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War of the Worlds - 70th Anniversary 10/30

Boo! ;D


BTW...there will be no newly-created broadcasts of War Of The Worlds
this year, as the Martians* have descended on Radioland and wiped out
most of the on-air staffs. ::)


*: Martians portrayed by bean counters and upper management
at Cheap Channel, C(BS), Farid-adel, Entercom, etc.
 
...part of what caused the panic was the fact that (or so a Princeton University* study found) most of the listeners who panicked had tuned over to CBS after first listening to another program since the top of the hour, most of them listening to The Chase & Sanborn Hour on the Red Network of NBC, the #1 rated show that season. (Father Charles Coughlin, the infamously anti-semitic "Radio Priest," was also heard at that hour in many cities, usually on stations that were either independent, Blue NBC or Mutual affiliates.) On my podcast site, I currently have a program in my Echoes of a Century series for Wisconsin Public Radio a few years ago on which I took the Chase & Sanborn and Mercury Theatre broadcasts from that night, started with the former and then -- at the point where the Princeton study determined was the great switch-over -- "tune over" to the latter and stay with it until the station break. The page with that program on it is http://kingdaevid.podbean.com/2008/10/18/echoes-of-a-century-martians-go-home-30-october-1938/ (and it's only going to be there for about four or five more days)...

*interestingly, part of the Welles drama was set inside the Princeton Observatory...
 
There was an entire book written on the War of the Worlds broadcast that I read in 1967. The book contained a study on how various parts of the country reacted to the broadcast. As I remember, there was not as much of a reaction to the broadcast in the New England states, but the study relates that this may have been because a major CBS affiliate in that part of the country (I don't remember which one although it may have been in Boston) did not carry the Mercury Theatre program that night.

You do wonder why more people didn't tune their radios to listen to other stations to see if they were carrying news of any "invasion". After all, it was at night when many more stations can usually be picked up. In putting myself into this situation, I remember when I was in a college dorm on November 22, 1963 and guys were in the halls saying that President Kennedy had been shot. I had a pretty good radio and began going up and down the AM band listening for news to confirm what they were saying and I quickly found it on numerous stations.

There was an excellent made-for-TV movie on this in the mid-1970's. It portrays the program being produced in the radio studio and shows how various groups of people were effected by it in various parts of the U.S.A. such as a man & wife almost taking the lives of their children rather than have them face death from the invading Martians or farmers firing at an irrigation pump thinking it is a "Martian machine". The ending of that TV movie is quite interesting when it shows that America and the World were about to face a true "nightmare" with the beginning of World War II.
 
>BTW...there will be no newly-created broadcasts of War Of The Worlds this year, as the Martians* have descended on Radioland and wiped out most of the on-air staffs.

Fybush.com reports that WSKG Radio and TV in Binghamton, NY will simulcast a recreation of the broadcast. See station's program info at http://wskg.com/expressions/2008-10-30.htm

>There was an entire book written on the War of the Worlds broadcast that I read in 1967.

Maybe it's the one that I have, "The Panic Broadcast" by Howard Koch.
 
WGSR-LP 39 in Reidsville, North Carolina will likely be re-broadcasting "War Of The Worlds" . I'm not sure when though

Watch/Listen to it live at http://www.wgsr.tv And give them a call, they're friendly people and would be glad to tell yuo if it's going to be on again.
 
A reenactment, complete with studio audience and "old time" sound effects, was produced here in Salt Lake City over several nights. The 10-31 event was broadcast live on Sirius satellite radio.
 
The War of The Worlds...the panic that took place back in the 30's did history repeat itself in 1968 when Buffalo's WKBW radio did their own version of this?

Over the years I have heard both yes and no.
 
Perhaps one reason why there was so little
panic on December 7, 1941, was because "War
Of The Worlds" had been a sort of "shakedown"
cruise. Coming only about a month after the
Munich crisis, where extensive use was made of
news bulletins, the public was on edge in October
1938; some people felt that it was really the Germans
attacking the U.S. Once the public finally realized
that "War Of The Worlds" was a play and not real
news, and with the continued use of bulletins to relay
real breaking news events, Pearl Harbor elicited not so
much panic but rather a desire to whip the Japanese.

By the way, a few years later a radio station in South
America broadcast "War Of The Worlds" with the locale
changed to the station's broadcast area. The panic there
was such that a group of listeners actually burned down
the radio station.
 
bpatrick said:
Perhaps one reason why there was so little
panic on December 7, 1941, was because "War
Of The Worlds" had been a sort of "shakedown"
cruise.
Click to expand...

...no, the reasons for Pearl Harbor not creating a panic are very simple: first, Pearl Harbor was an entirely daytime affair (breaking at mid-day in the North American time zones) whereas War of the Worlds was a nighttime phenomenon (8:00 P.M. on the East Coast, 5:00 P.M. on the West Coast). Note that the panic with the Welles program was mainly in the Eastern and Central time zones. Second, there was a general expectation of sorts that the Japanese would attack Manila at some point, so Pearl Harbor wasn't as much of a surprise (and the main point of what surprise had been created was that Hawaii was attacked first); although Archibald MacLeish had used a newscast element in his radio plays The Fall of the City and Air Raid, nobody expected Orson Welles to utilise the newscast element so extensively as he did in War of the Worlds...
 
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