Welles’ Wells: War of the Worlds Radio Drama
It’s Sunday, so you get YOBC reading updates.
For January’s YOBC, I selected several science fiction pieces from between World War I and World War II to participate with LittleRedReviewer’s Vintage Sci-Fi month.
H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was published in 1898, a story about alien invasion from Mars.
I included it in this list because Orson Welles created a radio drama of the story which ran on October 13, 1938.
You’ve surely heard this story before, about how people thought the radio broadcast was a real news broadcast, and thousands of people panicked. What I didn’t know was how riveting the dramatization is. (Link to Audible’s catalog listing.)
New York Times headline from 31 Oct 1938. Note also the article to the right: what an incredibly scary time. Little wonder, in my mind, why people were ready to believe extra-terrestrial invasion!
Put yourself in the time. There is little or no TV broadcast yet. You listened to the radio to get your news and entertainment, and no doubt you were tuning back and forth over the dial getting headlines from The War in Europe. There was a little news, ads for peppermint hair tonic, swinging jazz from Big Bands. And 90% of what you were hearing was live, which is usually not true today, even if you still have an AM/FM tuner. What came out of that radio was truth and gospel.
Welles’ radio drama has no ads. Throughout the piece, he does not cut in and announce that this is a pre-recorded dramatization. It cuts back and forth from furtive news updates to a musical show supposedly taking place in a real radio hall in NY. The fellows updating the invasion event continuously decline in their ability to speak clearly and form full sentences. And they are lost to the broadcast as they die! The drama is staticky and whistles and pops as the broadcasters try to tune in the on-site reporters.
I’m telling you, you have to listen to this, and it’s well worth the $4 download, as it is done all in one continuous broadcast.
At the end of the one that I downloaded (I hope I linked the same one) Welles and Wells are interviewed together. Orson Welles is discussing his idea for the yet-to-be-made Citizen Kane, and Wells brings his point-of-view from a Britain on the brink of a very real invasion.
We see a lot of folks arriving here with the search terms to find illegal pirated free downloads. If you are here for that reason, piss off. 
I listened to the broadcast through YouTube (in 6 10-minute chunks). It was great – really a high-piece of drama for the time. I read some stuff afterward about how people panicked. RedCross workers were finding people hiding in the hills of Tennessee and such weeks after the broadcast – people who claimed to have seen the Martians. It really is an interesting section of history.