Origin
story
Re-Imagined Radio began in response to a question.
In Fall 2013, I taught digital storytelling at Washington State University Vancouver. Students built
digital
projects based on The War of the Worlds radio drama. Prequels. Sequels. Extended character
developments. opportunities for community engagement. We planned an exhibition in a downtown
gallery.
See The War of the Worlds, 2013, the first episode of
Re-Imagined
Radio, for more information about this student exhibition.
"Will visitors understand our stories if they don't know the source?" one student asked. Good question.
I asked The Willamette Radio Workshop for help. WRW, a group of Old Time Radio (OTR) enthusiasts, were
keen to help. Founded and led by Sam A. Mowry, they offered live
performances of radio programs from the "Golden Age of Radio," the 1930s to the 1950s. The War of
the Worlds was part of their reportoire. "You find a venue. We'll bring the performance,"
Mowry said.
For the venue I turned to the historic Kiggins Theatre, built in 1936, and still the heart of downtown
Vancouver, Washington's Art District. "You can use the theatre if you handle the publicity," Dan Wyatt,
owner and manager told me.
That was the spark for Re-Imagined Radio's origin.
Our inaugural performance, October 30, 2013, the seventieth anniversary of the original broadcast of
The War of the Worlds, was a standing room only success. After the hour-long performance,
Sam, Dan, and I looked at each other and said, "What's next?"
We agreed on "A Christmas Carol," mid-December. Another sold out performance. We decided to keep going.
We chose more OTR content. Artifacts from a time when radio dramas, stories, and shows were a popular
and primary entertainment and information source for listeners. Each live performance was a study of how
the the orginal radio program might have been produced and broadcast from
radio studios thirty to forty years earlier.
We explored different forms of radio storytelling. Fiction, horror, science fiction, comedy, westerns,
and suspense.
In 2018, Willamette Radio Workshop switched their focus to in studio productions. Re-Imagined Radio
began a collaboration with Metropolitan Performing Arts, based in Vancouver, Washington.
And the experimentation continued. We frequently re-imagined our re-creations by changing gender roles,
added visual projections, encouraged audience participation, and incorporated digital recording and
streaming. We considered our performances a unique form of storytelling, based in community listening
events.
The COVID pandemic, 2020, prompted a shift from live performances to recorded radio broadcasts and
streaming. Our original partner community radio stations were KXRW-FM and KXRY-FM, who broadcast and
live streamed our monthly episodes. The digital recordings we made for our episodes became the basis for
our podcast and YouTube series.
Every recorded episode produced since 2013 is available here, our archival website, through our
podcast series, and our YouTube
channel. Enjoy listening!
— John Barber
Creator, Producer, Host