The War of the Worlds (radio drama) The War of the Worlds (radio drama) "The War of the Worlds" is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel "The War of the Worlds" (1898). It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938 over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode became famous for causing panic among its listening audience, but the scale of that panic is disputed, as the program had
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) the 1938 performance of "The War of the Worlds" in the CBS studio, using the script as a framework for a series of factual narratives about a cross-section of radio listeners. No member of the "Mercury Theatre" is named. The courts ruled against Welles, who was found to have abandoned any rights to the script after it was published in Cantril's book. Koch had granted CBS the right to use the script in its program. "As it developed over the years, Koch took some cash and some credit," wrote biographer Frank Brady. "He wrote the story of how he created