Adventure Ahead Episode 13 Greenmantle
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ADVENTURE AHEAD!
Adventure Ahead Episode 13 Greenmantle
Adventure Ahead! was a brilliant Summer feature for 1944. Comprised of fourteen stirring adventure novels and stories from among America’s greatest fiction writers, its somewhat more masculine orientation may have kept some of the young females of the era listening to Frank Sinatra that summer instead of Adventure Ahead!.
But it was indeed billed as ‘famous stories for young people’, not ‘famous stories for young men’. And yet, how any rational programmer at NBC-Red could have construed the slant of this project to young people is anyone’s guess. There’s no discernible love interest, there are female protagonists, nor any female authorities or mentors for that matter. Of course this was the 1940s after all, still in the throes of the fight for equality on many fronts. It’s just quite obvious that NBC-Red programmers were simply completely out of touch with their era.
That having been said, each of these literary choices did have a uniting theme–defending Freedom, domestically and abroad. To be fair to NBC’s programmers, there were several jingoistic, over the top, almost fascist ‘public service programs’ geared toward every facet of domestic population at one time or another during the World War II years and the Cold War Years that followed. So overlooking the slant for the time being, let’s focus in on the selected stories and their themes.
Virtually all of these stories were male-oriented, ‘coming of age’ tales of one type or another. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast was one of the books virtually any father would expect his son to have read by the time he was eleven. A stirring tale of independent thinking, the courage to act on it, and the satisfaction of correctly asserting one’s convictions is always a satisfying read for boy and man alike. For young ladies, even during the 1940s, not so much. All it would have conjured up was more of the status quo the Rosie the Riveters and their daughters across America were fighting against, sweating to defeat, and earning the right to overturn. Sadly this same theme can be set forth in the other twelve selections as well.
Suspending belief a bit further, The Arrival of The Lily Bean, ostensibly the one female oriented theme in the entire run, stems from Walter Dumaux Edmond’s compilation of short stories that appeared over several installments in The Saturday Evening Post and Atlantic Monthly entitled simply, Young Ames. The fact that this is one of the two exemplars of the series not in circulation doesn’t help. But from what I can recall from the Saturday Evening Post installment of the same name, The Arrival of the Lily Bean was yet another male coming of age story as well–but in the romantic arena.
T.B. Aldrich’s The Story of A Bad Boy–as adapted–was a greatly abridged version of the original novel, which basically traced the entire life of the author at various critical ‘coming of age’ junctures throughout his life. What survives in the Adventure Ahead! installment is a series of vignettes of the ‘bad behaviour’ of the protagonist. The ‘bad behaviours’ are a series inspired pranks which, in the final analysis were instigated with the best of intentions. It’s just that most of them backfired in one way or the other.
Inside The FBI is a stirring tale of the inner workings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Clearly fascinating fodder for the imagination of any young male. Reportedly blessed by J.Edgar Hoover himself, it doesn’t take much thought to imagine how the piece is slanted. With most of the emphasis on FBI scientific procedure and analysis, there’s plenty here to fire the imagination of any young man.
Robinson Crusoe is a classic of American literature. Even abridged, it’s easy to understand how naturally this selection sprang to mind when developing the project. Daniel Defoe’s classic exists here in skeleton form only, but it’s a good listen to this day. And if it prompts you to reach for your own copy from the library shelf, so much the better. It’s an amazing read–and re-read.
A Tooth for Paul Revere is one of Stephen Vincent Benét’s most enduring short stories. It’s been adapted and readapted in hundreds of productions over Radio, Animation, Television, and Film. If you’ve never read it yourself, then don’t miss the opportunity to listen to the Adventure Ahead! rendition. It captures all of the key elements of Benét’s original story.
Toby Tyler . . . is pure young male adventure fantasy, both delightfully spun and poignantly punctuated. One of the more realistically and sensitively portrayed productions, we found it one of the more enjoyable of the existing eleven exemplars.
Waldo Fleming’s Talking Drums is pure male juvenile escapism very much in the Jungle Jim or Tarzan mold, but with a bit more cereb
