Movie Magazines & Memorabilia: TV Radio Mirror

Today we are launching a new series featuring short reviews of vintage movie magazines, books, and other memorabilia. My sister and I have been dealers in the movie memorabilia industry for nearly ten years now and we have discovered a lot of great magazines and other periodicals that are chock full of great articles, photos, film reviews, and interesting tidbits so we'd like to share these with our readers in the hopes that you will hunt for some of these periodicals yourself. We'll post some photos ( captured from eBay or our own collection ), a little background info about the magazine, and a summarization of its regular contents. 

Let's start off now with one of our favorites - TV-Radio Mirror magazine. This was a great magazine! It was an American magazine that was released monthly and every issue features wonderful articles about the radio and television stars that were popular at the time. Like most movie magazines, the pages were packed with on-the-set photos, "at home" snapshots, interviews, gossip, and a few full-color spreads. 

TV-Radio Mirror featured some great covers with Burns & Allen, Ozzie and Harriet, or the Lennon Sisters and other members of the Lawrence Welk Show often garnering the most coverage. The magazine was originally titled Radio Mirror, then Radio-TV Mirror, and later in the 1950s as television became more popular, it was changed to TV-Radio Mirror. It was launched in 1933 and ran all the way to 1977. 

We like this magazine the best because the quality of the articles is better than most and much more entertaining. Many of the articles were supposedly written by the stars themselves. For example, Barbara Eden told her fans how she fell in love with Michael Ansara, Ed Byrnes revealed the type of woman he was looking for in a wife, and Shirley Boone told the story of how she and Pat arrived in Hollywood. Whether these stories were true or not doesn't matter much, they are fun to read!

Regular features included interviews, reviews of the latest films, a station guide to radio programs and television shows, and a listing of great "old" movies playing on television. Like most magazines of the time, TV-Radio Mirror also issued an Annual that summed up the year in radio and television. If you come across one of these at a flea market/antique fair, grab it...they are worth it!

If you want to read full issues of TV Radio Mirror, check out the World Radio History website. This site has all issues of Radio Mirror from November 1933-December 1958. To see more reviews of movie magazines and other memorabilia in the future, simply click on the banner on the right-side column.