King Arthur and Robin Hood on the Radio: Adaptations for American Listeners

by Katherine Barnes Echols

Overview

Before stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood were adapted and readapted for film, television and theater, radio scriptwriters looking for material turned to Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485) and Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883). Throughout the 1930s to the mid-1950s, their legends inspired storylines for Abbott and Costello, Popeye, Let's Pretend, Escape, Gunsmoke, The Adventures of Superman and others. Many of these adaptations reflect the moral and ethical questions of the day, as characters' faced issues of gender relations, divorce, citizenship, fascism, crime and communism in a medieval setting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476667041
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Katherine Barnes Echols teaches at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Her areas of interest include adaptation theory and American radio productions from the 1930s through the 1950s as cultural artifacts.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction
Prologue: When Radio Filled the Ether with “Winged Words”
1. Radio and the Formation of the Imagined Community
2. Adapting King Arthur and Robin Hood’s Legend for Radio
3. What Is Radio Medievalism?
4. Adapting Malory’s Le Morte Darthur for Radio
5. The Chivalric Ethos of the Comic Hero: Superman and Prince Valiant
6. White Knight of the Range: The Arthurian Knight in the Radio Western
7. Radio Adaptations of Robin Hood
8. Lighthearted Adaptations
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Describe American radio adaptations of the King Arthur and Robin Hood legends airing between the 1930s and mid–1950s and how radio episodes demonstrate the medieval British ideal of chivalric knighthood as a standard of American morality and masculinity and defined the difference between “good and ‘bad’ conduct by emphasizing a character’s chivalric qualities”—ProtoView; “Echols has uncovered a goldmine of lost or mostly forgotten American medievalisms of the twentieth century, and for this accomplishment her readers should be grateful”—Speculum.

From the Publisher