The 1938 Broadcast of War of the Worlds

The 1930s were the Golden Age of radio in the United States. Americans gathered around the radio to listen to music, both live and recorded, and to hear the latest news. Radio drama was gaining popularity, laying the foundation for our society's obsession with serialized, in-home entertainment.

In 1937, up and coming actor and director Orson Welles ended a rocky connection with the Federal Theatre Project and, together with his friend and producer John Houseman, founded the Mercury Theatre Company in New York City. Welles was a bold and expressive theatre artist, successfully staging innovative and challenging work at the unbelievable age of 22. He was able to supplement his theatre income with writing, directing, and performing radio dramas, earning as much as $2000 a week.

In the summer of 1937, Welles took his Mercury Theatre Company on the air, producing and broadcasting 13 weeks of programming for CBS Radio. Following that success, Welles and company made history with a broadcast that hit the American airwaves 76 years ago today: a dramatic adaptation of H.G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, a story of Martians invading the planet Earth, destroying civilization as they go.

The drama took the form of a live news broadcast, complete with scripted breaks and on-location reporting. Though the 62-minute presentation began with an introduction announcing that the program was fictional, many listeners switched over from a musical program on another station and missed the disclaimer. As a result, many New York City listeners mistook the realism of the production for reality and panicked, believing their city was actually under attack from extra-terrestrial forces.

Welles had sought to make the drama as real and hard hitting as possible, especially given the impossibilities of the novel on which it was based (C'mon, people; it's aliens. Really). In the days and weeks following the broadcast, Welles was blasted by news outlets for the program being a callous prank.

At the same time that Welles came under fire for the realism of Worldscan the producers of a realistic drama really be blamed for people missing the explanatory introduction?the quality of his work is unmistakable, and it cemented Welles' reputation as a dramatic artist. He would remain at the forefront of American entertainment until his death in 1985.

Listening to the broadcast (you can do so at the link below) I can't help but wonder what a 1938 audience would think of the realism we can achieve in our movies and television today, when big budget studios can successfully use computers to bring frighteningly real Martians to life. Check out the clip below from Steven Spielberg's 2005 film adaptation War of the Worlds.