Candy Matson Lives!

San Francisco's very own radio private detective is back in an all-new radio recreation!

Back in 2009 a small group of professional voice actors got together to make something unique, that creation was none other than "Candy Matson YUkon 2-8209".

The mere idea that the show itself was originally written and performed by a husband and wife team Monty and Natalie Masters, and that the show only aired on the West Coast (for lack of a National sponsor in reality), seemed a perfect choice for these Bay area residents.

I transcribed the very first pilot episode "The Donna Dunham Case" and we set about recording the episode with the intentions of re-recording all of the existing episodes.  

We went over the scripts, found the nuances of Monty's humor and writing style and looked up a phrase here and there to find out what some of the older phrases actually meant or were referring to, and we were on our way.

With the first episode in hand I set to work editing the episode, replacing the soap opera organ music with late 1940's early 50's jazz music as intervals, I think it worked better, but I am sure there are OTR purists out there that will disagree.

Our goal was not to change the scripts in any way, just re-record them with newer technology and polish some older radio gems, that maybe might be able to pull some new listeners in along the way.

We completed the episode in July 2009 and I turned to transcribe "The Cable Car Murder Case" when I received and email after I asked an expert on Candy Matson, if any of the scripts existed and if so where could I locate them.  He replied saying they do exist but in a private trust library and the only way to see them is to go to the library itself and sit and read them.  No copying was allowed.  He did hand copy a single episode "The Black Cat".  He typed it up and sent it to me for us to use in our re-recordings at hand.  

I put "The Cable Car Murder Case" transcribing on hold and we set out to record "The Black Cat" instead.  Again we looked for characters and nuances and relationships that Monty displays in his radio scripts.  This time we had to look up an old song titled "Horses Don't Bet On People" just so we could get the tune correct when Rembrandt recalls the song in a conversation with Candy. More phrases not understood, we looked them up to make sure we understood the meaning as it was intended in 1950.

With this second recorded episode we improved a great deal.  It took much longer to edit as this episode had a number of characters and a great deal of sound effects.  I think the efforts paid off and Jake the Cat, lives again!

We then had to decide, do we continue with "The Cable Car Murder Case" or do another one "The Egyptian Amulet"?  Well turns out, we did neither, instead we thought we could improve on our first episode and re-record "The Donna Dunham Case" over again.

I had reservations of doing so, as there are plenty more episode to fine tune the process, but we all agreed and went back and took another crack at "The Donna Dunham Case".

I present to you here for your listening pleasure, both the original re-recordings of "The Donna Dunham Case" and "The Black Cat". 

If enough folks are curious, I could edit the redo of "The Donna Dunham Case", but since sadly our acting group disbanded shortly after, no other episodes were re-recorded.  It is a pity, we improved a great deal from the first episode recording to the second.

"THE DONNA DUNHAM CASE"



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"THE BLACK CAT"

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Let us know what you think, with enough comments, maybe I can persuade them to take another crack at some more of Candy's Bay Area cases.

Anthony P. Anderson, January 1, 2014