But A Lot Of People Thought They Did
by Bob Walsh
Every
year on October 30 for the last many years I have dug out a recording
of the original Mercury Theater On The Air broadcast of the H. G. Wells
story War Of The Worlds. It is remarkable to an audience today that
anybody thought it was real, but you have to remember the radio was
newer then. People tended to believe things they thought were legit
news broadcasts. Audiences were not as sophisticated as they are today
and things like time compression did not register like they do today.
I
hadn't realized it but the cast of War Of The Worlds listened over and
over to the broadcast recording of the Hindenberg disaster as
preparation, in order to get the beat and timbre of their voices
correct. They put a LOT of work into verisimilitude. If you didn't
happen to tune in to the very beginning of the show, when the intro was
done, you might not have realized it was just a radio play. People
panicked. It got stupid in a lot of places.
Still,
it could have been worse. A radio station in South America (I think it
was Caracas) did the same play, altered for local locations, shortly
after WWII. When the citizenry figured out it was a "hoax" they stormed
the radio station, murdered some of the people there and burned the
building down.
Orson Welles, who was 23 at the time, had to eat a TON of crow afterwards. People were PISSED.
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