Episodes
Friday Oct 02, 2009
American Family Robinson - Pgm 39
Friday Oct 02, 2009
Friday Oct 02, 2009
A listener wrote to me last week and mentioned that her husband came into the room as she was listening to last week's episode of "American Family Robinson". "When did Ayn Rand get a syndicated talk show?" he asked. That pretty much sums up this odd mix of serial drama and comedy from the National Industrial Council (aka the National Association of Manufacturers) that includes at least one diatribe against FDR's New Deal policies in each episode. Perhaps the show influenced Ayn Rand's writing style.
I found out a couple more interesting tidbits about the show from the Museum of Broadcast Communication's "Encyclopedia of Radio". The idea for the show came from Harry A. Bullis, the vice president of General Mills and chairman of the NAM's public relations committee. Scripts for the show were originally submitted to both NBC and CBS, with the National Industrial Council hoping that one of the networks would carry it as a sustaining feature. Not only did the networks turn them down, but NBC prohibited their owned and operated stations from carrying the show after seeing more of the scripts. The Encyclopedia notes:"Reviewing the series’ first three episodes, NBC script editor L.H.Titterton hardly knew what to make of the Robinsons, or the direction the story might take. An outline for the rest of the series and a script of the last episode received three days later confirmed Titterton’s suspicion. After meeting with Selvage and Douglas Silver, the scripts’ author, Titterton reported that the American Family Robinson proposed “to take on a definitely anti-Rooseveltian tendency.” “You would probably not find in the entire series any specific sentence that could be censored,” Titterton wrote to his network superiors, “but the definite intention and implication of each episode is to conduct certain propaganda against the New Deal and all its work.”Probably the last thing the networks wanted was to antagonize the Roosevelt administration and, by extension, the Federal Communications Commission. Program 39 in the series is more typical of the series, focusing on Luke, editor of the local paper, and his dealings with crazy relative Windy Bill. It seems that Windy Bill is has a plot going to get some property that belongs to Miss Timmons, so she and Luke work out a scheme to thwart his plans. Somehow, this quickly turns into a discussion of social welfare in European countries. Don't you have conversations like this every day? My thanks to the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group for their donation of these discs to my collection. By the way - I recently obtained the First Generation Archive's "Little Orphan Annie" set that includes shows dating from the mid-1930s. The "American Family Robinson"'s Luke sounds like the same actor that appeared on "Little Orphan Annie". Anyone else think so?
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