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 consequence is you can still play with ideas of terror and conflict... It's a natural thing to do until you're right up against it." "Until it ceases to be a game," Welles said, a phrase that Wells repeated. Britain and France had then been at war with Nazi Germany for more than a year. As the Mercury's second theatre season began in 1938, Orson Welles and John Houseman were unable to write the "Mercury Theatre on the Air" broadcasts on their own. They hired Howard Koch, whose experience in having a play performed by the Federal Theatre Project in