The Welcome to a special midweek bonus episode of Down These Mean Streets.

Thanks for joining me today for a salute to the Dark Knight Detective Batman.

This week marks the 75th anniversary. Night of the caped crusaders old time radio appearances.

Now Batman really needs no introduction.

After all, he's been thrilling us in comics on TV and on the big screen

since that first appearance. But there was one medium where success eluded him.

On radio, Batman was always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

The first attempt to bring Batman to the air was in

1943 with an audition for a proposed series on mutual.

Superman had taken flight on mutual in 1940 and DC Comics wanted to repeat their success with Batman.

In a story called The Case of the Drowning Seal, Batman and Robin battled

sinister Nazi agents who had murdered Robin's parents, a departure from Robin's comic origin as an orphaned acrobat.

The series never made the air and sadly this audition recording is lost to the ages.

In March 1945, years before they ever teamed up in the comics, Batman and Superman met in an episode of The Adventures of Superman on radio.

Over the years, Batman and Robin would make guest appearances on the show, usually to pinch hit for Superman, and to allow series star Clayton Bud Collier to take a vacation.

In his Superman radio appearances, Batman was played by Stacey Harris, who later starred in This is Your FBI, and also by Matt Crowley.

Robin was played by actor Ronald Liss.

Liss recreated his role of Robin in 1950 in a second attempt to bring Batman to radio in his own

series. John Emory starred as Batman in The Monster of Dumfries Hall, an audition

show which found Batman and Robin narrating an adventure to the juvenile

members of the Batman Mystery Club, all of whom knew the dynamic duo's true identities.

Though that episode survives, I'm not featuring it today because,

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