{"id":37967,"date":"2024-02-03T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2024-02-03T06:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=37967"},"modified":"2024-02-02T10:51:44","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T16:51:44","slug":"audio-drama-review-the-red-panda-adventures-season-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/audio-drama-review-the-red-panda-adventures-season-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Audio Drama Review: The Red Panda Adventures, Season One"},"content":{"rendered":"

A version<\/a> of this article was posted in 2017.<\/p>\n

The Red Panda Adventures<\/em> by Decoder Ring Theater was one of the earliest of the new podcast audio dramas to be released in recent years. It launched for the first time in October 2005, with a new episode airing every two weeks until December, with the second half of the series airing every two weeks beginning in April 2006.<\/p>\n

The Red Panda Adventures<\/em> is set in the 1930s in Toronto (where the series was produced). The series is a mash-up between The Green Hornet<\/em> and The Shadow<\/em> radio series while adding its own unique improvements.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like both series in that the hero is a wealthy young man, though it leans more towards The Shadow<\/em> in that The Red Panda (Greg Taylor) has no active business concerns in his dual identity that we\u2019re told about.<\/p>\n

The Red Panda is like The Shadow in that he has strange hypnotic powers. However, unlikeTthe Shadow, he doesn\u2019t limit his mind-control powers to a single trick of invisibility. He creates all manner of elaborate mental illusions, such as making the villain see multiple versions of himself. It\u2019s a much more imaginative take on the idea. The villains also bear a strong resemblance to The Shadow\u2019s big, over-the-top megalomaniacs.<\/p>\n

The Green Hornet<\/em> influences can be seen in the hero\u2019s super-fast car and crime-fighting gadgets, as well as the suspicious attitude by which he\u2019s viewed by police. However, unlike the Green Hornet, the Red Panda doesn\u2019t try to pass himself off as a criminal mastermind.<\/p>\n

Of course, the Red Panda goes beyond what the original mystery men of the 1930s did on radio, with a greater sense of superheroics, and the series intro actually refers to him as Canada\u2019s greatest superhero.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most unique thing about The Red Panda<\/em> is his sidekick, Kit Baxter (aka. The Flying Squirrel) played by Clarissa Der Nederlanden Taylor. She\u2019s a very well-written and well-rounded character. She\u2019s tough and more prone to using physical violence than the Red Panda, occasionally getting carried away with it.<\/p>\n

Her relationship with the Red Panda is complicated. Like the female assistants of many golden-age heroes, she pines for him, while he feigns cluelessness about her feelings in this first season. Yet you also get a strong sense of the Red Panda being a mentor figure to her, and also being protective of her without being smothering. The dynamic between the two is probably the strength of the series.<\/p>\n

In terms of the plots, this first series has a lot of standard, boilerplate stories. There\u2019s the episode with someone impersonating the Red Panda, there\u2019s the episode with a mysterious ghost ship, and the episode with the cursed house, and the one where a hunter decides to hunt the most deadly game of all: The Red Panda. Probably the most interesting and original episode is \u201cThe Devil\u2019s Due,\u201d where the Red Panda investigates a series of deaths where the victims sold their souls to the Devil, and he\u2019s here to collect\u2026or is he? \u00a0Even though most of the plots are well-worn, they\u2019re also well-executed and the strength of the characterization helps the stories to work. While later seasons would be more innovative, this season serves to establish the characters and their world.<\/p>\n

The tone of this first season is relatively light. While there are some scary moments, as well as a few violent ones, the series doesn\u2019t try for the constant dark and foreboding feel of\u00a0The Shadow.\u00a0<\/em>It also isn\u2019t designed in such a way that you\u2019re likely to forget that you\u2019re listening to a production made in the twenty-first century rather than one in the 1930s, like many of the early episodes of Harry Nile.\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a clear homage to the Golden Age of Radio, but it is also a modern production. At the same time, it\u2019s not goofy or a parody like the original Red Panda Universe (a topic for another time).<\/p>\n

If the first season had any weakness, it is the sound design, which on occasion doen\u2019t support the show and the epic scale of the adventures portrayed. But doesn\u2019t detract too much from the series because of the strong characterization and also because it played off Golden Age Radio Dramas, where the quality of sound effects and sound design really could vary.<\/p>\n

Overall, this is a very strong start to a much-beloved Internet series.<\/p>\n

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0<\/p>\n

The first season of the Red Panda Adventures is available for free on the\u00a0Decoder Ring Theatre website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A version of this article was posted in 2017. The Red Panda Adventures by Decoder Ring Theater was one of the earliest of the new podcast audio dramas to be released in recent years. It launched for the first time in October 2005, with a new episode airing every two weeks until December, with the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[132,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-drama-review","category-golden-age-article"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-9Sn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37967"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37990,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37967\/revisions\/37990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}