2000 Plus spot ad from March 26 1951


2000 Plus spot ad from Dec. 17 1951




H.G. Wells' original book,
The War of The Worlds,
published in1898



Huxley's Brave New World First Edition copy from 1932



Heinlein's ironic Space tale The Green Hills of Earth first published in the February 8 1947 edition of TheSaturday Evening Post

BRIGHT SCIENTISTS   

     The general message of "2000 Plus," whose title refers to the 21st century, is about on a level with that of "Amazing Stories."  The idea is that scientists are terribly terribly bright but that you have to keep an eye on them. They get possessed by devils from time to time, and, unless carefully watched, they'll smash things up—whole planets, preferably. 

     One of the recent stories, something called "The Diamond Helmet," opened with the statement:  "It is the spring of the year 2050.  The trees are budding, the flowers are bursting but fear is present.  A crisis has arisen."  It,sounds, in fact, exactly like right now (except that the flowers in my vicinity aren't bursting).  The difference is that the crisis is rather more deadly than our present ones, unlikely as that sounds.

     The planet Nocturne—I love that name—is hurtling toward the earth at the rate of 50,000 light years a minute (or something like that).  The problem is to deflect it.  As you can see our own crises are relatively minor.  The task is entrusted to one of these science fellows, name of Martin Goodhue, who is monstrously bright but suffers from a weak heart which prohibits further interplanetary travel .  They transplant a new heart into him.  Then his lungs give out.  They equip him with a new pair.  Pretty soon, he acquires new kidneys and endocrin glands and practically a whole new body.  By this time he's 102—that planet is still hurtling toward the earth during all this—and he's lost all interest in stopping it.  In fact, he's fallen in love with a young pretty, one-fifth his age, and is naturally reluctant to tangle with a planet, an operation that will take his life.

LOVE STEPS IN

     Goodhue is finally undone by his monstrous brain.  It grows too large for his skull which has to be supplanted by a diamond skull, so hideous his girl friend runs out on him.  That brings him around.  He spins off into space, pushes Nocturne aside and perishes nobly.  As you can see, love still manages to mess things up even in the highest scientific circles.

     So does greed.  One of the "2000 Plus" stories was about a scientist — the exact science is never specified, they're just scientists — who had discovered how to "nucleate" dead tissue; how, in short, to bring corpses back to life.  The corpse he selected for his first experiment was that of a Pharoah who had been dead 2000 years.  His purpose was to discover where the Pharoah had buried his treasure.  The Pharoah, though, justifiably indignant at having his 2000-year rest disturbed, stabbed him to death.

     Much of the action takes place in outer space, the scientists being bored with mother earth, and the intercom system is alive with little cries of "Blast off," "Space Ship JX2 — calling earth."  My favorite was one in which Space Ship Q3 reported gravely: "We have just passed Saturn and are on our way to Jupiter."  Bon Voyage.

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Background

2000 Plus was the first adult science-fiction drama genre program to reach a mass audience over Radio. We qualify that by rushing to stipulate that the sci-fi programs that preceded it were, for the most part either juvenile space adventures or by way of exploratory documentaries on modern science of the era. We further qualify this by way of citing the science fiction dramas that arrived in rapid succession after the Mutual Broadcasting System aired its first 2000 Plus on March 15, 1950:

• April 8, 1950 Dimension X
• April 24, 1955 X Minus One
• December 4, 1957 Exploring Tomorrow

One can quibble about the relative level of maturity presented in CBS' two attempts with Exploring Space in 1937 and 1941, and of course we had Buck Rogers in The 25th Century airing as early as 1932 and as late as 1947 in various levels of development, as well as The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures Of Flash Gordon beginning in 1935. We're convinced we could find proponents of all three of those preceding space adventures that would argue most passionately about the maturity and farsightedness of their story arcs.

What made adult science fiction adult was the sophistication of the situations, plot lines and invariably very adult moral dilemmas posed in their scripts. The moral consequences of, for example, story arcs revolving about the complete destruction of mankind, the degree to which control over robots might--or might not--be attained, the earliest questions about cloning, and issues regarding population control, weren't really mid-America family fare by the 1950s--let alone between 1932 and 1950.

Producer/Creator Sherman H. Dreyer had already aired a modern science program for Mutual in 1945. His Exploring the Unknown (1945-1947) may very well have been the spark for his eventual development of 2000 Plus. There are some similarities between the two productions, but any comparison must necessarily be by contrast. Exploring the Unknown raised a topic each week touching on, for their time, the more cutting edge science-impacted topics of the era, in various physical and social sciences: psychology and parapsychology, early nuclear medicine, ethnic and racial unrest, and entymology, as examples.

Given some of the more provocative examples cited from Exploring the Unknown, it's not much of a leap to imagine Dreyer's concept of a more dramatic platform upon which to base many of those same explorations as they might logically evolve in the future of each of those disciplines. Indeed, Dreyer presented and promoted 2000 Plus as a hypothesis of how the moral issues surrounding the evolution of man--and mankind's science developments--in the year 2000 and beyond might take shape.

Many of those very issues had been explored by contemporary--indeed, even turn of the century--fiction writers as early as 1898. We might well cite H.G. Wells' War of The Worlds (1898) as one example. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World had first been published in 1932. Robert Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth had first been published in the February 8, 1947 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. All three seminal masterworks raised many of the same questions addressed in 2000 Plus.

Then, of course, there were the many science fiction digests that were gaining popular acceptance throughout the 1930s to 1950s in their own right.

2000 Plus and America's fascination with adult science fiction

It's also worth noting that the amazing scientific breakthroughs from the World War II era also helped fuel America's fascination with scientific advances--on virtually all fronts. One is reminded of the many 'miracle' drugs that arrived--of necessity--driven by hundreds of thousands of war injuries. Jet and rocket propulsion, of course, made exponential advances during World War II. And of course, it was World War II that ushered in the Atomic Age. Fertile soil, indeed, to fuel the imagination of post-War America.

The Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) wasn't necessarily the most innovative network in Radio, but they did often manage to beat the 'big three' to market with many of Radio's most interesting genre programming, especially during the heyday of Don Lee-Mutual out on the West Coast. 2000 Plus did, indeed, beat NBC to the table by about a month. Dimension X followed closely on its heels. One might well conjecture that if MBS had brought 2000 Plus to the air even six months earlier, it might well have enjoyed the popular acclaim of NBC's Dimension X, for example.

2000 Plus, for its part, clearly had all the makings of a truly exceptional science fiction canon. The sound engineering, in particular, was every bit the equal of anything heard previously on ABC, CBS or NBC. The music scoring for 2000 Plus was also quite effective and forward-looking for the era. An east coast production from beginning to end, the series tapped some of New York's finest dramatic talent for its productions. Indeed, the pace, direction, plot arcs and all-around finish of its productions were every bit the equal of any of MBS's finest popular productions from the early 1940s.

In spite of John Crosby's ascerbic observations (above) of science dramas in general, America was clearly ready, willing and able to embrace mainstream science fiction of a more provocative, adult nature. Though 2000 Plus was never quite the equal of the competing sci-fi dramas that succeeded it, it acquitted itself overall. Many of its stories had no equal in either Dimension X or X Minus One five years later. The other limiting factor in comparing 2000 Plus to either Dimension X or X Minus One is in its comparitive scarcity.

As popular as science fiction was during the era, it's quite plausible to imagine any number of private recordings of 2000 Plus -- or even transcriptions -- in the holdings of some of the hobby's oldest collectors. Sadly, only fifteen to seventeen exemplars have found their way to popular circulation. Given its relative scarcity, we're willing to withhold any further comparison to the science fiction dramas that succeeded it, until more exemplars surface. But if the examples in circulation are representative, we're certain that 2000 Plus will again find its day in the sun--or should that be multiple suns . . . . :)

Bryna Raeburn, Gilbert Mack, Mercer McLeod, William Keene, Arnold Robertson, William Griffis, Gregory Morton, Nat Polen, Merrill Joels, Joan Shea, Helen Shea, Charles Smith, Ralph Bell, Luis Van Rooten, Ken Williams, Ronald Liss, Ronnie Jacoby, Ed Latimer, John Griggs, Sandy Fickert, Gilbert Mack, Henry Morell, Hester Sondergaard, Joseph Julian, Lon Clark, Milton Kaye