Lights Out!

Lights Out! was one of the most famous series of all time. Even those not interested in OTR have generally heard of Lights Out! Created by Wyllis Cooper (of Quiet, Please) in 1934, and passed on to Arch Oboler in 1936, the series went through several incarnations and reincarnations throughout its long life, lasting until 1947. The exact number of episodes is a nebulous issue, since Oboler frequently renamed episodes several times over for rebroadcast, expanded the length of some of Cooper's shows, and freely moved shows back and forth between Lights Out! and his other projects with re-edited intros, making it very difficult to identify episode origins with any degree of certainty. To make matters worse, many shows have been lost over the years. Therefore, this is by no means a definitive listing (if such a thing can actually exist), only a partial one based purely on personal bias as to what properly fits the parameters of this site and what does not. Episodes vary in length from 15 min to 60 min. In 1970, twenty-five of the Lights Out! episodes (along with one episode from Arch Oboler's Plays) were syndicated, given new names, and then rebroadcast as episodes of The Devil and Mr O. These episodes generally have better sound quality than the older versions and are sometimes mislabeled as being from the original series. 

In 1962, Arch Oboler released a 36-min LP album called Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror. Some of the tracks from this LP are circulating as 'partial' Lights Out! episodes, most notably, "The Dark" and "Chicken Heart".

After 15 months of broadcasts limited to Chicago, NBC promoted Lights Out! to its full (Red) network on April 18, 1935, at 12:30 a.m.  It remained in that late Wednesday-early Thursday timeslot for the next four and a half years, providing initial network exposure to many of the Chicago radio acting company, who included Hal Peary, Willard Waterman, Mercedes McCambridge, Betty Winkler and Raymond Edward Johnson, among others.  But the show’s creator, Wyllis Cooper, left the show for a Hollywood screenwriting career after a year into its NBC run on June 3, 1936.

The show remained at its post-midnight timeslot of 12:30 a.m. on June 10, 1936, when young NBC staff writer Arch Oboler, 27, took over its writing and direction.  Any question that Oboler couldn’t pick up where Cooper left off was erased with his first drama, Burial Services.  The plot, concerning a paralyzed young woman being buried alive, (with all its attendant sounds), resulted in 50,000 letters, (mostly indignant complaints), sent to NBC. 

The subsequent three year run of Lights Out! is considered by many critics to be the series’ prime period when NBC gave the sustaining late night show a remarkably high production budget.  The funds allowed the program to fly Boris Karloff into Chicago to appear in a series of five encore broadcasts of popular Lights Out! stories including Oboler’s Cat Wife from April 6, 1938.  We won’t spoil the stories, but along these same lines, a shrewish woman was also the target of Oboler’s It Happened! starring Mercedes McCambridge from May 11, 1938. 

What would be the program’s longest network run, 274 episodes over four years on NBC, ended on August 16, 1939.  Lights Out! disappeared from the air until October 6, 1942, when Sterling Drug’s Ironized Yeast brought Oboler and the series back to CBS on Tuesday nights at the unusually early hour of 8:00 p.m.  Samples from this 52 week run include Bon Voyage from November 10, 1942, Meteor Man of December 22, 1942, and He Dug It Up from February 9, 1943.       

Casts in this Hollywood-based series were limited, often no more than three actors per programs, but Oboler’s scripts and liberal use of the skilled CBS sound crew gave them strong dramatic weight.  Oboler wrote reference to himself and the program’s use of gory sound effects into the May 11, 1943 drama, Murder In The Script Department. Then he pulled out all the stops and wrote himself, (going mad), into the script of the final broadcast in the CBS series on September 28, 1943, The Author & The Thing. Be advised that both plots have twist endings and involve the dark of late night. 
       
But the eight o’clock hour of broadcast, (7:00 p.m. in the Central Time Zone), often came at sunset or twilight and  worked against the title and spirit of Lights Out! despite its warning chant, “It’s…later…than…you….think…”, heard at the beginning and end of each episode.  The program’s only rated season, 1942-43, indicated that the early evening listeners weren’t yet ready for stories of ghosts, monsters and gore at that hour.  Family audiences gave vocalist Ginny Simms’ variety show on NBC a 14.2 Hooperating against  Lights Out! which registered a 10.0.  (Both beat the 5.0 scored by Blue’s combined quarter hours from newscaster Earl Godwin and Lum & Abner.)  

Lights Out! disappeared from the air again except for short summer runs on NBC in 1945 and 1946, then ABC in 1947.  These broadcasts are distinctive because they contained past and new material from Wyllis Cooper, creator of the series in 1934.  Samples from all three runs are posted, represented by Man In The Middle from August 25,1945,  The Coffin In Studio B from July 13, 1946 and  July 16, 1947’s Death Robbery, featuring the return of Boris Karloff to the freshly produced ABC summer series sponsored by Eversharp shaving and writing instruments.  

The lights were finally turned off on the series after a total of 350 original and repeat episodes on August 6, 1947.  But like the characters in so many Lights Out! stories, Arch Oboler brought a number of his stories back to life almost 25 years later in transcribed syndication as The Devil & Mr. O.  This 1970’s revival of his scripts from the 1942-43 season is represented here in The Hole, from December 3, 1971,  Three Thousand Dollars, heard again on January 21, 1972, and Cemetery, from February 25, 1972  which fittingly enough, concludes in a mausoleum.