The 1947 Wet Saturday broadcast with Boris Karloff
Can you find it?

A couple of years ago I received a note from a Cobalt Club member who recalled seeing a listing in an early 2000s catalog that was a long missing repeat performance of Wet Saturday, except this was the one with Boris Karloff!

The catalog was from SciFiGuy, Gordon Payton, a noted collector of science fiction broadcasts, especially those of the BBC. The latter were especially hard to find for US collectors. Gordon was the co-author of the CBSRMT book with Martin Grams and published by McFarland 17 years ago. Here is the Amazon link https://www.amazon.com/dp/0786418907/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_933HP15NSX0ZCJPW9KDM

Here's some background I have pieced together about where the recording may be...

Because of the early 2000s flood of cheap CDs packed with low encode mp3s, Gordon's sideline business of selling cassettes (and audio CDs) was no longer worth pursuing. He decided to concentrate on his other interests and his preparation for retirement. He packed up his cassette duplication masters and they were stacked in storage for a few years. He then offered the collection around to collectors he knew and finally sold them a year or so ago. A long-retired fan of sci-fi purchased the cassettes to satisfy his interest in the genre, but he also had an OTR collection that Gordon's tapes could supplement. It is important to note that this was an OTR fan, not a narrowly-focused hard core completist/collector/researcher as yours truly. There are many different styles of collecting. He devoutly loves listening and the savors the history of the era. When he got the cassettes, he gathered up the OTR ones and reviewed them against his collection. He then checked around with collectors and fans and asked if they wanted the cassettes. He had no takers. No surprise, because they were cassettes, after all, and everyone had moved on to the digital formats we enjoy so much.

When he sorted through the Suspense tapes, he compared the titles with his collection, identified duplicate titles he already had, and disposed of them because of space issues. So the Wet Saturday cassette master with Boris Karloff went into the trash. He already had a copy of Wet Saturday, a script that was performed three other times in the series. It is likely that the cassette label had no mention of it being the Karloff episode. It's easy to understand how this all happened.

These were all innocent decisions based on what was important to the individuals involved. It's a hobby. Everyone has their preferences for enjoyment and for collecting... even those collectors who decided they were not interested in taking the Suspense cassettes off his hands. Not collector's interests need to overlap or coincide. There was nothing wrong with what these fans did and we should not begrudge anyone for their decisions in this regard.

Now it's up to us die-hard completists to become OTR gumshoes and track it down... Gordon is successfully and happily retired and has no interest in OTR and has no recordings, no customer records of his now long-ago, and therefore no leads for this pursuit. As true gumshoes, we have to pound OTRdom's streets for clues. Gordon often had a dealers table at FOTR conventions in Newark. It is likely that he sold a few of these recordings at the convention. He probably had dealer tables at other nostalgia and scifi conventions. He had a good mail order business at one time and probably sold copies of this recording in that way. There may be a Karloff collector who has it (the Karloff fan web sites don't have it... but that doesn't mean we don't keep looking there!). There were likely collectors at his dealer tables who saw "Wet Saturday"... muttered "I already have one of those" and moved on... but perhaps a Karloff collector would be drawn toward his appearance and not be interested in any of the other performances.

The problem here is the sequence of events... the recording was found late in the life of Gordon's business... at a time his customers were getting recordings from the new mp3 dealers that emerged on the scene... so awareness of the program and his catalog was not cultivated in the way it would have been just a few years before. A buzz around its availability could not get started.

As many know, I scour collections constantly, digital, reel, and cassette, looking for recordings of missing episodes, especially recordings that might be misdated. The 1947 recording that appears in most collections is usually a mislabeled December 1943 broadcast with Charles Laughton. I've seen the network and the AFRS recording of the 1943 broadcast in collections as the 1947 recording. The file name often includes Karloff's name despite it being the Laughton broadcast. Be sure to listen to the recording. I have also run into recordings where it is the June 1942 broadcast starring Clarence Derwent. You'll know it's the Karloff broadcast because they'll announce his name!

Please... keep an eye out for this recording.

If you know inactive collectors who might have collected and traded cassettes or bought from Gordon (almost 20 years ago!) please ask them to check their collections. I was still on OTR hiatus at the time this recording was available and had not come back to the hobby yet. So I have no contacts from this era or this format of collecting. Please share this website with as many collectors and former collectors if you can who might be of assistance.

Perhaps with some luck the recording may surface. There may be someone who has it who may not realize that the recording may be as special as it is. It's out there... somewhere! (And maybe the true master recording, the broadcast transcription discs, or an AFRS disc, can be found).

It can be frustrating to know that a missing recording exists... but this is not the only one. I know that there is a dictation recording of the 1947-07-17 Beyond Good and Evil with Vincent Price in a dictation technology format that may not be easily playable, even if the recording could be obtained.

Your help and encouragement is always greatly appreciated. This Suspense project has been the beneficiary of tremendous generosity for more than a decade. Thank you, everyone! I hope we can all get lucky in regard to this particular recording.

If you have information, please contact me, Joe Webb, at suspenseOTR@gmail.com

To see some of my research and resources about Suspense, go to https://sites.google.com/view/suspense-collectors-companion

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JWW Aug 25, 2021