October 30th, 1938.
The date of one of the most infamous radio broadcasts of all time, still talked about 84 years later. This is of course Orson Welles’ reading of H.G. Welles’ classic, ‘The War of the Worlds’. This broadcast is well documented for having caused widespread panic (although the extent of this is heavily disputed) due to the first act’s news bulletin-style presentation.
I wanted to listen to this broadcast as although it is very well known I have never actually heard it, and thought it would be interesting to analyse the use of sound.
I think the most innovative use of sound in this story is the flip-flopping between a concert in “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in Downtown New York” and the news bulletins of Martians coming down to invade Earth. If the listener had not tuned in right from the start of the broadcast, or had simply not been paying attention for a few minutes, then there would be nothing to indicate in the story that this was fiction, especially seeing as there wasn’t a break in the programme until 38 minutes in, well after a large portion of New Jersey and New York had been vaporised by Martian heat rays. I think this is an excellent plot time and incredibly forward thinking for the time as it is quite a non-traditional way of telling a story. It’s certainly better than the awful 1977 musical version of the same story by Jeff Wayne. I was subjected to that once. Never again.
Bibliography
- Schwartz, A., 2015. The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke. [online] Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-fluke-180955180/> [Accessed 3 February 2022].
- HISTORY. 2009. Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast. [online] Available at: <https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/welles-scares-nation> [Accessed 3 February 2022].