Fibber McGee and Molly-The roots of the sitcom

Fibber McGee and Molly was one of a few radio shows in the early 1930's that used stories built on comedic situations. In the 30's and 40's Fibber McGee was part of pop culture in the US. Even in the 50's and 60's many people still used some references to the show in everyday language. I remember my mom calling her closet door in the kitchen Fibber McGee's closet. This was where she kept a lot of plastic bowls that were stacked haphazardly and were prone to falling out when she opened the door. She said that was what Fibber McGee's closet did on the show. I listened to recordings of a few episodes before and the closet was used quite often. The sound effects made it pretty easy to relate to the experience of opening a closet door and having stuff fall out and hit you. It's something that I think has happened to a lot of people.

One of the great features of radio shows was that they allowed you to use your own imagination to picture scenes and characters. I think sometimes when people would see a picture of the actor who did a certain voice they'd be surprised and it might even ruin their enjoyment of the show. Some of the actors who did voices of characters that were supposed to be strong handsome men were actually not much to look. From the opposite perspective, radio allowed people to be stars as leading men and women who wouldn't have been welcome to play those parts in movies or television because they didn't have the looks to carry the role.

We might not be able to recapture the effect of the radio show but we use the same kind of imaginative input when we read a book, at least one that hasn't been made into a movie. Before the first Harry Potter movie I'm sure there were a lot of different impressions of what the characters looked like and all of the settings but once readers saw that first movie it influenced how they pictured everything for each subsequent Harry Potter book. The same thing would happen if all of those old radio shows were made into television shows. Nobody would be able to hold on to their imagined visual images because they'd have all been replaced by the "real" images broadcast on the tv. If humanity stops using their imaginative abilities will they eventually be lost, evolved out of us in successive generations?