Helps and Hints for selected activities in Records of History World War Two Series: Wartime Entertainment

Page 1 “Can you Match the Movie Stars to Their Movie?”

You can use an internet search engine to help with this page (search by film title). If you prefer to browse a more comprehensive listing of films released during the war years, you could start with the listings at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940s_in_film.

Page 2 “Wartime Radio Programming: DRAMAS”

Try your luck at unscrambling the words first, but then considering browsing the list of old radio programs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-time_radio_programs.

Page 4 “Movie Chapter Serials”

Check out the listing of titles at IMDB’s website (at https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056855917/).

Serials, also known as “Movie serials,” “Film serials,” “Cliff-hangers,” or “Chapter plays,” typically were related to popular characters in fictional pulp magazines, comic books and newspaper comic strips.

They were lengthy films (usually 3 or 4 hours in run time) broken into a number of 12-to-15-minute segments called “chapters” or “episodes.” Each chapter was screened at the same theater for one week and ended with a cliffhanger in which the hero and heroine were in a perilous situation with little apparent chance of escape. The story then continued throughout the following week with the next chapter.

A typical Saturday at the movies included a chapter of at least one serial along with animated cartoons, newsreels, and one or two feature films.

If you wish to sample some of the classic movie serials, you can find many of them on Youtube.

Page 6 “Most Popular Western Movie Stars of 1942”

You can find lots of great info about the western stars at “The Old Corral” website at http://b-westerns.com/.

Page 8 “Newsreel Photo Quiz”

Try using your preferred internet search engine to lookup these names. Images for each of them should be easy to find!

Page 16 “1942 Abbott and Costello Movies”

A nice filmography of Abbot and Costello films is available on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_and_Costello. You can also explore more of the film careers of Abbott and Costello at the website, “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Internet”: https://www.abbottandcostello.net/index.html.

Page 21 “Armed Forces Radio Service”

For some descriptive info on these AFRS programs, see “Radio for the Troops, A Touch of Home” under the article for “World War II on the Radio” at https://www.otrcat.com/world-war-ii-on-the-radio.