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Trouble waits on the trail ahead of the Lone Ranger. St Louis, a town on the edge of the frontier, but with the civilization and amenities of cities back East. A group of frontier scouts meet with the secretary of the president. A plot has been learned that will tear apart the territories out West. A self imposed emperor is at work to set up his own kingdom.
A group of traitors known as the Legion of the Black Arrow, go around spreading mistrust, and hatred, stealing, murdering, and more. What can be done? How can this gathered group work in secret to feret out the members and leaders? There’s only one man fit for the job. Nobody knows his name, but everyone knows him as the Lone Ranger. His fabulous deeds have gone throughout the land. Will the government leaders and the Army go for asking for his help?
The scouts leave to spread the word that the Lone Ranger is needed in service for his country. At the same time, infiltrators in the meeting are spreading the word to their secret society to beware of the Lone Ranger’s activity, and to try to stop him at any cost. As the search for the Lone Ranger rages, who will find him first? The powers for good, or the powers for evil?
After some suspenseful moments, the Lone Ranger gets the chance to tell the president the story of why he wears his mask. Though the details are faded out, he refers to the incidents of the 1938 film that explains about the ambush that started his career. Commissioned directly by the president, he gets his marching orders to defend the United States from the forces that threaten it.
Note: there really had been a plot to organize the western territories as an independant nation, but as I recall, it was long before the time period when the Lone Ranger was said to have roamed it. It had something to do with Aaron Burr, vice president for Thomas Jefferson. There’s controversy whether Aaron Burr actually had anything to do with it, and the plot was disrupted before it got very far.
All this talk in this episode about an evil empire, has a lot of propaganda sounding nature to it. Though this aired less than 2 month before the involvement of the United States in World War 2, The war had been going on for a year or more with Great Brittain, and longer as the Nazi’s rolled through the nations of Europe.
Has anyone else noticed the shift in audio quality of the Lone Ranger program? One new feature is in the way that gunshots are done. In earlier radio shows, a sound affects man would just shoot a gun with blanks, right in the studio. Now the sound of a gunshot has been recorded, and fed in through a line in feed to the recording system. It gives a louder, mmore destinct sound than the pop sound of the old method.
