H.G. WELLS' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
caused panic across the U.S. in 1938 when Orson Wells presented a version of the story over the radio on Halloween Eve. TIME explained that listeners
reacted hysterically to the broadcast because "recent concern over a possible European Armageddon has badly spooked the U. S. public."
Steven Spielberg's film interpretation of the 1898 science fiction classic is a box office hit, with moviegoers around the world running for the entrance, not the exit. Some highlights from TIME:
Twenty-five years ago Herbert George Wells was a youngster of 42. His name stood for exuberant modernity, trailblazing science and a freely roving intelligence always starting up some new species of Utopian hare. But most of all it stood for exciting tales—plausible narrations of improbable happenings.
From Young Wells
Jun. 18, 1934
The cause of this amazing, nationwide panic last Sunday night was a broadcast by Orson Welles's CBS Mercury Theatre of the Air of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (no relative). Author Wells's classic pseudo-scientific thriller about how the men from Mars invade earth in a flying cylinder (at first thought to be a meteorite) was first published in 1898.
From "Boo!"
Nov. 7, 1938
To most of 1,200,000 U. S. radio listeners who ran for the exits, peered down the pike for Martian invaders or otherwise conducted themselves oddly on the night before Halloween 1938, the Orson Welles broadcast based on H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds remains a booful, baleful memory.
From Anatomy of a Panic
Apr. 15, 1940
Wells was the last of the high-level saturation prophets. His success as a futurist was based on a supreme confidence in man's worst instincts. For Wells, an atheist, theological good and evil did not exist. Original sin resided in the pinkish gray folds of the brain and expressed itself through brutish linkage, which operated the prehensile thumb. Given tools enough and time, Homo sapiens would turn the most charming toy, the most fetching theory, into a weapon.
From The Days of the Prophet
By R.Z. Sheppard
Aug. 20, 1973
In 1938, he [Orson Wells] elevated radio drama by bringing the Mercury Theatre to the air and, on October 30th, offered a Mischief Night ad-aptation of 'The War of the Worlds' -- a sensation when thousands of listeners took fright, and flight, from the story of a Martian colonization of America.
From That Old Feeling: Mercury, God of Radio
By Richard Corliss
Aug. 27, 2001
Out of the rubble rise giant alien ships that walk on three spindly legs and whose deadly heat rays not only destroy civilization as we know it but also threaten to split up Tom Cruise's latest movie family. The new film is a toss-up with George Pal's very watchable 1953 version: the special effects are even better here, the drama even lamer.
From Running from the Rays
By Richard Corliss
Jul. 03, 2005
None of [BRACKET {the best picture nominees}] had special effects and this was an exceptional year in that sense. But it was also a year that brought us the last Star Wars, one of the best Batman ever made; it brought us Narnia, the great King Kong, and I got a chance to squeeze War of the Worlds in there, where I worked very hard not to allow the special effects to upstage the characters in the movie.
From Spielberg at the Revolution
By Desa Philadelphia
Mar. 14, 2006
And it was all fiction, the culmination of two years of secret planning by television journalist Philippe Dutilleul and his colleagues at the French-language public broadcaster. The ensuing panic didn't quite approach that created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds [EM] acknowledged as the model for the Belgian prank [EM] but more than 30,000 phone calls flooded the broadcaster's switchboard, and the channel's website crashed as concerned viewers sought confirmation.
From Belgium's "War of the Worlds"
By James Graff
Dec. 15, 2006
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