This is Radio Mars

On October 30th, 1938, at 8.00pm, the Mercury Theater On The Air, headed by Orson Welles, broadcasted their performance of The War of the Worlds. It was an hour program where the first half was done as contemporary news bulletins spelling out the vanguard of an invasion force landing at Grover's Mill, New Jersey. It was performed as a Halloween event but too many people tuned in at the wrong time and got caught up in it believing it to be authentic and running out the door before the second half began in a more traditional radio-play structure.

Well, the shit went down and there was some sporadic panic in the streets. Over the ensuing weeks, then years and decades the media have blown it a bit out of proportion, but the myth remains firm that seventy years ago was the night that panicked America. It deserves the hype; the broadcast itself was a wonderful live performance that holds up so very well today.

Close your eyes and listen to this nine and half minute excerpt:

Mercury Theater On The Air, being Orson Welles and his troupe of performers, adapted classic texts to radio and some are seminal.  Their Dracula is still one of the best versions and Heart of Darkness makes me wish that Orson Welles had made a movie of it. There was a lot of pressure on Welles to turn War of the Worlds into a film but he made Citizen Kane instead. I'll not complain. It was seventeen years later, fifty-five years ago, that George Pal and Byron Haskin made their version. It consciously and respectfully takes a lot from the radio-play and despite some quibbles and a touch of datedness it still deserves classic status and I admit I've watched it numerous times and will again.

The recent Spielberg version has nice effects but keeping it contemporary really didn't work for me. The machines felt like they should have been stomping around an earlier time, preferably when H.G. Wells set his novel in 1898 and preferably back in England. Despite other right shitty versions not worth talking about there hasn't been a reasonably loyal adaptation of the book. I think it is worthy of such and I hope one day in the near future someone gives it a jolly good try.

But for now, I'm going to put on Jeff Wayne's Musical Version and do a disco dance in the office.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth Century...