From Mercury to Mars: The Legacy of War of the Worlds: What Happened Here? from Antenna

Our ongoing series on the radio work of Orson Welles, From Mercury to Mars, continues this week on our partner blog Antenna with a post that explores the lack of innovation in American radio and its connection to public radio as an institution.

University of Wisconsin professor and senior radio historian Michele Hilmes explains these connections…

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“Yet what happened to this legacy of innovation in American radio drama that Welles’
career so emphatically marks?  We can trace the tradition of creative radio drama forward through the suspense serials of the 1940s and 50s, jump to the 1970s with Himan Brown’s CBS Mystery Theater – and then virtually nothing, certainly not on a regular basis, until we get to the present radio revival …”

[Reblogged from Antenna]

To catch up on our M2M series here are some links.

• Here is “Hello Americans,” Tom McEnaney‘s post on Welles and Latin America
• Here is Eleanor Patterson‘s post on editions of WOTW as “Residual Radio”
• Here is “Sound Bites,” Debra Rae Cohen‘s post on Welles’s “Dracula”
• Here is Cynthia B. Meyers on the pleasures and challenges of teaching WOTW in the classroom
• Here is Kathleen Battles on parodies of Welles by Fred Allen
• Here is Shawn VanCour on the second act of War of the Worlds
• Here is the navigator page for our #WOTW75 collective listening project
• Here is Josh Shepperd’s post, “War of the Worlds and the Invasion of Media Studies” 
• Here is Aaron Trammell‘s remarkable mix of the thoughts of more than a dozen radio scholars on War of the Worlds
• Here is our podcast of Monteith McCollum‘s amazing WOTW remix
• Here is “Devil’s Symphony,” Jacob Smith‘s study of the “eco-sonic” Welles

Still to come in our series are works by A. Brad Schwartz, Murray Pomerance, Jennifer Hyland Wang, and Bill Kirkpatrick.