History Radio / TheShadow

* ArbitrarySkepticism: Justified in the radio show, because he considers his powers entirely scientific and easily reproducible by anyone willing to put in the effort, so he looked at the supernatural with a jaded eye.

* BadassInDistress: A lot of early episodes of the radio show, too, most dramatically in "[[Recap/TheShadowRadioS01E18 The Society of the Living Dead]]", where he was trapped in a mausoleum quickly filling up with water, with only a dead man and a nearly-dead man for company. Only the timely arrival of the police saved him. Happens again in The Phantom Voice, as he gets caught in a room narrow enough that two gangsters can stretch their arms out and walk forwards to corner him even without seeing him, and then being put in a chokehold - he ambushes the leader later with a brief explanation that he'd "picked up one little hold in the Orient" that had let him get out of it.

* GenreShift: Well, more like SubGenre shift. The radio series always held fast to its DetectiveDrama roots and a degree of supernatural styling in the form of the Shadow's powers, the genre of the cases he would explore each episode tended to change with what was popular at the time. Early episodes focused on standard crime drama adversaries like mobsters, arsonists, murderers, and thieves. Then there was a shift to more ScienceFiction inspired cases with robots, fantastic inventions, and even actual aliens. This gave way to more horror themed enemies and cases with zombies and werewolves, and eventually Lovecraftian horror. Finally as the series came to a close in the 50s it wrapped all the way back around to standard big city crime again, but now as detective stories where you wouldn't learn what really happened until the very end, with most of the supernatural elements (the Shadow's powers aside) having fallen out of favor.

** "The Leopard Strikes" features a leopard-worshipping cult who wear highly-realistic animal costumes (to the extent that most people mistake them for actual leopards) and apparently drug and kidnap women to use as "offerings" in their ceremonies, but they are not killers. (It's not clear what they do to the women in their ceremony) They're horrified to learn that the episode's villain is one of their members who has been using the costume (and its functional claws) to go on a murder spree.
* EvilCounterpart: "Revenge of the Shadow" featured a man who had learned the same trick of hypnotic invisibility, now trying to pass himself off as the real Shadow.

* Margo in ''Murder in E Flat, after getting a good lead on the bomber that's been terrorising the city, decides to go to his house on her own and get talked into going inside. Her being made a DamselInDistress was inevitable at that point, and it was pure luck that the Shadow received the message she'd left for him in time.

* JediMindTrick: Once in a while The Shadow would use his mind to control other people's actions, Obi-Wan Kenobi style. 1938 episode "[[Recap/TheShadowRadioS01E25 The Silent Avenger]]", in which The Shadow uses the power of his mind to stop a madman from throwing a grenade into a crowd, may be the UrExample.

* PetTheDog: Despite relying primarily on stealth and terrorizing his opposition, The Shadow takes the time to comfort a young kidnapped boy and provide a handkerchief in Hounds in the Hills.