Most of it was spread by word of mouth, a lot of the people who panicked hadn't even heard the broadcast.
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| Behind the 1938 Radio Show Panic http://www.focusgaming.co.uk/eveofthewar/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=625 |
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| Author: | eveofthewar [ Mon Jun 20, 2005 10:21 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Behind the 1938 Radio Show Panic |
It was the day before Halloween, October 30, 1938. Henry Brylawski was on his way to pick up his girlfriend at her Adams Morgan apartment in Washington, D.C. As he turned on his car radio, the 25-year-old law student heard some startling news. A huge meteorite had smashed into a New Jersey farm. New York was under attack by Martians. "I knew it was a hoax," said Brylawski, now 92. Others were not so sure. When he reached the apartment, Brylawski found his girlfriend's sister, who was living there, "quaking in her boots," as he puts it. "She thought the news was real," he said. It was not. What radio listeners heard that night was an adaptation, by Orson Welles's Mercury Theater group, of a science fiction novel written 40 years earlier: The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. However, the radio play, narrated by Orson Welles, had been written and performed to sound like a real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars. Thousands of people, believing they were under attack by Martians, flooded newspaper offices and radio and police stations with calls, asking how to flee their city or how they should protect themselves from "gas raids." Scores of adults reportedly required medical treatment for shock and hysteria. The hoax worked, historians say, because the broadcast authentically simulated how radio worked in an emergency. "Audiences heard their regularly scheduled broadcast interrupted by breaking news," said Michele Hilmes, a communications professor at University of Wisconsin in Madison and author of Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952. Stations then cut to a live reporter on the scene of the invasion in New Jersey. "By the end of the first half of the program, the radio studios themselves were under attack," Hilmes said. FULL STORY HERE |
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| Author: | Yuri2356 [ Mon Jun 20, 2005 11:23 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
Of course, if they'd waited arround for the second half they would have realised that it was all a show. (The second half dropping the news-report style and moving back to a conventional narritive) |
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| Author: | Lonesome Crow [ Mon Jun 20, 2005 11:30 pm ] |
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Most of it was spread by word of mouth, a lot of the people who panicked hadn't even heard the broadcast.
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| Author: | oever532 [ Tue Jun 21, 2005 7:46 am ] |
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They should also have listened from the beginning to realize it was a play... |
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