Radio Ga Ga was then competing with radio as an important medium for promoting records. The video for "Radio Ga Ga" would receive a Best Art Direction nomination. Roger Taylor was quoted: Taylor originally conceived of it as "Radio " (from something his toddler son once said), which doubled as a criticism of radio for the decrease in variety of programming and the type of music being played. The song makes reference to two important radio events of the 20th century; Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" in the lyric "through wars of worlds/invaded by Mars",
Black smoke (The War of the Worlds) narrator of what he "read of the destruction of Pompeii". The smoke is very dense, and can be avoided by climbing to higher places. Although Wells never explains the smoke's mechanism in the novel, he mentions that it may bind with argon to become toxic. In reality, argon cannot combine with other elements, with the marginal exception of fluorine, but chemical weapons were widely used in human warfare after Wells' novel was written, especially in World War I. Orson Welles' radio adaptation dramatizes the effects of the black smoke: The poison is depicted as being potent enough to render gas