Obscure Audio Dramas: The Secret of Dominion, MagicNet, Maiden Theatre Company, and The Peoria Plague

Among the dark corners of vintage and obscure audio dramas, some productions have drifted so far into obscurity that even devoted collectors are surprised to learn they ever existed. These are not the landmark works often cited in the history of radio drama such as Star Wars or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Rather, they are independently produced creations that capture the spirit of the 1970s through 1990s B movie science fiction and horror.

Their pleasures lie not in perfection but in imagination, enthusiasm, and the charm of productions made outside the mainstream.

Four titles stand out as prime examples of this “lost tape” phenomenon:

The Secret of Dominion (1987), MagicNet (1997), the Maiden Theatre Company science fiction and horror LP trilogy (1978), and the eerie Midwestern broadcast artifact The Peoria Plague (1971). Each one reflects a very different moment in audio drama, yet all share an eccentric, do it yourself energy that will resonate with listeners who seek material off the beaten path.

• 1. The Secret of Dominion (1987)
• 2. MagicNet (1997)
• 3. The Maiden Theatre Company trilogy (1978)
• 4. The Peoria Plague (1971)
• Why these obscure audio dramas matter
• Conclusion

Produced in St. Louis by Cygnus III Productions and broadcast on NPR affiliates in 1987, The Secret of Dominion is a thirteen-episode space opera centered on a rebellion against an interstellar regime known as The Dominion. The premise nods to the blockbuster science fiction cinema of its era, yet the execution remains firmly rooted in radio technique. The series relies on brisk pacing, theatrical performances, and detailed sound design to create a universe that would have been difficult to visualize on screen with the same modest resources. St. Louis radio personality Chuck Conners voices the lead, Steven Richards, and fellow St. Louis radio personality Anne Keefe serves as narrator. The writer Susan Heinkel Bayer, known as the voice of Southwestern Bell and the host of the 1950s children’s program Susan’s Show, also appears in the supporting cast.

Although the series received only limited national attention during its original run, it has quietly developed a small cult following. AudioFile Magazine praised its clean engineering and atmospheric scope, while later listeners have noted its melodramatic acting and earnest tone. In practice, it plays like a radio counterpart to late 1970s pulp science fiction paperbacks, ambitious, colorful, and unexpectedly endearing.

For collectors, it stands as a time capsule from a period when independent American radio drama was comparatively rare and fiercely homegrown. For enthusiasts of analog synth textures, grainy VHS-era space opera, and low-budget sincerity, The Secret of Dominion occupies an appealing middle ground between overlooked and unforgettable.

Created by producer and director Steven Ziplow and adapted by novelist John DeChancie, MagicNet is a three hour audio adventure that blends fantasy, cyberspace, and comic book logic into a single hybrid narrative. Released in 1997, as both the internet boom and CD ROM experimentation were reshaping genre media, it feels like a relic from a speculative timeline of multimedia that never quite happened.

AudioFile Magazine reviewed the program upon release, calling it clever and diverting with professional production values and enthusiastic performances, while noting that its adolescent humor and exaggerated characters may not appeal to more demanding listeners. That tension is exactly where its charm resides. MagicNet embraces the feel of mid 1990s pulp cyber fantasy, complete with larger than life villains, mystical networks, and the optimism of early digital storytelling.

The production won a Mark Time Award (Silver) for Best Adaptation, which establishes it as more than a curiosity. For modern listeners, it occupies the same cultural shelf as series such as VR.5, ReBoot, or mall rack fantasy paperbacks from the same period. It is a fun, sincere, slightly chaotic piece of 1990s pop genre energy preserved on tape.

 

About the author: John DeChancie

John DeChancie, born August 3, 1946 in Pittsburgh, is an American author known for an energetic and cross-genre approach to storytelling. After early work in television, he debuted with the Skyway Trilogy (1983 to 1986), a high-velocity science fiction saga built around a “truckers in space” concept that blends action, humor, and cosmic mystery. He became best known for Castle Perilous (1988 to 2015), a comic fantasy series set inside a shape-shifting fortress that contains 144,000 parallel worlds. Critics have associated the series with early forms of the New Weird because of its mixture of humor, metaphysics, genre deconstruction, and subtle existential themes. Beyond these central works, DeChancie wrote the USS Recluse novel The Kruton Interface, the Dr. Dimension books with David Bischoff, horror collaborations such as Crooked House, media tie-ins including Witchblade: Talons and Castle Falkenstein, and stand-alone novels such as MagicNet, Living with Aliens, and Innerverse. His range also includes nonfiction biographies of Perón and Nasser, editorial work on anthologies, and contributions to magazines such as Mondo Cult. He received the Forrest J Ackerman Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and audio adaptations of his novels earned a Golden Headset Award.

DeChancie is recognized for both his diverse body of work and his direct, humorous view of the writing profession. When asked to introduce himself, he replied, “You’d be amazed at the number of published, well-known, and even award-winning authors I could name, none of whom you would know… It’s amazing how many writers there are in the universe of letters.” His humor often reflects a creative philosophy that embraces the strange. When discussing Castle Perilous and its dimension-spanning oddities, he once noted that the castle tends to admit people “who look on the unusual as terrific rather than terrifying.” He has also described his early career with characteristic modesty, stating that “getting published was the shock of my life.” DeChancie remains active within fan communities and continues to be regarded as a writer who blends genres with confidence, uses comedy to illuminate deeper ideas, and maintains a steady commitment to imaginative storytelling.

The most elusive of the group, the Maiden Theatre Company is barely documented today. Their three-album set, catalogued on Discogs.com as MR-113, MR-114, and MR-115, contains six tightly constructed science fiction and horror dramas:

• The Mutant Strain
• The Purple Planet
• The Third Star
• Space Station Z-43
• Ten Light Years Away
• The Spiders

Written by Michael Armstrong and produced by B. E. O’Keef in 1978, these LPs appear to have been released in very small quantities. No professional reviews from the period are known to survive, and the albums have avoided mass circulation or any proper collector documentation to an unusual degree, making the Maiden Theatre cycle one of the true “ghost labels” in genre audio.

The plays themselves are far from disposable youth fare. Each title takes a familiar pulp premise and pushes it toward something darker, stranger, and more fatalistic. Short descriptions follow, with major plot turns hidden behind optional spoiler sections.

Composer Max Early

Little is known today about the composer Max Early, yet his music is central to the identity of the Maiden Theatre Company LPs. His scores combine orchestral textures with the analog experimentalism and rock-adjacent pulse that characterized late 1970s genre media. The result feels both ambitious and handmade, as if a small studio were reaching past its means to create the emotional scale of cinema using only sound. Early’s themes shift easily from eerie minimalism to percussive tension, often carrying more narrative weight than the dialogue itself. For listeners encountering these records today, the music becomes an immediate portal back to the expressive, risk-taking spirit of that era.

Although documentation of Early’s broader career remains scarce, the surviving Maiden Theatre recordings reveal a composer with unusual versatility. He moves between atmospheric horror, cosmic mystery, and action-driven drama with a confidence that belies the modest production environment in which the LPs were made. His cues have the unmistakable feel of late-1970s studio craft: tape echo, early synthesizer work, and melodic writing that sits somewhere between library music, European genre film, and rock-driven radio drama. For many collectors and audio drama enthusiasts, Max Early’s work is one of the most striking elements of the Maiden Theatre Company catalogue, a vivid sonic signature that elevates these obscure productions into something far more memorable.

Michael Armstrong, Barry O’Keefe, and Maiden Music

Maiden Music, a label associated with the Valentine Music Group, specialized in spoken word and children’s records during the late 1970s. Under managing director Barry O’Keefe, it focused on storytelling and audio drama for younger listeners. The company produced flexi disc stories for Hallmark’s “Charmers” greeting card series, issued the children’s albums Toad’s Army (Volume 1) and Toad’s Army (Volume 2) through EMI’s Talking Tales line, and then began releasing material on its own Maiden label in an MR 100 catalog series. Alongside fairy tales and educational pieces, this catalog included science fiction titles such as The Enchanted Orchestra and the Maiden Theatre Company dramas highlighted in this article.

During this period Maiden Music was described in trade press as a specialist in children’s records. Under O’Keefe, the company pursued international expansion through a six album deal for the United States and Canada, a planned three album Arabian Nights line with Phonogram that would have featured the Maiden Theatre Company and actor Roy Kinnear, and a proposed twelve title book and LP series with the German label Satellite Records. Maiden Music also licensed Dutch language versions of its children’s stories and card and record sets to Bovema Negram in Holland. Some of these projects appear not to have reached full commercial release, which has only added to the sense that Maiden’s output sits at the fringes of documented audio history.

Writer and director Michael Armstrong entered this world in 1977 when he was commissioned to script twelve half hour dramatized fairy tales for Maiden Music. The collaboration with O’Keefe led Armstrong to put aside plans to move to the United States and instead join the company, both to help build a film division and to develop new audio projects. One of their most ambitious creations was the children’s album The Enchanted Orchestra, which Armstrong reshaped by rewriting the storyteller’s opening and closing narration and helping to secure David Niven as narrator after an earlier approach to James Mason did not succeed.

The Enchanted Orchestra was recorded at de Lane Lea Studios in 1978, with arranger and conductor Arthur Greenslade and composer Max Early, then a nineteen year old protégé of O’Keefe, handling the orchestral score. The two men later pursued an ambitious plan to expand the album into a feature film that would combine live action, large scale period spectacle, and elaborate animated sequences set to classical music. Financing complications eventually halted the production and appear to have contributed to Maiden Music’s decline around 1979 and 1980. Seen in this context, the Maiden Theatre Company science fiction and horror LPs feel like part of a larger creative arc in which O’Keefe, Armstrong, and Early were consistently trying to push modestly budgeted audio projects toward the scale and ambition of cinema.

Artwork

The sleeve artwork for the Maiden Theatre Company trilogy is uncredited on the physical releases, but the visual style strongly suggests the work of Neil Grimshaw. Grimshaw served as the in-house artist for producer Barry O’Keefe and is formally credited with the cover art for Maiden Music’s The Enchanted Orchestra. Writer Michael Armstrong’s archives note Grimshaw’s active involvement with the company during this period.

There is also a historical connection to Robert Gibson (potentially the artist associated with The Beatles), who reportedly collaborated with Grimshaw on uncompleted film concepts for O’Keefe during this era. While this attribution remains conjectural pending definitive documentation, Grimshaw is the strongest candidate for the surreal, airbrushed illustrations that define the trilogy.

Keep in mind that this is purely conjecture. If you know any additional details, reach out to me on social media and let me know.

The Mutant Strain

A stranded astronaut records her final testimony on what she believes is a hostile alien world populated by bizarre fauna and dangerous phenomena. As she struggles to survive, she forms a strange bond with the primitive beings who have taken her in.

Show spoilers for The Mutant Strain

In the closing coda, we learn the “alien” world is in fact a prehistoric Earth, and her descriptive report is being read millions of years later by descendants of her own mutated children. Her union with the native creatures has produced a hybrid strain that eventually becomes humanity. What plays as a survival story turns into a quiet origin myth, with her logbook serving as the founding document of a future civilization that sees us as the “mutant strain.”

 

The Purple Planet

A survey mission to a supposedly uninhabited purple world goes catastrophically wrong when the crew encounters insectoid surface creatures and inexplicable seismic and visual phenomena. The survivors awaken inside a glass-like environment beneath the planet’s surface.

Show spoilers for The Purple Planet

The crew have been captured by the Urcons, an underground species that uses trained “drolls” as handlers and treats human beings as laboratory material and livestock. One astronaut is dissected alive, while another is subjected to a beam that accelerates her aging until she crumbles to dust. The protagonist eventually finds himself in what appears to be a hospital on Earth, with a doctor explaining that it was all a hallucination caused by a crash. The final twist reveals that this reassuring “case history” is actually an Urcon analysis log: the doctor is an alien experimenter, the human is deemed a “simple primitive life form,” and he is to be fed to the drolls as the Urcons prepare their invasion of Earth.

 

The Third Star

Presented entirely as a rolling radio news broadcast, The Third Star follows the discovery of a mysterious “Armageddon star” between the twin suns Beta Romulus and Beta Remus. As the object begins to move toward our solar system, scientists reassure the public while the International Space Organization prepares to launch the Triad 3 missile to intercept it.

Show spoilers for The Third Star

As the Armageddon object enters the solar system, it is reclassified as a small, unusually bright meteor and chosen as a convenient real-world test target for the new missile system. During the final countdown, technicians pick up radio signals coming from the object, decode them under intense time pressure, and discover a simple repeated message: “We come in peace. Greetings.” The “meteor” is in fact an alien spacecraft attempting first contact. There is no way to abort the Triad 3. The missile hits, destroying the visitors. The live feed from mission control cuts off, and the studio blandly announces a temporary loss of contact before dropping back into a chirpy pop track called “Spaceman,” underlining the grim irony of humanity’s first encounter with extraterrestrial life.

 

Space Station Z-43

Space Station Z-43 is framed as a first person account by its increasingly unhinged commander, who struggles to reconstruct events aboard an isolated orbital platform. What begins as a routine report of meteor “lights” and crew headaches slides into violent outbursts, hallucinations, and neurological collapse.

Show spoilers for Space Station Z-43

A mysterious parasitic infection is attacking the brains of the crew, causing stroke-like paralysis, synesthetic visions of color and light, and episodes of lethal madness. One officer destroys the control panels and kills a colleague in a frenzy. Another describes his skull deflating like a punctured balloon as the parasites devour his brain and even gnaw at the bone. As the captain’s own mind deteriorates, he attempts to record a factual account of events for whoever might investigate the silent station. The final sting reveals that the “light” that leaves the bodies is the parasite itself, and that the recording we are hearing is a vector that has “traveled on sound waves” into the listener’s head. By listening, we have allowed the entities time to enter us.

 

Ten Light Years Away

On the planet Orbis Terrarum, a world governed and sustained by a vast central computer called Deus Dolos, astronomers discover an asteroid on a direct collision course. The impact is certain, the timescale short, and deflection or destruction impossible.

Show spoilers for Ten Light Years Away

Deus calculates that the only chance of survival lies in building a single gigantic mother ship capable of carrying the entire population and the full heritage of their civilization to a habitable world in the Salto Regis system ten light years away. The project is mathematically borderline, with only a tiny fraction of a time unit between completion and impact. Under worsening conditions as the planet’s protective field cracks and the asteroid draws near, the Rayans finish the vessel and board at the last possible moment. Deus Dolos, however, is too large to dismantle or move. It instructs them to remove its memory banks and leave it behind to be destroyed, so that a new Deus can be built and “remember” them on their new world. In a poignant coda, we hear a fresh Deus Dolos announcing the evacuation as if for the first time, then realizing in its final moments that it is alone and about to be obliterated, pleading into the void for “anybody” as the asteroid strikes.

 

The Spiders

The Spiders begins as domestic horror: a little girl insists a “blue and horrid” creature bit her while she was playing, and soon a family discovers a large, purplish blue spider in their bathtub that can leap directly at a grown man. Police treat it as part of a mysterious but supposedly harmless new species appearing across the country.

Show spoilers for The Spiders

The spiders multiply and grow with each generation, from inch-long curiosities to three-foot monstrosities. Livestock are found torn apart, blamed at first on stray dogs. During a family picnic, David, the narrator, his father, and his brother discover a hollow swarming with thousands of giant blue spiders. They witness Farmer Harris and his son overrun and devoured as the creatures launch themselves out of the pit in coordinated waves. As reports emerge of towns falling and military flamethrowers failing, the family barricades their home, only to have enormous spiders crash down the chimney and through weakening windows. The final section is presented as David’s taped testimony meant for any survivors: while he records, his father shouts that the spiders are breaking through. The tape cuts off mid-sentence, leaving their fate and the wider outcome of the global attack chillingly unresolved.

Taken together, the Maiden Theatre LPs feel closer in spirit to late-night radio terror and disillusioned 1970s science fiction cinema than to simple juvenile adventure. They combine end-of-the-world scenarios, body horror, and bitterly ironic reversals with a clear awareness of media, militarism, and human fallibility. Until the albums resurface in wider circulation, they remain more myth than known quantity, but the surviving copies suggest an unusually ambitious and cohesive little cycle that deserves far more attention from archivists and audio drama historians.

If the Maiden Theatre LPs are ghost records, The Peoria Plague is a ghost broadcast.

Produced by the Peoria, Illinois radio station WHUN (later WSWT) and aired on October 31, 1971, The Peoria Plague is a full cast horror drama presented as a series of breaking news bulletins. Listeners hear a terrifying contagion unfold in real time as reporters describe citizens succumbing to violent, zombie like behavior.

Stylistically, it echoes the famous 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, but leans into the gritty pessimism of early 1970s horror cinema. The result is a tense, panic driven experience that feels like a B movie apocalypse unfolding through static blurred AM radio.

Unlike most radio dramas of its era, The Peoria Plague survives with no formal credits. No writer, director, or cast list is announced in surviving recordings, and no production documentation has surfaced in accessible archives. Modern commentators generally believe the actors were WHUN staff and announcers performing off hours as a local station project. The absence of attribution has elevated the piece to cult status. It feels like an anonymous, found footage broadcast recovered from a small station at the edge of a crisis.

Today, listeners encounter The Peoria Plague through digital archives, horror audio podcasts, and fan preservation efforts. Its rough edges, decayed tape quality, and documentary style delivery make it a strong fit for fans of obscure horror radio, zombie cinema, and experimental audio storytelling. There are a couple of different transfers floating around, but the one below is pitch-corrected and a cleaner encode.

The history of audio drama is well documented at the top, but much less preserved at the margins. Works such as The Secret of Dominion, MagicNet, the Maiden Theatre Company albums, and The Peoria Plague reveal a layer of independent, experimental, or locally produced creations that rarely appear in canonical histories.

These productions:

• Reflect the pop culture obsessions of their eras
• Demonstrate the inventiveness of small studios that worked with limited resources
• Bridge gaps between golden age radio, VHS era B movies, and modern podcast fiction
• Capture the sincerity and strangeness of do-it-yourself genre storytelling
• Remind us that audio drama has always thrived outside mainstream institutions

For listeners who enjoy series such as Nightfall, Campfire Radio Theater, Alien Worlds, or the stranger pulp corners of vintage science fiction and horror, these lesser known works offer new worlds to explore.

These four productions represent a shadow history of genre audio. They survived on vinyl, cassette, reel to reel, or decaying airchecks and now wait to be rediscovered by modern fans. They are flawed, eccentric, and sometimes rough around the edges, but that is exactly what places them in the lineage of B movie storytelling.

For audio drama enthusiasts willing to explore obscure audio dramas beyond the usual classics, The Secret of Dominion, MagicNet, the Maiden Theatre Company albums, and The Peoria Plague offer a rewarding detour into stranger territory.