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January 13, 2005

Dead Formats

One interesting thing about art over time is how the use of formats changes over time. Some formats like plays seem to be fairly consistent. The style of plays change from Greek chorus to the more modern dialogs, but the format is still basically a bunch of people in costumes using predetermined scripts who pretend to be other people. Audio dramas are an interesting twist on this as they were non existent pre 20th century became extremely popular from the 1920's to the 1940's in the form of radio dramas and are now almost non-existent again. This was a thriving art form that because of technology changes died out rather quickly and is now almost forgotten even though people still listen to the radio all the time. Drama is often easier to create if you have a visual format and radio audiences generally would rather get their drama from tv or movies than from radio or cd because tv requires less work on their part.

I bring this all up because I recently listened to Alien Voices perform H.G. Wells The Invisible Man as a multi-voice dramatization. Alien Voices is a drama group composed of people who were at some point in their careers on one of the Star Trek shows. John de Lancie (who played Q on TNG) played the lead role, while Leonard Nimoy (who played Spock) played the cheating professor. I probably liked this performance (which included music and sound effects) more than I would a straight reading of the book, but even though it is easy to find audio books, new audio drama performances are still rare. This is unfortunate since audio drama is as good as other formats and many people might benefit from works done this way.

Posted by Pete at January 13, 2005 03:00 PM

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Comments

I don't know... I'd have trouble listening to it without thinking of Spock, Q, and Maddog Murdock.

Hmmm... which tangentially makes me think... what would I have given to see Mr.T on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Maybe on the holodeck, but that's a rather inadequate place for proper fool pitying.

Posted by: Dangerous Dan at January 13, 2005 10:53 PM

You should check out their other works. You can find most of them at your local public library.

Posted by: Mike Thomas at January 20, 2005 09:21 AM