The run
This upload contains 88 episodes of the Old Time Radio program, Gang Busters. The show, a police-based dramatic crime anthology, ran from 1935-1957 and focused on dramatizing crimes from police files. The show also broadcast alerts, known as Gang Buster Clues, of suspects wanted by police around the country.
Restoration quality — measured from the surviving files
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
12 dated broadcasts across 16 years on the air, with 7 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Restored broadcasts from 1940, in original transmission order.
1 Nov 1940 · 30 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
9 Jun 1944 · 30 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
8 Dec 1945 · 42 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
11 May 1946 · 26 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
6 Dec 1947 · 25 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
28 Feb 1948 · 22 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
12 Jun 1948 · 24 min
Transferred from the Internet Archive item “gang-busters-1955-04-02-885-the-case-of-the-mistreated-lady”, part of the Old Time Radio Researchers public-domain collections.
2 Oct 1948 · 45 min
Originally broadcast on ABC, 2 October 1948. Restored from the Old Time Radio archives.
Same night on the air
Everything else the archive still holds from the night of 12 Jun 1948.
The Adventures of Frank Merriwell brought Gilbert Patten's dime-novel hero — the clean-living Yale sportsman — to NBC, first in the mid-1930s and again in a Saturday-morning run from 1946 to 1949 with Lawson Zerbe in the title role.
Broadcast on NBC Blue. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio Researchers collection (public domain).
Also on ABC
Other series the network carried while Gang Busters was on the air.
Same seasons
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
First-person narration, a case that walks in the door, and a city that talks back. Marlowe, Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar turned detection into a listening form.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
Chosen by the same editors.
