Escape: Finger of Doom & The Adaptive Ultimate | Old Time Radio Double Bill

EARLY DROP: Escape Double Bill: Finger of Doom & The Adaptive Ultimate

You're getting this one early, because the Tale Teller is packing a bag. I'm heading over east for an event this weekend, so rather than leave you waiting, I've lit the candle a few days ahead of schedule.

This week I've been in the restoration workshop with two episodes from Escape, CBS's great high-adventure anthology. Both have been repaired and cleaned up, crackle tamed and voices brought forward, so they sound as close to that 1949 broadcast as I can get them.

What's in today's episode:

A man vanishes without a trace, and a dying woman becomes something that cannot die.

Finger of Doom: Cornell Woolrich, master of noir dread, delivers one of his disappearance stories. Harry Bartell stars and narrates in this lean, haunting adaptation.

The Adaptive Ultimate: Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 science-fiction tale. A young woman with nothing left to lose is given an experimental serum. It saves her life, and then it keeps going.

These two aired just a week apart in March 1949, and they make a lovely, unsettling pair: one about a person disappearing, one about a person who becomes far too present.

Thank you to my Oud Night Tea Titan, White Tea Warlords and Earl Grey Enforcers. You're the reason these old voices get a second life!!!

I'll be back from over east with stories to tell next weekend however and back to the normal cadence!

Until then, keep the candle lit.

— The Tale Teller