+1 for the Radiolab episode
Well, that was another element in the “perfect storm” that I forgot to mention…the fact that the scariest part of the broadcast happened before the “act break”. As the first part–which mimicked a radio news broadcast–came to a close, we heard the New York announcer choke to death on the Martians’ poisonous black smoke, followed by the crowd sounds, car horns, and boat whistles gradually dying out, followed by a single ham radio operator’s voice calling out, “Isn’t there anyone alive out there?..Isn’t there ANYONE?”
Immediately after that, they had the station ID and the announcement by Welles that “you’re listening to a dramatization of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.” But by that point, anyone who believed it was really happening had turned off the radio and gotten the hell out of Dodge!
Nicholas Meyer, writing a movie that has to do with H.G. Wells? Who’d have thought it?
It was actually Ecuador in 1949.
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_quito.htm
as I mention in the other thread, the book on the invasion “panic” was Cantril’s Invasion from Mars:
published in 1940, and containing interviews with panicked people conducted by Cantril, a psychologist, it seems to pretty definitely document that a panic took place. The book also contains a copy of the complete script.
I find this unconvincing:
The accounts of panic were published the next morning. I don’t doubt that some of the accounts were sensationalized, as media tend to sensationalize every story.
But the idea that newspapers across the country, independently and overnight, would say, “Hey! CBS is doing a radio play about a Martian invasion. This is our big chance to discredit radio–a medium which has been around for 20 years, isn’t going away, and in which many of us are cross invested! Let’s make up a lot of shit and run it into the ground!”–strikes me as ridiculous.
The stories may have been overblown, but they were based on something.
In fact, I’ll turn it around and say, read the script. The notion of intelligent life on Mars was not preposterous in 1938, and was taken seriously by at least some scientists. The meme of “We interrupt this program for a special announcement” had not yet been done to death–today, it instantly stamps a script as parody or retro melodrama, but not so in 1938. Given the above, the first 20 minutes of the script are quite realistic and convincing–I’d be shocked if some fraction of the audience didn’t believe it.
After about 20 minutes the timeline becomes too compressed to be believable–if you’re thinking clearly–and then at about 40 minutes you have the station break, after which the program is obviously scripted drama.
But until then? Yeah, at least some people are going to believe it, and not necessarily only dumb ones. How could it be otherwise?
My grandfather didn’t hear the broadcast, but his Dad did. “Was he scared?” I asked.
Um, no. He was a scientist and it would take a lot more than a single radio broadcast on a single network to convince him of alien invasion.
ETA:
From the Slate article: Relying heavily on a skewed report compiled six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion, The Invasion From Mars, by Princeton’s Hadley Cantril, estimated that about 1 million people were “frightened” by War of the Worlds. But the AIPO survey, as Cantril himself admitted, offered an audience rating “over 100 per cent higher than any other known measure of this audience.” Cantril defended his reliance on AIPO data by noting that it surveyed homes without telephones and small communities often overlooked by radio ratings agencies. But this cherry-picked data set was clearly tainted by the sensationalistic newspaper publicity following the broadcast (a possibility Cantril also admitted). Worse, Cantril committed an obvious categorical error by conflating being “frightened,” “disturbed,” or “excited” by the program with being “panicked.” In the late 1930s, radio audiences were regularly “excited” and “frightened” by suspenseful dramas. But what supposedly set Welles’ show apart was the “panic,” and even terror, it instilled in its audience. Was the small audience that listened to War of the Worlds excited by what they heard? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean they ran into the streets fearing for the fate of humanity.
Read my comments on this in the other thread.
His contention that audiences were regularly “frightened” by dramas , and that this is different from “panicked” is unsupported. Why is “frightened” different than “panicked”? An audience todasy wouldn’t be frightened by the War of the Worlds broadcast. That it’s “an obvious categorical error” isn’t at all obvious.
An estimate of one million being frightened by something that is higher by 100 percent than any other known measure suggests that it was only half a million frightened people. I’m not seeing that this makes a significant difference.
It’s undeniable that many people were frightened and were panicked – Cantril interviewed them. Don’t call it “cherry picking” that he interviewed the frightened ones – what do you expect him to do, interview the ones that didn’t panic? The question then becomes “How many frightened people do you need to declare something a panic?” It certainly seems to me that there were enough. Not everybody, or even a majority. But I don’t think that anyone but the extremely gullible would require that.
My dad heard that broadcast as a teenager. He was tuned-in from the start. (If he had been listening to Nelson Eddy he wouldn’t have changed stations).
With the arrogance of youth, he thought at the time that anyone who was fooled by the broadcast must have been an idiot to start with.
The term for them was sustaining programs. You can’t have holes in your programming schedule. Something has to go out every minute you are on the air. From a business point of view it’s better to have some content there than dead air. So networks filled in hours when they couldn’t find sponsorship with inexpensive but prestige-building programs. Radio plays, symphonies, religion, current events. (Local stations did the same but might have a wider variety of types aimed at the local audience.) Sometimes they might pick up a sponsor, as Welles did, or they could be dumped in a second if a sponsored show became available. Sponsors, BTW, paid for the entire show in those days. So-called magazine style advertising, the type we’re used to today, with different short unrelated commercials filling time, didn’t get started until television in the 1950s.
As I wrote in the other thread, newspapers the day after mention incidents from every area of the country, with the greatest upset being in New Jersey. No, the country did not rise up in terror and flee into the woods. But you can’t say that nobody was fooled and nothing happened. Lots of individuals were clearly affected. Police and newspapers and radio stations were flooded with calls. A few people did foolish things. I guess it all comes down to where you want to place the emphasis.
Philip Klass is full of it, as well. I have a recording of the original and it follows the script given in Freddy the Pig’s link exactly. And that starts:
That had been announced in the closer the week before and it was in the radio listings for that evening’s shows. At no time did Welles try to hide anything. Just the opposite, he was trying to give the show the maximum possible publicity beforehand.
Geez, Xap, don’t you read? I’ve listened to the recording countless times, and, yes, it includes the full disclaimer at the start. But I could easily see some affiliate station cutting in late because a commercial ran over, or because of technical difficulties, as I stated above. It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened at the station he was listening to, and to many others across the country. It certainly still happens on TV.
Or he could be misremembering it, after all. But I don’t dismiss the recollections of an earwitness out of hand.
I do. In all the hundreds of accounts of the broadcast I’ve read, not one has ever said that the intro was cut. This is the first claim I’ve ever seen. Memories are always shaky and statements that are made immediately after an event are far more likely to be true than memories adjusted by the narrative later placed on a story. E.g., Case Closed, the JFK assassination book by Gerald Posner, examines dozens of witness statements and found that people changed their stories to make them adhere to conspiracy theories rather than backing the Oswald claim as they originally had.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the station Klass listened to omitted the opening, or that he tuned in late, or he got distracted, or whatever. It is unlikely that he is the only one in the country to notice this. The odds are that his memory is wrong. And there is no evidence anywhere that Welles tried to hide the opening and huge amounts of evidence otherwise.
You might want to notice that I am fully supporting your argument otherwise. I’m just examining the claim of a third party and finding it dubious. “Don’t you read?” has been grounds for a warning in other threads as a personal insult. You’re the one reading things into a post that were not there. To be honest, I remembered the quote and not who wrote it. It’s not about you.
Non-commercial “sustaining” programs were a mixture of program try-outs looking for sponsors plus public-service type programs, since the radio networks at this time still felt an obligation to provide a broad range of programming. In 1941 the Federal Communications Commission issued its review of radio network programming, Report on Chain Broadcasting. A couple sections you might find interesting are Sustaining programs and The Effect of Network-Affiliate Relations on Competition in the Radiobroadcast Industry.
I’m surprised the authors of the Slate piece don’t mention the later broadcasts (and associated panics, if they also happened) in South America and in Portugal.
The subtext of the Slate article seems to be that the panic didn’t happen because people aren’t really that panicky. So if the panics really DID happen in those other countries, it puts the lie to that notion; therefore, they’re conspicuous in their absence.