PLANET THREE - JANUARY 24, 1981

One of my favorite series was the mysterious "Planet Three," a three-hour concoction of audio clips, music, and overall weirdness. I had inherited the Friday night/Saturday morning midnight to 3 am slot in the autumn of 1980 after another show that had occupied that slot ended. (It was called "The Better Than Dead Air Show" which was a fun program I was involved in with a couple of other people at WUSB. No recordings are known to exist.) Sadly, there are only two surviving excerpts from "Planet Three" and this is the first, broadcast on January 24, 1981, one week before the series finale. The trademark of this show was that I never spoke a word except for an ID that aired at the end and occasionally some backwards speech that revealed the name of the program.

This episode featured the sounds of Republicans as they were starting to take over the country, along with some memories from the 1960s. (One of the musical bits played here would eventually become the theme to another series called "Chatterbox," available in our archives.)

(There's even a bit where some prank calls (possibly live) were broadcast. Technically, they weren't calls since our local crossbar switch had a bug in it that occasionally allowed people to get connected together just by picking up the phone at the same time. You can hear the confusion as something like that was transpiring along with feedback that we were somehow causing.)