This year marks the 5 year absence of any Shadow cd releases from Radio Spirits. Their last collection "Evil Lurks" was released back in 2017 and nothing from them or Conde Nast since. With the boom in audio drama's as "podcasts" you'd think we would have gotten a small season of 5 to 10 recreated missing episodes or at the very least an official Shadow channel on Spotify or Itunes with decent quality copies of the existing episodes. 

But we've gotten absolutely nothing!

I've been wondering if the reason Conde Nast hasn't done anything with the existing episodes is because they don't actually own any of the transcription discs. If don't have the original source recordings to work from you can't really do anything. It seems like a logical answer, but I could be wrong. Maybe they're just putting some distance between the Radio Spirits sets and their own, cause why re-buy episodes you just bought a few years ago?

If the sound quality was good enough I'd re-buy them! Lately I've been listening through my collection and  (it's been awhile since I last did that) I've got to say I'm disappointed with the sound quality on some of the episodes. The worse sounding ones were all intact with commercials from the 40's. Now, I only own the "18 episodes on 9 discs" sets Radio Spirits released starting with 2008's 'Knight of Darkness', The Story of The Shadow cd set and The Making of a Legend box set, so I can't speak to the quality of their earlier sets. I'm wondering if maybe the earlier sets included better sounding episodes that were missing the commercials. I've been meaning to compare the episodes included with The Story of The Shadow and the Making of a Legend with those on the other sets I have, but haven't had a chance yet.

Before I start going off rambling anymore, I guess the long and short of it is, something needs to be done with The Shadow. All this time and we've only gotten the Patterson novel. Why not hire someone (I am very available to do this for you) to edit together a collection of the first season of scripts for The Shadow and release a very nice hardbound edition. As a bonus, throw in a script from when The Shadow was narrating. That should be a huge money maker, or even better license out scripts for amatuer theaters or podcasters to preform.

Maybe even turn to a global powerhouse bring The Shadow back to radio, literally. 

In the 1950's when television sets became cheaper and more popular, audio drama's here in the U.S. died. However in the U.K. (I think in part due to the television license) radio drama's continued to thrive. BBC Radio 4's "The Archers" has been on the air since 1951, having aired over 19,500 episodes, it is the world's longest-running drama by number of episodes. It makes sense, they have recording studios, they have voice actors, most of their big radio shows get cd releases 90% of everything could be handled by the BBC. All Conde Nast would have to do is provide the scripts and handle distribution outside of the U.K.

If any of these ideas are used I'd like a 5% commission on any profits. lol Not gonna happen but I can dream.

Why not even work out some kind of deal with Grace Gibson Productions in Australia to get more of the episodes they recorded released? A vast majority of the episodes Grace Gibson chose to recorded are now part of the lost/missing "original broadcasts" and can give us episodes we never thought we'd hear. There are some Grace Gibson recorded episodes that had the names changed and as far as I know no one knows what the original title was, who knows what episodes might be found. Right there you have a huge untapped source of Shadow episodes waiting to live again.

All in all I think what I'm trying to say is, we don't want a revamped poor imitation of The Shadow, we want The Shadow that we've loved for years. Focus on celebrating the past, reissue full replicas of The Shadow Magazine issues, it doesn't have to be 4k but do a decent restoration of the movies from the 30's and 40's, the same with the 1940 serial and tv pilots and give us more radio episodes new recordings or original I don't care I just want more Shadow.