Home » A formidable Orson Welles unleashes the War of the Worlds with the Martians via radio

A formidable Orson Welles unleashes the War of the Worlds with the Martians via radio

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On October 30, 1938, at eight in the evening, live on the CBS radio station. the Martians invaded us and unleashed War of the Worlds. It went down in history as Orson Welles’ joke but in reality it was not a joke, it was a formidable theatrical performance that through a still relatively new means of communication, radio, became something else.

The facts. The previous year, the brilliant director, actor and writer had founded a theater company, the Mercury Theater, which was specializing in radio plays, a genre that was born recently and was doing very well. The debut was a Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in fascist Italy, not bad. Allore Welles had taken the text of another brilliant character, Herbert George Wells, a writer who in his texts, already at the end of the 19th century, had foreseen airplanes, tanks, space travel, the atomic bomb and satellite TV ( according to some, even the web). In 1897 Wells had published a science fiction novel, The War of Worlds, which had been quite successful. Thirty-one years later Orson Welles had made a radio adaptation of it so it really seemed to many that the Martians had invaded us.

A newspaper came out with the front page in big letters: “A fake war on the radio triggers panic in the United States.” In reality, the news of the panic seems to have been largely exaggerated, but the theatrical performance remains formidable. When fake news began to be talked about, many cited this episode as an example of the manipulative power of the media. But on October 30, 1938, Orson Welles ended the broadcast with these words: “This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that War of the Worlds has no other meaning than the festive offer it was meant to be: the Mercury Theater radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush. and say Buh! As of now, we couldn’t lather all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. … … so we did the best thing after that: we wiped out the world in front of your own ears and completely destroyed CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we did not mean this and that both institutions are still open. So goodbye everyone and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That smiling, bright, globular invader in your living room is a resident of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that wasn’t Martian. …. it’s Halloween “.

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