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Spectrum was a long-running weekly radio documentary series which captured the essence of New Zealand from 1972 to 2016. Alwyn Owen and Jack Perkins produced the series for many years, creating a valuable library of New Zealand oral history.
In this Spectrum documentary Alwyn Owen looks at boys’ comics of an earlier generation.
[Dramatised excerpt from] ‘The Catapult Cowboy’
Alwyn Owen lingers fondly over comic books of yesteryear and re-creates their characters and adventures. From the late 19th century until after World War 2, the comic book was a thing of delight for youngsters. For 70 years the plots hardly changed:- find a good detective, cowboy or captain of the school cricket first eleven and throw in a rattling good adventure yarn. And all in four pages, once a week with a free gift.
Stiff-upper-lip boy adventurers carried the British flag to the ends of the earth by airship and later by aeroplane. The plots stayed the same, only the technology changed. Dark-skinned "half breeds" were often the villains, never the heroes. Foreign lands, deserts and mountain ranges provided the backdrop for heart-stopping deeds of daring.
Alwyn reviews some of the old comics: ‘Young Men of Great Britain’ almost 100 years old, ‘Scout’ 1924, ‘The Boys Weekly’, ‘Cheers Boys Cheer’, ‘Boys Realm’- names long forgotten except for collectors. But inside them, some heroes and villains reflected the attitudes of the era, such as the stories in ‘Young Men of America’, featuring "Sam Waffles, White Chief of the Black Feet", and "Pedro the Half-Breed."
[Dramatised excerpt from] ‘Sam Waffles’
[Dramatised excerpt from] ‘Pirates of The Air’
Alwyn explains developments in the second decade of the 20th century, interspersed with two dramatisations of ‘From the Editor’s Chair’ and ‘A Fine Story of British Pluck’
Alwyn finishes by saying the comic is a escapist medium and would be wrong to end his essay on any other note, so we join the readers of ‘Boys Weekly’, a paper for British boys, for an adventure of 1919, which could be an adventure of 1929 or 1939.
[Dramatised] ‘Harland The Hunter’
Credits: Alex Truston, Grant Tilly, Anthony Bartlett, Peter Vere-Jones, Louis Rowe, Peter Reid and Ray Henwood.
The narrator was David Delaney and technical direction came from Mike Judd.