The War of the Worlds

Performed as a Halloween episode of the American radio show Mercury Theatre on the Air, the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles the War of the Worlds create chaos and pandemonium to the public. The story, originally adapted from the novel The War of the Worlds by H. G. Welles, was about a group of alien life forms that come to Earth and disturb the people. While when many read the novel with no ideas of panic or reason to freak out, the fact that this version of the story was done over radio involved many reasons for it to be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

After the show aired, not only were many people outraged about the entire incident, many public figures spoke out about the broadcast, and newspapers and other radio news labeled it “cruelly deceptive”. But despite the bad press, and confusion among Americans, this single air time allowed Orson Welles to become very well-known.