Five-Star Theater (also written as 5-Star Theater) is an American radio series that premiered on Monday, November 28, 1932, on NBC's Blue Network, sponsored by the Standard Oil Companies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana and the Colonial Beacon Oil Company.
The 1980 discovery of scripts for this 1932–33 series led to publication by Pantheon Books, as described in The New York Times in 1988: Now, one of the funniest "lost" radio shows of the early 1930s — Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, Attorneys at Law, starring Groucho and Chico Marx — has been unearthed.
It happened that in 1980, as part of his Ph.D. studies, Mr. Barson worked as a specialist in the Deposit Collection of the Library of Congress (which oversees the Copyright Office).
[2]After the rediscovery of the Marx scripts, many of them were adapted by the BBC, new recordings made with contemporary actors, broadcast on Radio 4 in 1990-1992.
[1]: 136 On Friday evenings, a radio drama based on the Charlie Chan film franchise was heard, with a cast that included Ray Collins.