Halloween Radio Theater - "The War of the Worlds"
Since I will be smack in the middle of Cambridge tonight, doing the adult equivalent of trick-or-treating -- that is, I'll be at Club Oberon, drinking and watching Cirque of the Dead -- and unable to do my musing in real-time, I shall leave you with this, the original Orson Welles radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds", first broadcast on Halloween night, 1938: MP3 download version Streaming version (YouTube) The script for the 1938 adaptation The original novel by H. G. Wells [ HTML | epub | mobi | print ] Wikipedia article Although there wasn't really widespread chaos and panic as the legend would have you believe, the framing device of a newscast breaking in on what would have sounded just like an ordinary music program was novel at the time. Epistolary novels like Dracula were well-known, but using metatextual devices in radio was not. Audio dramas were traditionally presented to the audience like plays in a theater, a neat littl