In 1946 Bing Crosby was the king of media. He was the movie star, the pop star and his radio show was reaching a third of american living rooms each week. But then, it all started to fall apart. His ratings were plummeting and his fans were fleeing. Bing however, was not going down without a fight.
Today, the story of how Bing Crosby and some stolen Nazi technology won his audience back, changed media forever and accidentally broke reality along the way.
Mixtape is reported, produced, scored and sound designed by, me, Simon Adler with original music throughout by me. Invaluable reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen.
Special thanks to: Michele Hilmes, Pete Hammer, Rich Flores, Mara Mills, Jonathan Sterne, Claudia Mewes. Though their voices weren’t in the piece, input certainly was.
And to Mary Crosby and Robert Bader, for opening up Bing’s archive for us and enabling us to fill this episode with so much of Bing’s music.
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Selected Shorts
Memory and Forgetting
Small Potatoes
The Distance of the Moon
The Moon Itself
Short Cuts: Drawn Onward
Finding Emilie
Throughline: Dare to Dissent
Staph Retreat
Hold On
G: The World's Smartest Animal
Cheating Death
Breaking Newsve About Zoozve
G: Relative Genius
Zoozve
The Living Room
Our Little Stupid Bodies
Stochasticity
Zeroworld
Numbers
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Hidden Brain
This American Life
Slate Debates
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
The Incomparable Mothership