Radio Archives’s ninth set of Great Gildersleeve episodes featuring Harold Peary contains twelve episodes, all the circulating programs from September 19, 1943 to March 19, 1944. The bulk of the third season of Gildersleeve focuses on Gildersleeve’s love life. The over-arching through-line in the story is about the love triangle between himself, the very newly widowed Leila Ransom (Shirley Mitchell), and elementary school principal Eve Goodwin (Bea Benaderet), who both find themselves vying for Gildersleeve’s affections.

Beyond this, the episodes are mostly self-contained stories that cover a lot of ground. In one episode, Gildersleeve having agitated against the old water commissioner in the previous season, he finds himself in “hot water” when low water pressure becomes a problem. My favorite episode is “Sleight Ride”, in which Gildersleeve gets together some male friends in the hopes of getting Eve and Leila to join them. The episode is nice for some fun character interactions. It’s also a bit of a time capsule, capturing a practice that you don’t see anymore except for some really rural parts of the country. It was probably out of style by 1944 in most places, but it was a plausible good time to have in a small town where gas rationing limited how much people could drive. The set ends with Gildersleeve launching a mayoral run (and immediately trying to ditch an important meeting with a congressman for the sake of his social life.)

The relationship angle is the most prominent part of the set and also the most frustrating. Once again, this has nothing to do with Radio Archives, but with the episodes missing from circulation. Of the twenty-seven episodes that aired during this time period, there are only twelve in circulation, and the fourteen missing episodes come in chunks of three, seven, and four weeks, so you feel like you’ve missed a few important points in the ongoing romance angle.

Gildersleeve, as a great sitcom hero, manages to provide plenty of situations that lead to misunderstandings, mostly in understandable ways. He’s non-committal and wants to avoid making up his mind, and when he does, he manages to say the wrong thing and botch things up. And by the end of this set, due to his indecision, rivals are emerging for him in both women’s lives, so maybe we’ll write about a love pentagon in the next set.  Of course, he’s not the only one to cause problems. In one episode, Leila tricks Gildersleeve’s cook, Birdie (Lillian Randolph), into letting her take Gildersleeve’s roast. A major issue in an era defined by meat rationing!

The only real issue with Gildersleeve that seems a bit too stupid to be funny is that he keeps actively working to bring Lelia and Eve together for social occasions. They don’t like each other, it’s awkward, and ends uncomfortably for him. There’s no logical in-universe reason to do it. It just makes the story a bit convenient for the writers.

Still, it doesn’t happen that often in twelve episodes, and the series is enjoyable, with a solid ongoing cast. And, as always, Radio Archives does a beautiful job with the transfers. If you’ve enjoyed past GIldersleeve sets, you’ll enjoy this one, even while wishing we could hear all the missing episodes in this collection.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been posting reviews that focus on Batman actors in other detective and mystery programs as part of our Amazing World of Radio Summer Series. However, we’re getting creative this week. The only thing this week’s villain has was a brief cameo as himself, in the second-to-last episode of Kojak. So I decided it’d be nice to review a CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode with another Batman villain who didn’t appear during the Golden Age of Radio, but did some work during the era of radio revival. I’m referring to Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in seasons one and two of Batman.

In the March 1974 episode, a woman (Newmar) grows alarmed when her father becomes increasingly scared and paranoid. She summons her fiancé (Mandel Kramer) back from his trip to China to help sort things out. The fiancé checks with his millionaire future father-in-law and finds that he’s joined the Prometheus Society, a secret society that wants to bring back moral order to the world by doing stuff (making movies, releasing books) that they’ve not actually done with the donations they’ve received. They are led by a man who claims the ability to control fire, which he demonstrates by setting himself on fire without being burned at every meeting.

The millionaire future father-in-law has been commanded to fork over a million-dollar donation. One of his fellow society members had declined to do so, only to have his feet catch fire while he was at home, leaving such severe burns on his leg that it put him in a wheelchair. The fiancé calls in an old Marine buddy from Vietnam, who had since become a private detective, to help sort of everything out.

All in all, this is a solid mystery. There’s some great atmosphere and a good puzzle throughout that’s well-acted and even has one shocking surprise towards the end of the second act. The ending is harsh, with rough justice being arranged in a way that reminds you that this isn’t the Golden Age of Radio, although it has a strong “moral” about the danger of playing with fire.

My big complaint is that there’s not a ton for Julie Newmar to do in this. Her character brings in the fiancé, and her father reveals what’s going to the fiancé on the condition the fiancé not tell his adult daughter because I guess she can’t handle it. After this, she gets two scenes with nothing to do. It’s a waste of a talented actress, who had a significant number of credits to her name. I can only imagine that this script wasn’t written with her mind, but she happened to be available at the time and took the work, which usually amounted to half a day for a modest wage. On the bright side, she didn’t have to do much work for it.

Overall, other than the waste of Julie Newmar and a so