Series Description

The Lights Out TV show was a 30 minute anthology, horror series on NBC. Each week audiences were treated to tales of terror, mystery, and suspense, often involving the supernatural.

Lights Out Cast

Jack La Rue............... Narrator (1949-1950)
Frank Gallop .... Narrator (1950-1952)
Arlo Hults .... Organist (1949-1952)
Doris Johnson .... Harpist (1950-1952)
Paul Lipman .... Theremin Player (1949) (See Trivia Below)

Lights Out Trivia

The Lights Out TV show was inspired by the "Lights Out Radio Show". It was broadcast from January 1, 1934 to August 6, 1947. It began on a local radio channel (WENR) in Chicago and then after a few months, it moved to the NBC Radio Network.

Since Lights Out was an anthology series, there were no regular Cast from week-to-week. There was a well known guest star or two nearly every week, however. To name just a few, there was John Forsythe ("Dynasty"), Jonathan Harris ("Lost in Space"), Steven Hill ("Law & Order"), Ross Martin ("The Wild Wild West"), E.G. Marshall ("The Defenders"), Burgess Meredith ("Batman"), Leslie Nielsen ("Police Squad"), and Robert Stack ("The Untouchables").

If you look at the cast list above, you'll notice that a musician named "Paul Lipman" is credited as a "Theremin Player". The Theremin is one of the first electronic musical instruments. It has two antennae that sense the position of the musician's hands. One of them varies the tone of the music and the other varies the volume. It's "eerie" sound has made it the instrument of choice as the background music for many movies including "Spellbound", "The Spiral Staircase", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "The Thing", and "The Ten Commandments". It was also used in the soundtracks of several other motion pictures.

Before each episode began, the audience saw a close up of a pair of eyes followed by a bloody hand that reached out to turn off the lights. Then there was an eerie laugh and the narrator said, "Lights out everybody" followed by a candle being blown out. This same technique of getting the audience worked up and ready to be scared to death was used later by Alfred Hitchcock ("Alfred Hitchcock Presents"), Rod Serling ("The Twilight Zone"), and Boris Karloff ("Thriller"), and others.

Lights Out had some stiff competition for viewers when it first went nationwide in July of 1949! CBS was airing "Candid Camera" in the same time slot followed by "The Goldbergs". Both of those were extremely popular shows. To make matters worse, Lights Out was followed by "The Cities Service Band of America" which was a series highlighting a 48 piece band, vocalists, glee clubs, and baton-twirling majorettes.

Like all nationwide shows at that time, Lights Out was broadcast live to New York City and was filmed on "kinescope" for later viewing in the rest of the U.S. Kinescope refers to the filming in black & white of a show using one camera and 16mm film.