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For context, the Mercury Theatre on the Air site has a full recording of Orson Welles's staging of The War of the Worlds available at [1][mp3]. It doesn't sound

For context, the Mercury Theatre on the Air site has a full recording of Orson Welles's staging of The War of the Worlds available at [1][mp3]. It doesn't sound to me like the cast were trying to make it particularly realistic. Commercial radio broadcasting was still relatively novel in 1938, but its hard to understand now how anyone thought it was real. The site [2] also has a brief recording of a conversation [3][mp3] between Orson Welles and H. G. Wells (which I haven't listened to). I hadn't realised that their adult lives overlapped. [1] http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3 http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3 [2] http://www.mercurytheatre.info/ http://www.mercurytheatre.info/ [3] http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/401028.mp3 http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/401028.mp3

orblivion 13y ago
The explanation I read was that this show was not very popular, at least at the time. Most people were listening to another station. Then, when it went to commercial, they switched to Mercury Theatre. This means they missed Orson's introduction, which says explicitly that it is just a drama. So the first thing they heard was the series of fake news flashes.
- evan_ 13y ago
  That's specifically addressed in the article.
  - orblivion 13y ago
    I noticed that later, though it seemed to be in response to the amount of people who were listening, not the fact that they missed the intro.