickly went from quarterly to twice-a-month publica
tion (Gibson, “My Years” xii).
In today’s culture we are accustomed to popular entertainment that spans
several mass media: many motion pictures are accompanied by animated series,
toys, novels, video games, and the like. The Shadow, though, is one of the first
examples of a popular hero who became a mass-media phenomenon. The incred
ible response to The Shadow demonstrates the hunger of Depression-era Ameri
cans for archetypal heroes. The Shadow magazine continued publication until
1949, amassing a total of 325 novels, with Gibson writing 282 of them (Eisgruber
59-63). Gary Hoppenstand observed: “What had begun as a simple copyright
practice quickly blossomed into a media event because it supplied something he
roic that the reading public needed, the extent of this need being reflected in the
speed with which the public bought the issues” (142).