The Strange Dr. Weird (1944-45) aired “Beauty and the Beast” on January 16, 1945 as its 11th episode of 29. We have run only seven earlier episodes of this show since 2018, the last two from March of 2021 and June of 2023. The show ran from November of 1944 through May of 1945 in short 15-minute episodes (a few minutes less without commercials), and was dubbed by some as a poor man’s Mysterious Traveler. Indeed, there are similarities between the shows, though MT had a much longer run of nine years (1943-52) and was a full half-hour program. Maurice Tarplin (photo at right, 1911-1975) was the host/narrator for both shows, and one of the writers for MT, Robert A. Arthur (photo lower right, 1909-1969), also penned the scripts for The Strange Dr. Weird. While MT‘s shows included tales of mystery and suspense along with SF and the supernatural, The Strange Dr. Weird concentrated mostly on the supernatural. Both shows opened with the narrator setting the stage with a tease for what was to follow, but where MT stories were told in conversation while on a train and ended with the narrator beginning another story only to stop when the unnamed passenger to whom the story was being told had to get off, The Strange Dr. Weird ends with a variation on the same gimmick, the narrator beginning a story just as his “guest” has to leave. As you might imagine, with actual story lengths running to around a scant 12 minutes, there’s not much room for characterization or extraneous detail, so only the essentials are conveyed—the idea or dilemma takes center stage and remains front and center. And there is always an unexpected twist at the end, providing the moral comeuppance knife in the heart for the bad guy or evil doer. Short and to the creepy point, there’s no lavish musical score or expensive production values here, only the quintessential organ riffs manipulating and accentuating listener emotion at the proper moments in conjunction with the plights of the actors.

“Beauty and the Beast” would have made a tense little one-act play on the old half hour b&w Alfred Hitchcock Presents show in the 1950s. It begins in a remote and desolate area of New England, with a still shot of a man standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down on the rocky shore of the Atlantic Ocean far below. We soon learn that a man has been found dead, washed up on the rocky shore, mutilated and disfigured, presumably from a high fall. Was his death an accident or was foul play involved? We are then introduced to a married couple where the husband is appreciably older than his wife, and the revelation when the police arrive that a former employee of the household has been found stabbed to death some time before and not far from the couple’s house. Besides the husband and wife, another male character enters the drama and ere long accusations and harsh words fly, shouted angrily at one another, for more than one of them had motive and opportunity to carry out both murders, as the most recent death is now believed not to be the result of an accidental fall. Only one thing becomes frighteningly clear:  one of them is a homicidal maniac, and it takes keen insight into an aspect of human nature to expose the killer, and this bit of observation is the twist for which these condensed episodes of The Strange Dr. Weird have come to be appreciated.