Get to Know a Show: Mary Farfisa’s Outer Space Radio Theater
Listen to this fantastical, whimsical, and musical outer space adventure series starring Mary Farfisa and her space-horse, Briscoe!
Mary Farfisa is an eight-year-old space-girl who travels the Galaxies on her space-horse, Briscoe. She goes from planet to planet, searching for “songs and sounds and music and noise” to share with the rest of the Universe. Mary catches the songs and sounds and music and noise in her “audio lasso.” Then she brings them to the Listener’s Library — an intergalactic collection of sounds, curated by music-loving super-beings called the “Listeners.”
Mary’s musical assignments take her many places: to a planet of living bells… into the past to collect the sounds of vanished interplanetary dinosaurs … and to a space rodeo on an asteroid, where music students rope, ride, and catch the musical instruments they dream of playing in an orchestra.
Cartoonist, writer, and illustrator Jim Cheff (who also voices Briscoe the Spacehorse) has been drawing Mary Farfisa comics for years, and her adventures are the “audio cartoon” he’s always wanted to make.
It’s hard to believe that Cheff recorded this series at home when you hear the expertly crafted audio quality, professional voice actors, original sound effects, and beautiful music tightly edited into well-crafted adventure stories that sound like the best radio plays of yesteryear. Every Tuesday night, the creative community in Cheff’s life would together at 7:00 pm on Tuesday nights, and by the end of the evening, another Mary Farfisa adventure had been recorded and a big spread created by his wife had been enjoyed. In a lot of cases, the smaller roles were not given out till everyone had arrived, and their living room would be buzzing with people coming up with weird voices, or working out how to make a crazy sound. Neighbors grew accustomed to seeing cast members’ cars gather outside, and watch them enter and exit the little house with scripts, musical instruments, kids, and pets, even.
Mary Farfisa’s Outer Space Radio Theater would depict Outer Space as a fun, creative place, full of artists, poets, musicians and dreamers. There would be no space battles and very few real villains. Characters might behave badly, but there would be no violence, and no problems that couldn’t be solved through peaceful measures. Outer Space would be a place where the Imagination had room to stretch out, and grow as big as it needed to be. — Jim Cheff
Mary Farfisa’s Outer Space Radio Theater ran for two years as a weekly Saturday morning show on Radio Sunnyside in Flagstaff, AZ. In 2020, Cheff re-edited all the episodes and launched Mary Farfisa as a podcast.
The show has gathered an enthusiastic group of listeners in its new life, and it’s gratifying that our locally produced radio show now has listeners literally all over the world. — Jim Cheff
From the beautiful, sweet songs and fun characters; to the exciting stories and poetry and wordplay, this show has something for every listener. My 7-year-old adventure enthusiast is absolutely hooked, and we parent people like that it sounds just wonderful. I find myself tapping my fingers and toes while driving and listening, and I take my own delight in the sweet, silly, and optimistic fun the characters have. Mary Farfisa’s Outer Space Radio Theater is great for road trips, longer travel, screen time avoidance, and bedtime entertainment. The comics, coloring pages, and art are fantastic, too!
Check out the first episode here:
