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April 13, 2025

Newspaper comic strip line art shows two boys frowning, each one pointing to himself. Caption above them reads “Clash of the Story Boys.”

Will Exposition Boy expose the backstory of Billy Narrator, boy detective? Can Falk prevent them from destroying the whole episode and the sanity of his listeners? Listen to find out!

Clash of the Story Boys, episode 127 of This Gun in My Hand, was narrated and exposed by Rob Northrup. This episode and all others are available on Youtube with automatically-generated closed captions of dialog. Visit http://ThisGuninMyHand.blogspot.com for credits, show notes, archives, and to buy my books, such as Sisyphus, Eat Your Heart Out, available in paperback and ebook from Amazon. How do I settle creative differences? With This Gun in My Hand!

Show Notes:
1. Thanks to Pete Larsen for the idea for this episode: “I'd love to see a fight between 'Exposition Boy, the Teen-Sidekick' and 'Billy Narrator Jr.'”

2. If you’re going to take six years to develop an international exposition and build an artificial island for it, maybe open it in an off-year when there isn’t an official world’s fair on the other coast. The Golden Gate International Exposition opened in 1939, competing with the 1939 New York World’s Fair. (Spoilers: they did run out of money and closed early in October 1939, then scrounged up a little more to reopen May-September 1940.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_International_Exposition

3. Billy commandeered the show in episode 113, “Don’t Kid a Kidder,” to do his own show, Billy Narrator, Boy Detective.
https://archive.org/details/tgimh-113-dont-kid-a-kidder

4. The Pope’s Rhinoceros by Lawrence Norfolk establishes a deeper backstory than any other novel I’ve read. The first four pages describe glacial and geologic activity that form the lake where protagonists finally come into the story on the fifth page. Literally a glacial age of backstory.

Credits:
The opening music clip was from The Sun Sets at Dawn (1950), and the closing music was from Killer Bait (1949), both films in the public domain. Exposition Boy’s storytelling music was from “Journey Into Fear,” the June 9, 1946 episode of the public domain radio show Hour of Mystery. Music from the second commercial was from the public domain film Death Machines (1976). Most of the music and sound effects used in the episode are modified or incomplete versions of the originals. 

Sound Effect Title: Traffic mel 1.wav
By malupeeters
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
https://freesound.org/people/malupeeters/sounds/191350/

Sound Effect Title: Park ambience - mostly birds
License: Public Domain
https://freesound.org/people/Mafon2/sounds/274175/#

Music Title: Kitten on the Keys
Composed and Performed by Zez Confrey and His Orchestra
Recorded May 4, 1922
License: Public Domain
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Kitten_on_the_Keys/

The image accompanying this episode is a modified detail of one panel from the April 28, 1929 public domain comic strip Just Kids by Ad Carter. The title of the comic strip changed to Mush Stebbins and His Sister in 1950.

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