Friday's Favorite OTR

Conan the Barbarian: "The Tower of the Elephant" & "The Frost Giant's Daughter." (1975)
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Okay, this one isn't really old-time radio, but it was a nifty-keen attempt to revive the medium with adaptations of two stories starring one of the most dynamic and entertaining characters to come out of the pulp fiction era.
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In the mid-1970s, a guy named Alan B. Goldstein got the idea of adapting Robert E. Howard's original Conan the Barbarian stories into audio adventures. Apparently, he had hopes of making this an ongoing series.
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Writer Roy Thomas, who was at that time writing a superb Conan comic for Marvel Comics, also liked the idea and penned the scripts for two of the stories.
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Both the stories chosen were set early in Conan's career--a wise idea if these were indeed to be the jumping off point of a continuing series. "The Frost Giant's Daughter" has Conan still in the northern part of his fictional world--not far from his homeland. Knocked unconscious by an opponent, he wakes up still dazed and sees a beautiful woman standing over him. The woman taunts him, causing him to run after her in a rage. But she is leading him into a trap involving her rather bizarre brothers...
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"The Tower of the Elephant" is one of my favorite Conan stories. On the one hand, it's a sort of fantasy "Mission: Impossible" story, with Conan and a more experienced thief breaking into a wizard's tower. But later, we see horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's influence on Howard's prose when Conan encounters an imprisoned being with a weird and cosmic back-story. The two themes mesh nicely into a tale that runs the gamut from taut suspense to action to creepiness to tragedy.
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Both the audio adaptaions (eventually released on an LP record) are excellent, with good acting and skillfully done sound effects. In both cases, a third-person narrator is used to move the story along while perserving much of Howard's entertaining prose.
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Sadly, Goldstein's vision of a continuing series never came to pass. But the two Conan stories that were produced were both worthwhile--solid, faithful adaptations of two excellent sword-and-sorcery adventures.