Actor Bob Hastings is a television veteran. Yet, you are more likely to know his voice than his face. He has worked in many genres and featured in several innovative radio and television science fiction shows. His career took in the earliest days of TV entertainment and playing a regular character in acclaimed superhero cartoons from the 1990s. But it all began with a song.

"I think it was about 1935 or the beginning of 1936," Hastings said. "A teacher heard me sing in school at an assembly and he thought I sang well enough that I should be on radio. So I started singing radio shows and from there... There was a newspaper called 'The Daily Mirror' and they had a children's show on WMCA in New York and I sang on that...for maybe a couple of years. Then I went over to NBC and that was before the networks split - it was all one, NBC and ABC was one - and there was a show on Sunday mornings, Coast to Coast on a Bus."

Coast to Coast on a Bus was a children's radio show that helped to launch the careers of several performers that would became well known. Among them was Anne Francis, whom genre fans might remember from the 1956 science fiction movie classic Forbidden Planet and two segments of the original Twilight Zone, ('The After Hours' and 'Jess-Belle'.)

Bob's break in acting came in pre-war soap operas, but his acting career was temporarily suspended when in 1943 he joined the Air Corps and became a navigator on B29 bombers. After he left the service he started on the popular radio comedy Archie Andrews, which was based on the 'Archie' comic books. Hastings stayed on that show for 10 years. In 1949 he appeared on television in the series Captain Video and his Video Rangers. That show also featured his younger brother Don.

"I did like a four-week series but my brother played the Video Ranger," Hastings said. "I did one set-up, one storyline where I said I was his brother, which I really wasn't according to the show."

Captain Video was broadcast by the DuMont Network from 1949 to 1955. According to The Museum of Broadcast Communications, it was the first science fiction space adventure series on television, . The titular character was a heroic inventor who battled evil on Earth and in space. Bob's brother Don was only 15 when he first played The Ranger and he would later spend over 40 years on the soap opera As the World Turns. He also appeared in the more recent science fiction film Decoys, which was written and directed by his son Matthew.

In 1950 Bob appeared as a guest on another futuristic show, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet. This series was based on a novel by Robert Heinlen and, like Captain Video, was popular with children. Three years later Bob signed up to Atom Squad. Broadcast from Philadelphia from July 1953 to Jan. 1954, this largely forgotten NBC series consisted of 26 stories divided into 15-minute daily episodes. Clearly inspired by Cold War paranoia and fear of the atom bomb, it concerned a small group of scientists battling enemy agents, mad scientists and experiments gone awry.

"[Atom Squad] was futuristic when you think about how we were using computers and [technology] to solve mysteries, murders or whatever it was," said Hastings. "Bob Courtleigh played the lead [Steve Elliot] and I played [Dave Fielding]. We were like buddies...He was the star and I was his second banana."

The science fiction element in Atom Squad came not only from the futuristic way in which technology was portrayed but also in the occasional form of aliens and flying saucers. Along with  and Captain Video it was groundbreaking not only because it was one of the earliest genre shows but also because it was made when TV was still broadcast live.

"I don't know how we all survived," Hastings said. "I don't think I have ever worked on any show, radio, TV, movies or anything that I wasn't nervous. When I think of how nervous you were on live TV, because if you made a mistake you might never work again ... It was a crazy time."

Live TV was like theatre in that sets sometimes had to be changed during the show. Also, there was only one take. If actors messed up, they had to carry on regardless. Hastings recalled one occasion when the absence of props during dress rehearsals almost ruined a scene in Atom Squad in which Elliot and Fielding were escaping from a prison camp.

"Courtleigh was supposed to have wire cutters, and when we rehearsed it he would say, 'Okay. Snip, snip; snip, snip; snip, snip," Hastings said. "When we got on the air he did the same thing. While he was cutting it with the wire cutters he was saying 'Snip, snip; snip, snip,' and I laughed, and the bad guy who was with us laughed and leaned against a phoney tree. And it went back and forth."

Despite such incidents, Atom Squad didn't cost Hastings his career. Throughout the 1950s he had supporting roles in several television series. He would make his mark on the history of science fiction in another medium, too, after he was cast in the acclaimed radio anthology series X Minus One.

"Well, I was working at NBC/ABC and I think it was on NBC most of the time," said Hastings. "From working there, doing Archie [Andrews] and doing other shows [such as Five-Star Matinee] the directors would know you and then they'd hire you to do X Minus One or whatever they were doing."

X Minus One ran from 1955 to 1958. It was the successor to another NBC anthology series, Dimension X, and Hastings is credited with appearing in over 30 episodes. Some were performed live, but later ones were recorded, said Hastings. Apparently that didn't always relieve the pressure to avoid mistakes, however.

"Originally I don't think they were put on tape, they were put on discs," said Hastings. "That used to be funny because everybody would look at you like, 'Don't louse this up.' Now, when you went to tape, you can tape it in, do pieces whenever you want, do a scene over and put it in. But you couldn't do it when we had the old 78 discs. But most of the actors you worked with were very, very good, unless somebody had a girlfriend or something that they wanted to give a job to, and then you'd sweat, trying to get through a show."