The 86th Floor
The Adventures of Doc Savage on NPR
 
Of all the adaptations of Doc Savage into other media -- radio (three times!), comics (six different companies!), and  that movie -- this is the best. It might be because radio leaves enough to our imaginations -- giving the fans enough control -- that we're satisfied the same way we are reading a novel. More likely, it's the faithfulness of the adaptation. And with  latter-day Kenneth Robeson Will Murray on board they couldn't fail.

 Here's my two cents: The voices of Monk and Renny are dead-on. Wonderful. Ham should have been more precise in speaking. And vocally, he and Johnny are interchangeable. Doc is very well-spoken, very intelligent sounding, but his voice has too high a register. I was hoping for deep and powerful tones. And, although radio is a great medium for a period character, Doc Savage, himself, is not well suited for it; On radio, everyone explains what they're doing -- and we all know Doc never told his aides anything!

Fear Key
 

was written by
Lester Dent
and adapted for radio by
Roger Rittner

Chapter 1: Kidnapped
Chapter 2: The Hanging Man
Chapter 3: The Disappointing Parcel
Chapter 4: Island of Death
Chapter 5: Terror Underground
Chapter 6: The Mysterious Weeds
Chapter 7: The Crawling Terror

 

The Thousand-
Headed Man

was written by
Lester Dent
and adapted for radio by
Will Murray

Chapter 1: The Black Stick
Chapter 2: Three Black Sticks
Chapter 3: Flight Into Fear
Chapter 4: Pagoda of the Hands
Chapter 5: The Accursed City
Chapter 6: The Deadly Treasure


(Note that Will Murray used the oft-discarded Dent title "Flight into Fear" for chapter 3, which he was later able to use as the title to his 60th Anniversary Doc Savage novel.)

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