Overview

Before stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood were adapted and readapted for film, television and theater, radio scriptwriters looking for material turned to Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485) and Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883). Throughout the 1930s to the mid-1950s, their legends inspired storylines for Abbott and Costello, Popeye, Let's Pretend, Escape, Gunsmoke, The Adventures of Superman and others. Many of these adaptations reflect the moral and ethical questions of the day, as characters' faced issues of gender relations, divorce, citizenship, fascism, crime and communism in a medieval setting.

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9781476667041

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describe American radio adaptations of the King Arthur and Robin Hood legends airing between the 1930s and mid-1950s and how radio episodes demonstrate the medieval British ideal of chivalric knighthood as a standard of American morality and masculinity and defined the difference between good and 'bad' conduct by emphasizing a character's chivalric qualities --ProtoView.

“Describe American radio adaptations of the King Arthur and Robin Hood legends airing between the 1930s and mid–1950s and how radio episodes demonstrate the medieval British ideal of chivalric knighthood as a standard of American morality and masculinity and defined the difference between “good and ‘bad’ conduct by emphasizing a character’s chivalric qualities”—ProtoView; “Echols has uncovered a goldmine of lost or mostly forgotten American medievalisms of the twentieth century, and for this accomplishment her readers should be grateful”—Speculum.

Author Information

Katherine Barnes Echols teaches at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Her areas of interest include adaptation theory and American radio productions from the 1930s through the 1950s as cultural artifacts.

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