Shorty Bell
Broadcast · 1948 · Seasonal
CBS
CBS · 1948–1948
Broadcasts
4
Cadence
Seasonal
Rated
PG
Since
1948
The run
- Network
- CBS
- Years active
- 1948–1948
- Surviving broadcasts
- 4
- Genre
- drama
Shorty Bell ran on CBS in 1948 with Mickey Rooney as an eager cub newspaper reporter, produced and directed by William Spier of Suspense and scored by Bernard Herrmann. Expensively mounted but poorly rated, it left the air within months, and only a handful of transfers survive — the March 1948 audition record among them. Public-domain transfers held by the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio collection.
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
What survives, year by year
2 dated broadcasts across 79 years on the air, with 78 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. Dead Air · 14 Jul 2026
- 2. The Long Silence · 21 Jul 2026
- 3. A Room Above the Street · 28 Jul 2026
- 01
Signal at Midnight
4 Aug 2026 · 1h 1m
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
- 02
A Room Above the Street
28 Jul 2026 · 24 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
- 03
The Long Silence
21 Jul 2026 · 39 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
- 04
Dead Air
14 Jul 2026 · 54 min
The one everybody argues about.
Also on CBS
CBS in 1948–1948
Other series the network carried while Shorty Bell was on the air.
Same seasons
drama on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
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