Orson Welles - The War of the Worlds (1938)

"The War of the Worlds" by Orson Welles with The Mercury Theater on the Air


Orson Welles, the prodigy, talked his way into the theater in Europe and parleyed that into a successful and heralded career as a theater and radio actor/director by the age of twenty.  What brought him to prominent, national attention was his work with CBS's Mercury Theater on the Air, a radio acting troupe that performed weekly various adaptations of classic novels and short stories.  The most famous and notorious being the 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, a sort of Halloween holiday special.  With the unique structure of a regular musical broadcast interrupted by increasingly alarming emergency news bulletins and field reportage, the United States was rapidly taken over by an alien threat from Mars starting in Grover's Mill, New Jersey.

It was a new structure for the radio and because some listeners only heard portions of the broadcast (the full script makes the dramatization quite clear both in its content and promotion), a spotty hysteria spread through the Northeastern United States and some parts of Canada that had people fleeing their homes.  If it all seems overblown, it might have been since the media ended up writing over 12,500 articles on the program and its aftermath.  Welles, as the director and lead actor of the program and by now a household name, was forced into an apology for any trouble the broadcast might have brewed.  He would end up building the event into a new career in film through an unprecedented contract with RKO.  Welles would return to the radio as an actor, but it would no longer be his primary profession.  The War of the Worlds adaptation remains the most talked about and available of his radio work.

Here is the discography surrounding Orson Welles's debut album:

The War of the Worlds

Orson Welles Apologizes


Pass the Headphones!!