by David Kubicek
I was in elementary school when I first read about how the Orson Welles radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds scared the bejesus out of everyone. Or at least that’s what my young mind got from it–Welles did this radio show about Martians invading Earth, and everyone thought it was real, and widespread panic ensued. I learned many years later that, like with most legends, the size of the panic has been greatly exaggerated over time.
This Saturday, October 30, 2021, marks the 83rd anniversary of that Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast . The show began with an announcer breaking into a music program with a series of news bulletins about astronomers seeing flashes on the planet Mars, objects landing at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and Martians emerging from said objects to zap people with death rays. The theory goes that listeners who tuned in late did not hear the announcement at the start of the program that it was fiction, so they believed the “news bulletins” were real.
There was even a 1975 TV Movie, The Night That Panicked America, about the making of the show and the panic that ensued. I’ve seen estimates that one million or more people were panic-stricken, but this seems unlikely since the listening audience wasn’t that big to begin with, and those who listened from the beginning of the program knew it was fiction. On that fateful Sunday evening the C.E. Hooper ratings service survey of 5,000 households found that only 2% were tuned in to Welles’ program, which was competing with the extremely popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and and his main wooden man, Charlie McCarthy.
The reason the producers decided to go with the news bulletin format was that the writer, Howard Koch, came to them in distress because he couldn’t make an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ book interesting. So they used news bulletins. They also updated the story from 1897 to 1938, moved it from England to New Jersey, and used real names and slightly modified names of places to give it more of a real and immediate feel.
The show apparently caused a bit of a ruckus, mainly in New York and New Jersey. Shortly after the show began at 8 p.m., CBS’s switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with viewers asking if it was real. Reporters from various news outlets invaded the network’s office because they smelled a good story, and good stories sell papers.
Orson Welles worried that, at the ripe old age of 23, his career was over. He went on the air the following day, Halloween, to apologize for the broadcast and asked the viewers to think of it as a Halloween prank. But, arguably, the debacle may have given his career a boost. He was summoned to Hollywood where he made Citizen Kane.
I asked my mother or grandmother (it’s been so long that I don’t remember which) if she listened to the program. She said that they’d heard about it, and no, Grampa didn’t grab his shotgun and an extra box of shells and usher the family into the storm cellar.
If you want to hear the original Mercury Theatre on the Air production, I have linked to it above, but unless you are a true Martian invasion history buff, you might be disappointed. Because it is dull!
Or Maybe, having been a science fiction reader and writer for most of my life, I’m just jaded.
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