From Mercury to Mars: Cynthia B. Meyers’s” Why Teach War of the Worlds?” from Antenna
“I turn down the lights and encourage students to close their eyes or rest their heads on the desks. Then I play the first 20 minutes of The Mercury Theater on the Air 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. Sometimes I play it straight through; sometimes I pause it occasionally and ask students what’s happening …”
[Reblogged from Antenna]
Click here to read the rest of Cynthia B. Meyers’s thoughts on what it means to teach this radio play in the classroom today. And be sure to watch out for Meyers’s exciting new book, A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio, which is sure to reshape how scholars think about advertising in commercial culture.
This post is the fourth in our ongoing series in partnership with Antenna, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Want to catch up on the series? Click here to read Tom McEnaney’s thoughts on the place of Latin America in Welles’s radio work. Click here to read Eleanor Patterson’s reflections on recorded re-releases of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast. And click here to read Debra Rae Cohen’s thoughts on vampire media in Orson Welles’s “Dracula.”
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Also, if you’re getting terribly drawn in by all this Welles material – and, really, who could blame you – why not join our WOTW anniversary Facebook group? You can learn more about a broadcast we are planning for next month to help celebrate and rethink the panic broadcast , as well as about a social media experiment we’re conducting around it. Help spread the invasion!
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From Mercury to Mars: “‘War of the Worlds’ as Residual Radio” from Antenna
“WOTW’s notoriety is obviously explicitly a result of the attention the mainstream media gave it at the time, as well as the fame and success that followed Orson Welles’s ascendance in film, and subsequently, his position in the critical and academic canon of auteurs. However, WOTW’s circulation through LP, cassette, rebroadcast, and mp3 also implicitly shapes how people look back at this time in entertainment history, while also allowing this recording to become an object of fetishism and desire …”
[Reblogged from Antenna]
Click here to read the rest of Nora Patterson’s reflections on recorded releases of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.
This post is the second in our ongoing series in partnership with Antenna, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for our next installment on Sept. 2: Debra Rae Cohen on the inaugural broadcast of the original Mercury series, Welles’s fascinating version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Miss the first post in the series? Click here to read Tom McEnaney’s thoughts on the place of Latin America in Welles’s radio work.
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