Second Series
During World War II, Russell Comer came up with the idea of starting a brand-new industry for the production of radio broadcast dramas in his hometown of Kansas City. He felt that, with the proper recording equipment, top-notch radio serials could be produced in Kansas City using local radio talent and that a possible revision of The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen would be the way to attract sponsors to supporting this industry. Comer and director John Frank looked through old 1930s Jimmie Allen scripts to see what would have to be changed to make an updated version of the series. They found that it would simply be a matter of changing terminology and bringing in post-WWII aviation developments such as jet propulsion. Comer soon obtained the necessary equipment to record the show and set up a small recording studio in his downtown Kansas City advertising offices.
Comer and Frank endeavored to assemble an entirely new cast for this new edition. For the lead role of Jimmie, it was Jack Anthony, a young announcer for radio station KCKN in Kansas City. The role of Speed Robertson went to Shelby Storck, who had been a newscaster for WDAF and was then in public relations work. The role of Speed and Jimmie's mechanic Flash Lewis went to Al Christy, a WDAF announcer who later went on to appear on the TV shows Bonanza and Punky Brewster, as well as in the films In Cold Blood and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Other Kansas City radio announcers played supporting roles, and it is apparent, listening to these episodes, that some of the same actors were playing several different roles, with slightly different accents.
Comer sold this new edition of the series to the International Shoe Company of St. Louis and several oil companies, and the first broadcast occurred on October 14, 1946, over KFH in Wichita, Kansas. It first aired on a Kansas City station on January 1, 1947. Though the lead actors were all capable and the scripts were all fairly exciting and well-written, the show did not receive enough promotion and did not achieve the fascination of the 1930s series. By the end of 1947, after the production of more than 400 episodes, the program was cancelled. Repeats of the 1946-47 edition of Jimmie Allen continued to air until the mid-1950s.
The program's history remained vague until a Jimmie Allen advocate named Walter House published a detailed two-part article about the show in an airplane model magazine during the 1980s. More recently, an MP3 CD featuring 131 episodes (from 1936-37 and 1946-47) was released. The 1930s episodes suffer from extremely poor sound quality, but the post-war episodes sound just as they must have on the airwaves in the 1940s.
Read more about this topic: The Air Adventures Of Jimmie Allen
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