Superman on Radio in 1939!

History tells us that, following successful runs in comics books and comic strips, the new, wildly popular Superman character started appearing on radio in 1940.  Michael J. Hayde, author of Flights of Fancy: The Unauthorized but True Story of Radio & TV’s Adventures of Superman, is certain of that date, noting in an interview, “Just last year, a radio-themed book mentioned a ‘limited regional run’ of ‘Superman’ radio shows during 1939. That’s a myth. The four episodes that have been cited as ‘evidence’ of such a run were audition recordings that never aired. Superman’s radio debut was during the week of February 12, 1940, period.”
 
But maybe this question deserves a closer look.  It appears that there were three broadcasts of the Superman radio show on station KSD in St. Louis in 1939, months before the program’s official premiere the following February. The specific dates are September 5 and 6 and November 4, 1939. Why those dates? The answer is that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was getting ready to start running the Superman daily comic strip on Monday, September 11 and the Superman Sunday comic strip on Sunday, November 5 and used the broadcasts to promote the strips.
 
The tie-in was obvious, as a display ad run in the Post-Dispatch on Friday, November 3 announcing the Sunday strip urges readers to “be sure to hear SUPERMAN on KSD at 6:00 P.M. Saturday, Nov 4.” 

And the Post-Dispatch’s radio listing for the show describes it as a “special dramatization of the thrilling adventure strip that starts in color in the Sunday Post-Dispatch tomorrow.” KSD, by the way, was owned by the Post-Dispatch.

And here are the two earlier listings for radio broadcasts tied to the launch of the Superman daily comic strip on September 11.

So what did these radio dramas consist of? The first thing that comes to mind is the aforementioned four audition shows, well-known to Superman aficionados, recorded in 1939 to convince advertisers and radio stations to sponsor and carry the show. But these recordings would have had some problems, for example the fact they mentioned a bogus sponsor (“Blank Corporation”) and products (“Blanko” and “Blankorene”), not to mention the cliff hanger endings. Editing out such extraneous content would have been more difficult in those days, as recordings were made direct-to-disc. And everything I've ever read about the auditions says they never aired.
 
It’s possible that these were live shows with different actors that used the same scripts as the auditions. But that’s just speculation. Without further evidence it’s impossible to know.  What we can say, though, is that Superman appeared on radio on a local St. Louis station in 1939, months before his show’s official start in February 1940.