Adventures in time and space ... told in future tense!
Dimension X was an anthology science-fiction series, broadcast by NBC from 1950-1951. It was one of the first 'adult' science-fiction radio programmes - as opposed to the more juvenile and simplistic likes of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon - dealing with themes of life and death, science and religion, war and politics, and man's place in the universe. It was also the precursor series to the longer running, and perhaps better-known, X Minus One. Many episodes were adapted from stories by the major science fiction writers of the day, including Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Heinlein, and were generally quite faithful to the originals. Despite all the social and technological changes that have occurred since these stories were first broadcast, many still stand up well today.
N.B. A large number of Dimension X episodes were remade by X Minus One, and in the reviews of these episodes I have simply provided links to my reviews of the X Minus One adaptations - by and large, the scripts were reused with few substantial changes to the plots, so it would be redundant to review both. Some OTR fans prefer the Dimension X versions over the X Minus One ones, and others vice versa. Dimension X episodes have the advantage of usually being a little longer, as X Minus One adaptations of the same scripts were often trimmed to reduce the running times; however, the surviving recordings of X Minus One can be of higher audio quality and, personally, I tend to find the productions to be (on average) superior. In particular, given how most probably listen to these programmes today - downloading the whole run of a series' episodes in a single set - I'd recommend to anyone new to OTR to go for X Minus One, as this will give you over twice as many stories at once, including the majority of those made by Dimension X. It's then easy enough to pick out the dozen or so Dimension X episodes that were not remade by X Minus One and listen to these individually. Of course, feel free to ignore my advice and just listen to whichever series you prefer!
There were 50 episodes in total (equalling 46 individual stories, taking into account remakes).
** ALL EPISODES REVIEWED **
