The Panic Broadcast Part I

Tag: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

 Content: The invasion was harmless, one of the CBS Sunday night broadcasts of the Mercury Theater on the Air, a dramatic re-telling of Herbert George Wells' novel, War of the Worlds. Wells completed his story in 1897 and immediately it was a huge success. Orson Welles, the young director of the Mercury Theater, had for some time been interested in adapting the story as a radio drama and settled on broadcast within a broadcast as the plot. News reports and live, on-the-scene accounts breaking into what seemed to be an ordinary evening of musical entertainment, created a vivid realism that convinced many listeners they were witnessing an actual extra-terrestrial invasion by hostile visitors from Mars.