Orson Welles' War of the Worlds
Broadcast as the Halloween episode of ‘The Mercury Theatre On The Air’ on 30 October, 1938, this is the famous CBS radio production that panicked America.
The first two thirds of the broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to some listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress.
Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air ran without commercial breaks, adding to the program's realism, and that others were primarily listening to Edgar Bergen on another channel and only tuned in to the show during a musical interlude, thereby missing the introduction that proved the show was a drama.
In the days following the adaptation, there was widespread outrage in the media. The program's news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some public figures and newspapers (which had lost advertising revenue to radio), leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. Despite these complaints - or perhaps in part because of them - the episode secured Welles' fame as a dramatist.
The first two thirds of the broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to some listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress.
Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air ran without commercial breaks, adding to the program's realism, and that others were primarily listening to Edgar Bergen on another channel and only tuned in to the show during a musical interlude, thereby missing the introduction that proved the show was a drama.
In the days following the adaptation, there was widespread outrage in the media. The program's news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some public figures and newspapers (which had lost advertising revenue to radio), leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. Despite these complaints - or perhaps in part because of them - the episode secured Welles' fame as a dramatist.
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