Cooper announces story "The Big Strike" next week?

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Posted Aug 08, 2014 - 2:59 AM:

Something very odd which I just now noticed..
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At the end of "The Venetian Blind Man". both in the audio , as well as in the original script , Cooper says:
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COOPER: Before I tell you about next week's story, may I remind you that next
Sunday only Quiet Please will be heard at 3:30 PM EST - 2 hours earlier than
usual. I hope you'll listen to the story I have for you about The Big Strike.
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The next weeks episode is Dialogue For a Tragedy... I haven't listened to that episode yet.. Is this involve a title change or something?.. There's only 7 days between the episodes, so it doesn't appear to be a matter of a lost episode,

I'm surprised i've not seen this mentioned anywhere before..
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Posted Aug 08, 2014 - 3:05 AM:

Audio Clip:

https://db.tt/2FwmkW4d
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Posted Aug 10, 2014 - 3:05 AM:

MS... Can you provide any insight on this?
MS
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Posted Aug 11, 2014 - 12:37 AM:

I can't. If there's an answer, it's probably buried in the QP papers at the University of Maryland.

The story of the following week's "Dialogue for a Tragedy" doesn't seem to match up with "The Big Strike."

There's an episode with an odd title, "3000 Words," that has nothing to do with the plot, and I've always assumed that Cooper hadn't written the script yet and came up with a dummy title. Maybe the same thing happened here except that Cooper changed the title during the week.

Or perhaps Cooper wrote a script called "The Big Strike" and it didn't air for some reason -- rejected by the network, or he himself decided against it.

But I'm just speculating; I don't really know.

There are other examples of Cooper changing or tinkering with the title during the week. At the end of "Dialogue for a Tragedy," for instance, Cooper previews next week's "Shadow of the Wings" as "The Shadow of Great Wings." And "Wear the Dead Man's Coat" was plugged as "Put on the Dead Man's Coat." And of course we discussed "Pavane" here recently.

So, just as he couldn't always keep the episode numbers straight, Cooper wasn't too sure about their titles either! smiling face
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Posted Aug 11, 2014 - 10:12 AM:

I listened to "Dialogue For a Tragedy" since my above post and was also left unable to make any connection to big strike.... But wait, something just occurred to me at this very moment!! Perhaps it's the strike of the guns hammer coming down!
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I didn't get how the title "The Third Man" related to the story.. I actually started to ask about it a while back, but hesitated because I sensed I might be missing something obvious! - but the meaning of "third man" still hasn't occurred to me.
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I'm guessing "3,000 Words" to be somehow in reference to ventriloquisting words.. I'll have to give it a re-listen for the 3,000 number significance.
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The episode numbering thing has bugged me from the start...
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And while on the subject of numbers.. one of these days I'm going to try to find out what numerological significance there is between Willis Cooper and Wyllis Cooper that led him to change it!
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Posted Aug 11, 2014 - 1:13 PM:

"The Third Man's Story" is a retelling of the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel from the latter's point of view. Abel is the third man in the Bible, after Adam and Cain.
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Yeah, I don't know enough about numerology to understand the spelling change. Something to do with the number of vowels in a name? But there may have been another, more rational, reason for it. In mid-1939, the year of the change, Cooper lost a court case to NBC. Subsequently, his wages were garnished so the network could collect what he owed them. It was over a thousand dollars and took a year or two to pay off, if I'm remembering correctly. Judging by some of the NBC papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Cooper resisted paying and made things difficult for his creditors. I can't prove it, but I think it's possible he changed the spelling to make it a little harder to attach his money. There was also a brief period in late 1940 when he apparently went by the name "Red Cooper," according to a couple of mentions in the trade paper Variety.

Or maybe our guy was just plain eccentric; it's hard to tell.

So forget about titles and episode numbers, even his own name wasn't safe! smiling face
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Posted Aug 13, 2014 - 9:46 AM:

Red Cooper must've been his communist spy alter-ego.

"About the big strike" seems to me like it's not necessarily giving an episode title but rather a description. I don't recall any episodes that involved a strike though. Maybe it was just a way of describing the gun hammer, yeah.

I've always kind of assumed that the script of 3,000 Words is 3000 words long, but never checked. I suppose in the days before word count utilities he'd have to have been pretty bored to count them up... but maybe his numerological wife insisted on 3000 and did the counting.
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Posted Aug 13, 2014 - 2:22 PM:

That thought about the script maybe being 3000 words long crossed my mind too.. I would of ran it through a word count program, but could not find a script of it to count
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