Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 113

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Metaphor and The Shadow

lation of the original radio show. In 1994, The Shadow, over 60 years after his
creation, continued to battle the “weed of crime” in a forty-million-dollar feature
film starring Alec Baldwin. Walter Gibson’s title for the first pulp novel remains
an appropriate description for this heroic archetype: The Living Shadow.
Conclusion
Thomas Carlyle, in his 1840 lectures on heroes, defined a hero as “a pat
tern for others to imitate, in himself a justification of life” (qtd. in Bentley 42).
Certainly this was true of The Shadow, and it remains true for heroes in today’s
culture. Whether the heroic myth is shared by a group of medieval troubadours
around a campfire, a Depression-era family around a radio set, or a contemporary
audience in an air-conditioned movie theater, the function of the archetypal hero
remains the same: to communicate and reinforce a culture’s basic values. Mircea
Eliade, noting the prevalence of superheroes in contemporary popular culture, re
minds us that “the mythic imagination can hardly be said to have disappeared; it is
still very much with us, having only adapted its workings to the material now at
hand” (40).
The mythic heroes of radio’s golden age made fine use of the materials at
hand in their day: the emerging power of broadcasting, heroic archetypal meta
phors, the cultural demand for heroes, and the imagination of the listeners. Radio
drama demanded the involvement of its audience, and, in this sense, was much
more a reflection of the American consciousness than any other medium. Radio
historian Jim Harmon summed it up well when he wrote of golden-age radio:
It was a world of faceless things and faceless people, but a master
showman could bring it to life. The greatest impresario of radio
was not Cecil B. DeMille or Orson Welles. The one who really
ushered you into the world of strange and commonplace delight
that was radio, the guide through the mind’s inner rooms, was al
ways yourself (Heroes 85)
Regent University

Ronald R. Roach

Notes
1

These categories are drawn from the work of Northrop Frye (16-20), Alexander El iot
(1-2), and Sarah Russell Hankins (268-70).
O f the roughly 1000 golden-age radio shows listed in The Big Broadcast, by Frank
Buxton and Bill Owen, at least 175 (17.5%) are some form of heroic drama. Daniel J.
Czitrom showed that in 1931, all forms of drama constituted 15% o f total network
radio programming; by 1940 drama made up 23% (84).