By Bob Walsh
The New York Times' coverage of events after the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in America, with Orson Welles at the microphone.
This evening I will play my copy of Orson Welles and the
Mercury Theater doing War Of The Worlds. Modern audiences will likely
find it incredible that this could have literally panicked huge numbers
of people into believing we were actually being invaded by Martians. If
nothing else the time compression is completely off. Radio was a
relatively new medium in 1938 and something that APPEARED to be
legitimate news broadcasting was taken more at face value than it might
be today.
It is a really interesting piece of cultural history.
As
an aside the same play was presented in the early 1950s in South
America. Columbia I think. It totally freaked out the local
population. When they found out it was a radio play and not "real" a
mob stormed the radio station, burned it down and murdered several
people in the building. They were a tad miffed. At least we didn't do
that.
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