Mercury Theatre - Classic 30\'s Radio Plays torrent

*The Mercury Theatre On The Air*

From http://www.mercurytheatre.info/:

"The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.

The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse."

This torrent is being hosted (quite silently I might add) on mercurytheatre.info, which is hosted and maintained by Kim Scarborough. It stands as an archive for the highly appraised radio series, and is one of the finest resources for classic radio plays that I have personally found online. Each episode is hosted in both Real Audio (.ra) and Mp3 format for direct downloads on the site, but in the interest of bandwidth conservation Ms. Scarborough decided to host the full collection as a torrent.

This torrent DOES include the infamous original 'War of the Worlds' broadcast.

I have done nothing to Ms. Scarboroughs' original torrent, merely added Pirate Bay trackers and written my little piece here. I feel that this is a very important torrent, and that it should be shared with a broader audience. I'm an obsessive archivist, and I feel that the radio drama is a sadly forgotten art.

These are top of the line dramas. I have several on my ipod, so when the time comes for chores around the house I find them to be fantastic distractions. They're perfect for internet lurking as well, or for listening to while working on an art project. These are classic stories told in a forgotten way, they strike the imagination in a manner that those of us born into this digital age are unfamiliar with. These come highly recommended by Yours Truly.

Here is the list of files:


- Dracula

- Treasure Island

- A Tale of Two Cities

- The 39 Steps

- Three Short Stories: I'm a Fool/The Open Window/My Little Boy

- Abraham Lincoln

- The Affairs of Anatol

- The Count of Monte Cristo

- The Man Who Was Thursday

- The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

- Hell on Ice

- Seventeen

- Around the World in 80 Days

- The War of the Worlds

- Heart of Darkness / Life with Father

- A Passenger to Bali

- The Pickwick Papers

- Rebecca

- A Christmas Carol

- Counselor-at-Law

- Mutiny on the Bounty

- I Lost My Girlish Laughter

- Arrowsmith

- The Green Goddess

- The Glass Key

- Beau Geste

- Showboat

- The Patriot

- Private Lives

- Wickford Point

- Our Town

- The Bad Man

- Things We Have

- Victoria Regina

- Peter Ibbetson

- Ah, Wilderness

- What Every Woman Knows

- The Count of Monte Cristo

- Algiers

- Escape

- Liliom

- The Magnificent Ambersons

- The Hurricane

- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

- The Garden of Allah

- Dodsworth

- Lost Horizon

- Venessa

- There's Always a Woman

- A Christmas Carol

- Vanity Fair

- Theodora Goes Wild

- The Citadel

- It Happened One Night

- Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

- Dinner at Eight

- Only Angels Have Wings

- Rabble in Arms

- Craig's Wife

- Huckleberry Finn

- June Moon

- The 39 Steps

- Julius Caesar

- Les Miserables

- Episode 1: The Bishop


- Episode 2: Javert


- Episode 3: The Trial


- Episode 4: Cosette


- Episode 5: The Grave


- Episode 6: The Barricade


- Episode 7: Conclusion

- H.G. Wells Meets Orson Welles

- Theatre of the Imagination


Video

- Macbeth {mpeg}
(The only surviving footage from Welles and Houseman's first stage production, a version of Macbeth set in Haiti with an all-black cast.)