Before the invention of television, while the movie industry certainly had a degree of cultural relevance, the primary entertainment industry of all America (and, via Coca-Colonization, the rest of the world to varying degrees) was radio programs, which are now referred to as “old time radio” (OTR) to distinguish them stylistically from modern podcasts and NPR and the like. The OTR period is generally regarded as having ended in the 1960s, shortly before The Twilight Zone and Star Trek helped to redefine television as a concept, and its beginning is somewhere in the 1920s, during the heyday of “pulp” adventure stories which predated comics. One of the most popular genres of the OTR and Pulp eras was what could loosely be termed the “thriller” genre, sort of a midpoint between detective mysteries and what we would today consider horror; the well-defined tropes of “thriller” comics and radio shows included the use of some sort of host character, like the Whistler, the Crypt Keeper, or the “Man in Black” from the program Suspense.
All this being said, one of the less notable “thriller” programs ran over the summer of 1945, The Sealed Book (written mostly by David Kogan and Robert Arthur Junior, who are better known for the Mysterious Traveler, another program of this type which ran for much longer). Most episodes of the Sealed Book have a format where the Narrator speaks of a silent “Keeper of the Book” turning the pages of the titular volume…but for the first five episodes, there were actually two narrators, and the one who would stay with the program was initially the far less talkative one. The actual narrator would introduce the story, but when the “vault” was opened and the Keeper carried the Book out, he actually spoke, using a stereotypical Arabic accent for the period (similar voices are heard in Chandu the Magician, an OTR program which is famous for inspiring the creation of Doctor Strange).
For these five episodes, the Keeper actually did most of the talking, setting up and advancing the story between the scenes that were voice-acted by guest stars. Presumably paying a second voice actor to bring the Keeper to life every episode was shortly deemed to be too expensive, and the format of the show was restructured so that only one narrator needed to actually exist. And some of the stories, both before and after the switch, are pretty decent in their dated and cliche-heavy way, but to me the real story here is how reminiscent the original Keeper character is to what little we know about Grimm in Disparation and a few relevant Letters Pages. Obviously Grimm is more focused on fairy tales in most of the cards we see, but he wouldn’t seem out of place in OTR thrillers, and the specific way the Keeper talks about his Book (which, like that of Destiny of the Endless in the later Sandman comics, is a book magically containing “all the tales that will ever be told, including some that have not yet come to pass”) strikes me as very Grimm-reminiscent.
Here’s a link to a YouTube video which is a 10-hour livestream, featuring all but the last two episodes of the Sealed Book, with the five Keeper-voiced episodes right up top. Give an episode or two a listen, and tell me that the Keeper doesn’t sound almost exactly like Grimm looks on his flipside?
