The Shadow: Death and the Easter Bonnet – ComicWeb Old Time Radio Podcast

ComicWeb Old Time Radio
Program: The Shadow
Episode: Death and the Easter Bonnet
Original Airdate: 03/28/1948

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Episode Summary:
The lovely Margo Lane needs an Easter Bonnet that matches her own loveliness. She knows exactly what she wants, a beige hat, with a white bird’s wing and a pair of deep red cherries. )Let’s just be glad this is a radio program, that hat sounds awful.) She finds this exact bonnet at a small haberdashery. The cost is $75. Lamont does his chauvinist, patronizing best to dissuade her. Margot insists,
But what she didn’t know is that as a bonus the hat comes with the nation’s atomic secrets. The design of the hat was a code that Lamont and Margo stumbled onto. It turns out that if you accidentally sell atomic codes to the wrong party, well, lets just say that the haberdasher will be . . . closed. Lamont and Margo track down the real spies. Margot is kidnapped once or twice (honestly I lose track of the number of times she gets captured.) A chase ensues on a train, and they save the country. All in time for Easter.

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Program Summary:
"Who knows...what evil...lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..."
Lamont Cranston, a man of means, an amateur criminologist, and a master of mental control, would protect the innocent, cloud the minds of the guilty, and fight for justice. Learning hypnotic practices from the Orient, Lamont could hide himself in plain view from the guilty, allowing him to overhear their plans, or create illusions to destroy them. He can look in the hearts of the guilty, and allow their guilty conscious to grow and consume them. If you hear the laugh of the shadow, your doom is near. The Shadow could go where the police could not, or would not go. The bumbling police would often take credit for the Shadow's work, but would still try to capture him. The stories would pit the Shadow against crime bosses, murderers, werewolves, ghosts, and the unimaginable. Cranston's partner and love interest is Margo Lane, played by Agnes Morehead, among others. She is the only person to know the Shadow's secret identity.

Technically the show was on the air from 1930 to 1954. The character of the Shadow was originally just the host of the Detective Story radio program (voiced by Frank Readick, Jr.), but the narrator proved so popular that they created a whole show for him. Indeed Street and Smith created The Shadow Magazine because of the narrator's popularity. Walter B. Gibson was the pulp writer who fully developed and transformed the character from a host of radio program into a pop culture icon. The Shadow has since been portrayed in movies, television, comic books, (radio programs), and video games.
The role of the Shadow was played by many actors (the show lasted over 20 years), the most famous of all was Orson Welles. Welles played the character from 1937 to 1938. When the radio program aired in 1937 it featured the adventures of the character of the Shadow, not the Shadow as the host. This run, 1937-1954 are the iconic stories of the Shadow. Orson left the Shadow when he made it big with The War of the Worlds, among other great projects. Welles did not actually speak the signature line, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Instead, Readick, Jr. did, using a water glass next to his mouth for the echo effect. The famous catch phrase was accompanied by the strains of an excerpt from Opus 31 of the Camille Saint-Saëns classical composition, Le Rouet d'Omphale.