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Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12841935)

by radiofan » Fri May 13, 2016 6:41 am

CHICKENMAN TURNS 50
By Radio Ink - May 10, 2016

4-18-2016

BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ED RYAN

He was born in Williamsport, PA, in 1933, and by age 16, Dick Orkin was ready for radio. He began as a
fill-in announcer at WKOK in Sunbury, PA. After earning his BA in speech and theater from Franklin &
Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, he attended the Yale School of Drama, then returned to Lancaster
to become the news director at WLAN in 1959. Orkin would move on to KYW in Cleveland, and in 1967
he took a job as production director at WCFL in Chicago, where he created Chickenman.

Chickenman chronicled the exploits of a crime-fighting “white-winged warrior” and his secret identity,
mild-mannered shoe salesman Benton Harbor. It’s a short-form radio series many of you probably
remember hearing or even playing on your station. Chickenman’s 250-plus episodes have been
syndicated around the world and can still be heard on Internet radio and on some AM and FM stations,
making it the longest-running radio serial of all time. At WCFL Orkin also produced more than 300
episodes of another popular serial, The Secret Adventures of the Tooth Fairy.
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Inspired by the commercial parodies on Stan Freberg’s and Bob & Ray’s radio shows, Orkin created the
Famous Radio Ranch in 1973 to produce his own comedic radio spots. Stationed in California since
1978, the Radio Ranch has produced hundreds of memorable ads for a variety of clients, ranging from
Time magazine to First American Bank to the Gap, and has collected more than 200 awards in the
process.

Dick Orkin, one of radio’s most creative minds, was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in
2014.

RI: How and why did you create Chickenman?

Orkin: In 1966, ABC Television decided they wanted to re-release Batman and Robin, but they wanted
to do their own version of it. So they did what is now called the campy version of Batman, which
means it was more of a spoof — it was an excess of the radio serial of the superhero.

Soon after that, my program director at WCFL in Chicago suggested that I might do something
comparable to that — not necessarily Batman and Robin, but I could choose my own superhero. My
first choice, after thinking about it for a while, was going to be Gorilla Man, because when I was born,
in 1933, that was the introduction of King Kong. I thought Gorilla Man would be fun, but then it
dawned on me that something as scary as a gorilla wasn’t going to work as a nerdy, nervous parody of
a superhero, and the idea was to do something funny.

After reviewing a bunch of plausible animals that I could use in a costume for that version, I came up
with Chickenman. I said to myself at the time, whatever I do, it can’t be the standard superhero. He
needs to be a little on the chicken side — I said, “Aha, chicken!”

RI: So you break out the pen and paper and hit the production studio?

Orkin: Well, they had engineers back then. WFCL was owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor. It
was a fairly large station in Chicago and had a lot of competition. They decided that they wanted to
do it full-throttle with production. So I took one of the DJs, Jim Runyon, who was the morning man,
and our traffic girl, Jane [Roberts] Runyon, who later became his wife, and I just started writing.
That’s how it happened. I came in in the morning and took out my typewriter and just started writing
episodes one through 260, over a period of approximately four years. They were 2 1/2 to three
minutes long.

As an aside, Jane rode a motorcycle around Chicago. Why she did that to check on traffic, I have
absolutely no idea. But she looked good on the motorcycle. She wore short shorts. She got a lot of
attention, and I think she was on a motorcycle because she looked good and then just happened to
stick her nose up in the air and catch the weather and then report it back to the station on the radio.

RI: Was WCFL a music station at that time?

Orkin: WCFL was for the most part a music station. But a contemporary music station. Not hard rock, a
soft rock station. They were also looking for comedy features they could run between the music cuts,
and that was when Ken Draper, the PD, suggested I do something with a good comedy serial inspired
by Batman and Robin. And that’s what I did. Sometimes I wrote two episodes a day.

RI: What was it like to try to get such a long feature syndicated on music stations?

Orkin: Talk radio was coming on; the impulse to do talk on radio in addition to music started around
that time. Then they wanted some comedy features. A number of stations, particularly in Chicago,
decided to do their own two- to 2 1/2-minute features. Mine was certainly not the first one, but I
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think it was probably the most widely syndicated once it got on the air at WCFL, and then probably
the one that was heard more than any other in the country.

RI: How many stations did it eventually get syndicated on?

Orkin: I would say about 1,500.

RI: What kind of feedback did you get from stations and listeners at the time?

Orkin: From the moment it started on WCFL in Chicago, there was a tremendous response to it. People
loved the characters. The comedy I was using was not cartoon comedy. I just had normal people in
conversation, chatting about office matters. In this case, the office matters happened to be about
fighting crime and evil. There was a commissioner in the office, who was sort of like any other
commissioner, except he was a little bit more inept at his job. In fact, he spent most of his time
coloring in a coloring book.

Then there was Miss Helfinger, who was the commissioners’ secretary, who was not happy about
Chickenman being there, and they were constantly at cross purposes in everything they did. It was an
office situation, with normal-sounding people talking about silly things in the office.

RI: Where did you come up with the ideas for the episodes?

Orkin: (Laughing) I think it was probably whatever I had to eat before going to bed the night before.
That’s a tough one, because the idea of doing comedy episodes has been something that has been a
vital part of my experience ever since I was 16 or 17 years old. Anything that I was asked to tackle,
including a Sunday school presentation, I had a tendency, probably because of radio, when I was age
13, 14, 15, to write comedy.

There were a lot of comedy features on radio, particularly at night. I was so inspired by radio, and I
knew that ultimately I would like to do that someday. It wasn’t difficult to pick up the idea of doing
comedy on radio.

In the case of Chickenman, there was a television serial called Highway Patrol, with Broderick
Crawford. Do you remember that?

RI: No, not really.

Orkin: Well, very few people do. Broderick Crawford played a very serious highway patrolman who was
so pompous and so serious that he knew how everything was going to work. He was an extreme version
of a detective or a policeman, except he was extraordinarily pompous and sure about everything he
said and did. That show, more than anything else, I laughed instead of taking it seriously, so that
probably was the beginning of the Chickenman idea for me — that is, to get someone to take himself
so damn seriously that he never does anything really correctly. That was Benton Harbor, a shoe
salesman on the weekdays and fought crime and/or evil on the weekends.

RI: Were you surprised at how many stations you were able to get the show syndicated on?

Orkin: Yes, in the very beginning I was, because I had expected that maybe 20, 30, 40 stations might
be interested in Chickenman. Little did I know that the syndicator out of Dallas, Spot Productions, had
the capacity to syndicate the series all across the country. After that, we had other syndicators, and
we managed to constantly promote it and syndicate to stations everywhere, including Europe. It was
translated into several other languages, German, Dutch. It’s in Australia right now, and it’s very big in
Australia.

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RI: It was on cassette back then, correct?

Orkin: Yes, it was on cassettes at that time, not discs, not CDs. Sometimes it was reel-to-reel. We had
big reel-to-reel sets that we would send out to some stations from WCFL.

RI: Even though there hasn’t been a new episode in 45 years, are there stations still playing
Chickenman today?

Orkin: Yes. I think there’s about 30-35 stations. 


RI: Did Chickenman make you money?

Orkin: Oh, yes. We did very well.

RI: After Chickenman, you launched the Radio Ranch.

Orkin: Yes. When I left the radio station and we stopped producing Chickenman, I opened a company
with a friend, Barry Stone. He and I went into business together with a company called Creative
Monopoly, where we sold in Chicago to retailers as well as large corporations. Skil Saws was one of our
clients. Before we knew it, we were in the business of writing and producing radio commercials.

Read the full story and Orkin's comments on radio today at:
http://radioink.com/2016/05/10/chickenman-turns-50/ (http://radioink.com/2016/05/10/chickenman-
turns-50/)

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Re: Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12841936)

by radiofan » Fri May 13, 2016 6:46 am

Chickenman episode #1, the origins of Chickenman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgMOOPxkYVk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgMOOPxkYVk)

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Re: Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12841938)

by jon » Fri May 13, 2016 7:29 am

This might be a good place and time to try and remember where and when you first heard
Chickenman. I may as well start.

I don't believe I actually heard an episode of the original series until long past its prime, when Robert
O. Smith was airing them as PD and Morning Man on KTAC-850 Tacoma around 1972 or 1973, after CJJC
left the frequency.

However, I was lucky enough to hear CFUN air the entire first side of the Chickenman LP when it was
first issued. As part of their Sunday morning comedy show when they started easing back on the paid
religious programming that had previously been airing until Noon Sunday mornings.

As a collector of radio station record surveys ("charts"), I am pretty certain that I had heard of
Chickenman from ads on the back of charts long before CFUN aired the album.

Speaking with those who listened to Edmonton radio, I understand that Chickenman was aired here
soon after it debuted on WCFL Chicago and was syndicated.

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Re: Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12841940)

by radiofan » Fri May 13, 2016 12:36 pm

I first heard Chickenman on KJR or maybe KPUG likely in late 1966. Sometime in 1967, CKLG started
running it on Roy Hennessy's morning show and they ran it for a year or so. Later, they ran The Tooth
Fairy and then The Stoned Ranger.

In the late 1980's, CFMI ran the original Chickenman series (In a box somewhere I have all the reel to
reel tapes from that run).

Also in the 1980's and early 90's, Dick Orkin's Radio Ranch did a ton of spots for various businesses and
housing developments in Western Canada.

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Re: Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12841992)

by radiofan » Wed May 18, 2016 6:42 pm
Today I was reminded by someone who worked at CJOR in the mid 1960's that CJOR was the first
station in Vancouver to run Chickenman.

They picked it up when it was first in syndication and it ran on Monty McFarlane's morning show.

Maybe it was CJOR that I first heard it on and not KJR or KPUG.

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Re: Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12842004)

by Mike Cleaver » Thu May 19, 2016 8:59 pm
We quickly jumped on the "Chickenman" series at CJOC in Lethbridge in 68 or 69, sponsored of course,
by A%W Chubby Chicken. We did a series of remotes with the local A&W, where the franchisee was a
huge fan of the station and did many different promotions with us while I was there.

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Re: Chickenman Turns 50 (#p12842010)

by jon » Fri May 20, 2016 10:44 am

Mike Cleaver wrote:

We quickly jumped on the "Chickenman" series at CJOC in Lethbridge in 68 or 69, sponsored
of course, by A%W Chubby Chicken. We did a series of remotes with the local A&W, where
the franchisee was a huge fan of the station and did many different promotions with us
while I was there.

This might also explain why Chickenman was heard in Edmonton at the time. CJOC and CJCA had the
same owner. And the A&Ws in both Lethbridge and Edmonton may even have been the same
franchisee in those years. Earl Fuller, founder of Earl's restaurants, was an A&W franchisee in
Edmonton initially (1950s), eventually growing to own about 30 locations, so he may well have owned
Lethbridge locations by the time that Chickenman came on the scene.

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