The Mercury Theatre Presents...

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S.”

-Orson Welles

My obsession with Orson Welles began when I was sixteen, after my mother had asked me if I wanted to listen to a radio broadcast. For her birthday, my father had given her a set of the twenty greatest radio shows put on air during the first half of the twentieth century. Assembled and introduced by Walter Cronkite, this collection catalogued a multitudinous offering of programs, ranging from the vaudeville antics of Abbot and Costello to the heart-racing thrills of The Shadow.

If we had started with anything other than the first broadcast in the collection, I perhaps would’ve listened once, maybe twice, to appease my mother’s wishes, and then moved on to other things. However, she didn’t start with one of the comedies (although, we’d eventually get to Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, and I Love Lucy) or even one of the thrillers; she started with The Mercury Theatre’s production of The War of the Worlds. She started with Orson Welles. And although I didn’t know it when I sat down that evening, I would forever be changed when that baritone voice introduced us to the apocalypse that followed.

If you’re unfamiliar with this broadcast, I urge you to look it up on Youtube. Before doing so, though, look up its history. (Or just read the next two paragraphs. This isn’t a detailed summary of what happened, by any means, but it’ll serve as a nice Cliffnotes version.) On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles (who was only 23) and his theatre troupe broadcasted their version of the H.G. Wells novel, updating it to fit a modern audience. Instead of telling the story as a standard radio drama, though, Wells depicted it through a series of news reports, interrupting an orchestra broadcasting from atop a high-rise in New York City to bring its listeners in an alien invasion. As the reports gained in frequency, they began relaying information about an unidentified flying object landing in a remote town somewhere in New Jersey. Twenty minutes into the broadcast, while they reported and investigated the crash, new reporters, police officers, and unlucky citizens who were just too nosey for their own good screamed as a creature emerged from the structure. Several seconds later, the UFO began firing a ray into the crowd of people, and just as the screams reached their apex, the broadcast went dead. The next twenty minutes cut between news throughout the east coast, reporting the alien attack.

Of course, we can look back on this now and see it for what it is; however, radio was still new in 1938, and no one had exploited it in such a manner. Of the six million people listening, an estimated one million thought the report was real. Welles had timed his alien invasion to coincide with the break of a more popular show on a rival station. When the break came and listeners began circling the dial, Welles ordered his alien invasion to commence. Unfortunately, some listeners didn’t make it to the end of the broadcast (they were too busy fleeing into the night with their families), when Welles comes on the air and admits this was simply a good-old-fashioned horror story and was not meant to be taken seriously. But he knew what he had done. He had just committed the best prank still to this day.

My mother told me all of this before playing the CD. I nodded, wondered how people could have been so stupid to believe such a thing, and stretched out on the floor next to our dog. I was tired and figured I’d probably fall asleep. As Orson’s voice vibrated through the speakers, my mother turned off the light. “Why’d you do that?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“For effect,” she answered.

We said nothing more.

When the aliens first attacked, I imagined the poor schmucks listening to the radio, their eyes widening, their lips trembling. When I heard the screams, I saw mothers and fathers weeping as they grabbed their children and raced for their cars. When the news reporter described people dying in the streets of New York, my mind raced back to the horrors of 9/11, and I knew exactly what must have been going through their minds as they drove their cars toward the black horizon, wondering if they’d see another day.

After it finished, I asked my mother if there were any other radio shows like that.

“Well,” she said, turning on the light and leafing through the booklet, “there’s a few more by Welles and the Mercury Theatre. There are some comedies, too. Abbot and Costello come next. Wanna listen to that tomorrow night?”

My weariness had worn away, and an anxious, childlike enthusiasm had replaced it. “Let’s listen now,” I said, smiling. “But let’s listen to another one by Welles.”

She laughed, found another Mercury Theatre production, and turned off the lights.

For the next few months, we’d listen to radio broadcasts throughout the week. Eventually, I’d find my way to Citizen Kane and The Third Man, but for a while, movies took a back seat to an art form that has long since been forgotten. Sometimes, while teaching in class, I mention The War of the Worlds story, and students take interest; however, I know most think nothing more of it after leaving my classroom. Still, there are those who come back, wide-eyed and smiling, and tell me they listened to it over the weekend. Some of them still say they wouldn’t have freaked out if they had heard it live; others, though, are like me, and were freaked out even after knowing the truth.

If you haven’t listened to it, give it a try. Maybe you’ll find a new medium of entertainment. There are so many great programs from this era that no one will ever experience; it would be a tragedy to let these forgotten gems fade away.