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Was 'the war of the Worlds' a real news bulletin?
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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...
Oct 30, 2013 · He was in Grovers Mill, N.J., at a 50th anniversary celebration of The War of the Worlds broadcast. We interrupt this blog to bring you a special bulletin: Martians have invaded New Jersey! OK, as ...
- Mark Memmott
- Radio
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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 ...
Oct 30, 2018 · "The War of the Worlds" is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. UIG via Getty images. People likely didn't hear much of the broadcast, instead focusing in on the urgent-sounding news bulletins that cut in, experts told ABC News in 1988, on the 50th anniversary of the radio drama.
- Julia Jacobo
- 2 min
Oct 26, 2021 · Almost 85 years ago – Oct. 30, 1938 – “War of the Worlds” was broadcast on CBS Radio, including KNX (1070 AM) here in Los Angeles. In his radio adaption of H. G. Wells’ book for his program...
- Richard Wagoner
Jun 17, 2005 · The format used in War of the Worlds, with its shrill news bulletins and breathless commentary, echoed the way in which radio had covered the "Munich crisis"—a meeting of European powers that...
Others simply took it for granted that what was on the radio had to be true. “I just naturally thought it was real,” one woman explained. “Why wouldn’t I?” Welles explained to assembled news reporters that the crew of the broadcast of War of the Worlds was surprised by the public’s reaction.
