Omar Wizard of Persia
The Setup
The premise of Omar Wizard of Persia is straightforward enough: Henry Mason, an American gem dealer, has accidentally acquired a cursed emerald, and the only way to break that curse is to return the stone to the rightful owners' family. What makes it unusual is how Mason gets his help. Omar — the show's title character — never appears as a physical presence. He communicates with Mason as a mysterious voice only Mason can hear, and at critical moments, mysterious bells ring out in code to steer Mason in the right direction. It's a neat piece of dramatic architecture, keeping the mystical element ambient rather than tangible.
The serial premiered on October 7, 1935, on the Mutual network, airing weekdays at 5:05 in 25-minute episodes. Tasty Bread sponsored it. The action in the surviving episodes travels from the United States as far as a bazaar in Damascus — though the story never actually reaches Persia itself, despite the title's promise.
The Chandu Connection
The show belonged to a recognizable type in 1930s juvenile radio: the mystic Eastern adventure serial. Its closest kin was Chandu the Magician, which had been airing on Mutual since October 1932 — about three years before Omar premiered on the same network. Both featured a mysterious protagonist with Eastern roots guiding younger, more ordinary characters through dangerous situations. The comparison isn't superficial; the shows share a structural DNA, and Omar was understood at the time as working in Chandu's wake.
The title also leaned on a genuine cultural reference point: the historical Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, whose Rubaiyat had become widely familiar to English-speaking audiences through Edward Fitzgerald's Victorian translation. Attaching the name "Omar" to a mystical Persian figure would have carried immediate associations for the show's 1935 audience.
The Man Behind Omar
The actor who voiced Omar was credited as M. H. H. Joachim — full name Maurice Herbert Hentley Joachim. He was born on May 11, 1895, in Calcutta, India, and died in November 1980 in Mountain View, California. His background was more complicated than his billing might have suggested: his family were Catholic, living in the Portuguese quarter of Calcutta and attending the Sacred Heart Church. He was educated at the University of Calcutta and then at Oxford, served as a dispatch rider during World War I, returned to India, and eventually emigrated to the United States with his wife Stella and their children, Camille and Paul.
Family sources credit Joachim with being the first person to speak on an NBC religious broadcast after the network was formed in 1926. After Omar ended, he went on to host — or voice the conscience character in — Your Unseen Friend on CBS Radio from 1936 to 1938, and later served as director for The Avenger on WHN New York from 1941 to 1942. Ethel Everett played Zaidda, the show's other named cast member on record.
What Survives and What Remains Uncertain
The show ended on July 10, 1936. What happened in between its premiere and that closing date is genuinely murky. Thirteen episodes are known to survive, with a combined running time of roughly three hours and eight minutes. The last surviving recording closes on the line "Our mission is complete!" — a tidy narrative ending to the Emerald Curse story arc.
The bigger question is how many episodes the show actually produced. Reports vary considerably. One theory holds that scripts were originally written for a 200-episode run broadcast over Mutual under Tasty Bread's sponsorship, and that the 13-episode package with an accelerated conclusion was assembled separately for syndication sale to smaller markets. The surviving recordings do carry sonic characteristics associated with syndicated production — notably long musical interludes at the beginning and end of each episode. As one summary of available research puts it: "Most reports are that the program was produced for syndication and lasted for 12 or 13 episodes, although there are reports that the program ran for 200 installments on the Mutual Network." There is also a suggestion from at least one OTR research source that an earlier version or precursor of the show may predate the 1935 Mutual run entirely, though the evidence is thin and contested.
Reliable information on Omar Wizard of Persia is scarce, and what exists is often contradictory. It's a minor entry in the juvenile adventure serial category, notable mainly for its unusual narrative device and for the distinctive biography of its lead actor — a Catholic-born, Oxford-educated Indian immigrant voicing a Persian mystic for American children over a Midwestern bread sponsor. That combination is strange enough to be worth knowing about.