The recordings were a fun exercise with little initial payoff — Taylor joked that when he submitted them to radio stations, "They would look at you like you have nine heads, like, 'Are you from 1942, sir?'"

Around that time in the early 2000s, the rise of file sharing and MP3s enabled collectors to transfer years' worth of the old "Golden Age of Radio" classics into digital recordings, and, in the spirit of sharing, many were then made available on archival websites that had cropped up. Thousands of hours of history rest in dusty corners of the internet, relics with lessons and memories to share with any willing ear that stumbles upon them — Taylor's being one of them.

He listened to many of those shows, which, through osmosis, helped him better understand the intricacies of audio storytelling. Taylor initially kept his programs off the internet and left his stories in a quiescent limbo for several years, but when his local theater troupe — the Decoder Ring Theatre — launched its website in 2005, Taylor finally tossed them up on the site. Suddenly, he was getting emails from around the world, sent by people who had stumbled upon Red Panda and wanted more episodes.

Spurred by the sudden encouragement, he got to work writing both rebooted Red Panda adventures and a new series about a gumshoe called Black Jack Justice.

At first, his cast — selected from friends representing various regional theaters — recorded in a makeshift studio in his home, working for creative satisfaction in lieu of a paycheck.

"There was no money," Christopher Mott, a veteran Toronto theater actor who voices Jack Justice and several Red Panda characters, told BuzzFeed before a recording session recently. "We were recording in a basement next to a water heater, all doing it for fun, paid with coffee and donuts."

Both Red Panda and Black Jack Justice's format and old-time dialogue — recited in deep, heroic baritones and wise-guy cadence — are obvious throwbacks, but Taylor and co. have been determined to balance tribute with updating the medium for a more self-aware and socially progressive 21st century.

"A lot of people say it's nostalgia, but I say that the kids who are listening to this can't be nostalgic for things they've never heard," argued Taylor, who has a day job in marketing at a regional theater. "The old dramas have casual racism and the almost complete irrelevance of the women at the story, at best."

Decoder Ring Theatre releases one episode of each series once a month, with each new installment taking in about 10,000 streams and downloads in the 14 days that it sits atop the theater's website; in all, the Red Panda and Black Jack Justice shows have been listened to more than 5 million times. Decoder Ring receives fan art and invitations to conventions, and has an active Facebook page that allows listeners to interact with the cast.

Along with its Facebook page, the theater company has an official fan message board at a site called AudioDramaTalk.com, which hosts forums dedicated to several other micro-popular serials and theater companies as well. It serves as a hangout of sorts for many showrunners, including Grant Baccioco, who co-created the hit kids' program The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd.

When that launched in 2004, Baccioco said his short, kooky broadcasts reached just a handful of listeners; the popular embrace of podcasts — and smart phones that could easily download and play them — lifted the series north of 85,000 downloads per month at the peak of its run, which wrapped up in 2011. Along the way, there were several talent agents that took the show's creators on a tour of Hollywood in search of a television deal, but nothing came of that year-long quest. Now Baccioco runs another kids' audio show, the popular Deputy Guppy, which, yes, is about a cowboy fish.