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May 6, 2015 · But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin—it was Orson Welles' adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic "The War of the Worlds." A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of ...
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Orson Welles' 30 October 1938 radio adaptation of \\"The War of the Worlds\\" caused mass hysteria, convincing thousands of panicked listeners across North America that Earth was being attacked by Mars. Of the countless adaptations made of H.G. Wells 1897 science fiction classic The War of the Worlds over the past century, the one that remains most t...
A brief excerpt from the script by Howard Koch shows why Welles hour-long production of The War of the Worlds is justly regarded as a mini-masterpiece of horror: The broadcast was legendary overnight for supposedly having been too realistic and frightening for its audience. Morning papers from coast to coast reveled in the mass hysteria it had caus...
In Pittsburgh, Associated Press reported, a man returned home in the middle of the broadcast and found his wife with a bottle of poison in her hand, saying, Id rather die this way than like that. In San Francisco, police fielded hundreds of calls from frightened listeners, including one man who wanted to volunteer to help fight the Martian invaders...
When Orson Welles was asked to comment on the hysteria he was blamed for causing, he was incredulous. Weve been putting on all sorts of things from the most realistic situations to the wildest fantasy, but nobody ever bothered to get serious about them before, he was quoted as saying. We just cant understand why this should have such an amazing rea...
WABC, which aired the program in New York, issued this statement one hour after the broadcast ended:
For decades, the conventional wisdom based on the sensationalized reporting of the time was that the Mercury Theatre broadcast had indeed spread mass hysteria from one end of the country to the other. By the 2000s, however, sociologists and historians were questioning the true severity of the War of the Worlds panic. W. Joseph Campbell, an American...
Such data as exist about the listening audience that night support Campbells thesis. The C.E. Hooper ratings service reported that only 2 percent of national respondents were tuned into Welles broadcast on 30 October 1938. The rest were either listening to something else (most likely ventriloquist Edgar Bergens Chase and Sanborn Hour, one of the mo...
Recapping the event on its 75th anniversary in Slate, media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow pointed out that few, if any, of the anecdotal reports of hysterical reactions to the program were ever investigated and confirmed:
In addition to overblown press coverage, another reason the event went down in history as an instance of mass hysteria was the publication of a book in 1940 called The Invasion from Mars. Written by Princeton psychology professor Hadley Cantril, the book purported to explain the War of the Worlds panic in sociological terms but suffered from being ...
From 'The War of the Worlds' broadcast: 'This is the end now.'. On the evening of Oct. 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his troupe went on the air to say that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Ever since ...
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Oct 28, 2013 · Wednesday marks the 75 th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. “Upwards of a ...
Oct 30, 2013 · Updated: June 1, 2023 | Original: October 30, 2013. As the clock struck 8 p.m. in New York City on the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles stood on a podium inside a Madison Avenue radio ...
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Feb 10, 2023 · In perhaps the most notorious event in American broadcast history, on 30 October 1938, 23-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. They converted the novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey, which some listeners actually ...
The original broadcast of Orson Welles's production of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. This was the narrative of perhaps the most infamous radio broadcast ever: Orson Welles’s Halloween adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, War of the Worlds, which aired for the first time 80 years ago. Only twenty-three-years old, Welles already had ...
