The 900 Pound Tradition (Halloween Special)
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 07:00PM 
October 30, 1938. Creatures from Mars have landed. Grover's Mill, NJ waits for news. And the world would never be the same. Nor would audio entertainment. In radio theater there is really only one giant representative icon, one show that everybody knows and everybody agrees-that's radio. In its oneness it overshadows all other media traditions. It's huge. Television doesn't have just one defining show. Film constantly argues about the top 100 favorites. The Internet isn't defined by one shared experience. However, whenever somebody asks me what I do and I tell him or her I produce audio or radio theater. That somebody smiles and says, "Oh, the War of the Worlds. I've heard of that."
The War of the Worlds stands alone.
The War of the Worlds stands alone.
Every October hundreds of radio stations across the globe re-broadcast or reenact the most successful media-savvy Halloween pranks of all time. Seventy-one years ago Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater On the Air broadcast their "simulated" newscast of an invasion of the East Coast from Mars based on the H.G. Wells novel. Names that were to become famous were involved-Welles of course, John Houseman produced, and Howard Koch (later to co-write Casablanca) wrote the script.
The show was performed in the deadpan news style of the day, pretended to interrupt an on-going program and took the listening public completely by surprise. What was going on? Radio station phone banks lit up all across the nation as listener called in with concern, anger and fear. Was there really an invasion and later, how dare the media play with and fool an audience like that.
In the blaring light of the 24/7 news cycle and the John Stewart Show, and like the urban myth quality of Woodstock or the Reagan Administration it's hard to truly measure who actually heard the initial 1938 broadcast and who just thinks they were around for the first War of the Worlds. Depression-era, pre-World War II America was a very different time and place and had only had mass-broadcast media for about ten years.
War of the Worlds had it all-a good believable story, horror, suspense; however, there's a GOOD, BAD and the GREAT to War of the Worlds. GOOD: A monument like this can never be repeated. BAD: People will keep trying to repeat it. GREAT: Audio theater is an amazingly powerful, emotional, and complete way to tell a story. It can accomplish almost anything.
So when War of the Worlds pops up on Halloween, listen to it again. Let the horror and surprise soak in. There's nothing like it. War of the Worlds will always be the biggest monster in the room.
THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio
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