As today’s incentive to get you to donate to Special Relativity’s sprint to raise $125 a day for the next 20 18 days, I’m giving you a gift of my favorite radio show ever, which also happens to be one of the most important works of art of the 20th century. (I know that the way these pledge drives usually work is that I give you the gift after you donate, but we’re all family here, and if I had any business acumen I wouldn’t have driven six miles yesterday to save $1 on a box of Fruity Pebbles.)

The show isn’t comedy, but it is science fiction. It’s the Mercury Theatre’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, first broadcast on CBS Radio October 30, 1938, produced/directed by and starring Orson Welles. You can stream or download the entire hour-long broadcast after the jump, though you’re obligated to read through my explanation of why you should think it’s great.1

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Okay, so you’ve most likely at least heard of this version of The War of the Worlds, since it’s one of history’s most famous broadcasts, and we all learned about how many listeners mistook the fake breaking news reports of an alien invasion for the real thing. The legendary stories of public hysteria are less exaggerated than you might think; people freaked out, and in some cases nearly killed themselves or their families rather than face the descending Martians. If you want to learn more about that, there are plenty of sources better than me. A good one to start with is this excellent 2004 episode of Radio Lab.

I’ll point out, though, that Welles’s show wasn’t an outright Halloween prank, like some people assume. It didn’t break into programming or otherwise blast out of nowhere in a way specifically designed to make people lose their shit. ”The War of the Worlds” was a regularly scheduled episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a weekly series composed almost entirely of adaptations of literature. In fact, the previous Sunday the Mercury performed a version of Around the World in 80 Days, another speculative fiction novel by H.G. Wells’s contemporary, Jules Verne. At the start of “The War of the Worlds,” an announcer introduces the show, and then Welles sets the scene with a reading of a modified opening of the novel2 before the broadcast-within-a-broadcast begins. No hoaxing here.

I’m noting this because knowing the context in which the show was presented underscores its importance. Hysteria would’ve been much more understandable if CBS had been punking its listeners. But those who freaked out simply had tuned in late or hadn’t paid attention to the beginning. At 1938, the American public were still at a point of such media naivety that a creative, well performed episode of a weekly series could produce mass panic.

That isn’t to take anything away from Welles. To the contrary, it demonstrates his brilliance. Orson Welles has long been one of my heroes, largely because of his unparalleled understanding of every medium in which he worked, and his willingness to use that understanding to drive those media to places they’d never been before, usually with extraordinary success. He was the first true artist of the new media of the 20th century.

Some of the filmmaking techniques Welles used in Citizen Kane had been around before, but no movie had reached the full potential of cinema before Citizen Kane. In the same way, the techniques of “The War of the Worlds” already existed, but no program before it had ever reached the full potential of broadcasting. Welles didn’t create the idea of using fictional news reports to tell a story, but he perfected their execution and, most importantly, understood when and how to unleash them. He knew the expectations his own show had developed in its audience. He knew how people listened to the radio — sometimes with just half an ear; sometimes, thanks to the deep imagining needed to enjoy radio fiction, fully engrossed. And he knew how listeners naturally reacted to other conventions of radio: live music shows, news reports, live music shows interrupted by news reports. Then he combined all that knowledge to create a monumental broadcast by subverting expectations — but also by meeting them.

Imagine a regular listener to The Mercury Theatre on the Air. ((Sadly there weren’t many. It was a low-rated show before “The War of the Worlds.”)) He wouldn’t expect a drama series to contain news reports. But in all likelihood he’d never heard a fake news broadcast nor considered the possibility of one. So he’d expect that any news report was real. But he knew this one wasn’t real, because he’s heard both the announcer introduce the Mercury Theatre and Orson Welles drone on about space wood or something. So by the listener’s expectations that meant he was in the midst of a drama show. But then again, the radio had gone to a music program after Welles had finished talking, which was unexpected. And music shows sometimes got interrupted by news reports. He’d expect that. And after the first news report they’d gone back to the music, which he’d also expect, except not really, because he expected they have gone back to the play or whatever. What the fuck was going on?

My point being Welles had created a radio masterpiece that by all rights should be remembered as the first great work of art of the medium. I imagine that the majority of its audience was weirded out but went with the flow and enjoyed the show and when it was over said, “Nifty! Those gents got fried up by spacemen!” and then quickly forgot about it. But others tuned it not knowing what the program was and heard the news reports and expected — never doubted for a second — that they were real. Thus the hysteria, thus the history, and thus the show’s real importance.

In one hour in 1938, Orson Welles demonstrated the true power of broadcasting. No other work of art in the history of mankind had simultaneously affected so many people so extremely. ”The War of the Worlds” made nakedly apparent to the public, to the government, and to the broadcasting industry the capacity of mass media to instantly change the world. Radio was no new invention by that point, but until Welles stepped up and let it out of the cage, no one had fully understood its potential or the responsibility it required. Ironically, while the show made broadcasters and politicians suddenly realize the capabilities in their hands, at the same time it immediately diluted broadcasting’s potency. The public’s naivety going into “The War of the Worlds” was wiped away on the other side. Welles’s manipulation of the audience’s expectations caused them to change those expectations and approach the media with much more skepticism. Some claim that skepticism permeated the country so deeply that it led to Americans doubting the news reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“The War of the Worlds” changed broadcasting forever, and so doing changed the course of the 20th century. Broadcasting shaped the century and its events, and its rise led directly into the information age. The digital communication explosion currently shifting civilization is largely following a path laid out for it by broadcasting. Humanity is trying to get a handle on who controls information, who controls the truth, and what massive greatness and terribleness might happen when one person can suddenly speak to many. Those are all questions that “The War of the Worlds” first made us think about. A fun little scary story about space monsters reorganized the world.

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To listen to other broadcasts from The Mercury Theatre on the Air, check out the excellent archive at http://www.mercurytheatre.info.

1. I should mention that the reason I’ve decided that it’s okay for me to distribute this recording is that the question of who, if anyone, owns the copyright to old broadcasts like this one is very unsettled. That’s partly because at this point nobody really gives a shit. And while the estate of the show’s writer Howard Koch unquestionably holds the rights to the script, those don’t extend to the actual broadcast. Lots of folks with no claim to the material at all make money by selling CDs and MP3s of the broadcast, so I figure I can give it to the world for free. [↩]
2. Just listen to him say “…this small fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space.” SPLOOGE! [↩]