Orson Welles started the Mercury Theatre company with John Houseman at the ripe old age of 21 and by the time he was 23, they had graduated from the stage to the airwaves with Mercury Theatre of the Air. Their weekly radio show, which produced the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, was a smash hit and ran without a sponsor for only a few months before it was picked up by Campbell's Soup, had its name changed to the Campbell Playhouse and moved itself to Hollywood to accomodate Welles' growing film career. Here are the 17 surviving episodes of the original 22 broadcast by the Mercury Theatre of the Air and I'll be posting the Campbell's Playhouse episodes soon!
From The Digital Deli:
Mercury Theatre of The Air (1938) was the most innovative and historically significant production of the series. Indeed, though overshadowed in Radio History by the extraordinary result of its notorious The War of The Worlds program, all of the remaining productions were equally radical or innovative for their time. Julius Caesar was presented in much the same format as their radical Stage production, set in contemporary fascist Italy. Welles' Sherlock Holmes characterization was heralded as one of the finest interpretations of the morphine-addicted detective genius as had ever been heard over Radio. And all three of the Charles Dickens productions--A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers--were very well received. But indeed it was Howard Koch's brilliant adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds that created a stir out of all proportion to any other Radio broadcast during the Golden Age of Radio.
Mercury Theatre of The Air had intended from the outset to mount H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds on October 30, 1938 as a Halloween presentation. They'd already opened their season with Dracula in any case, and Howard Koch and John Houseman had written a hyper-realistic adaptation of Wells' brilliant science-fiction novel. The production was by no means a secret. Nor, by extension was The War of The Worlds a secret. First published in 1898, H.G. Wells' most famous book had already been published throughout the world in a commensurate number of languages fully forty years before Mercury Theatre adapted it for Radio.
The program opened with Welles' narration describing a series of fictional events which ensued during the evening of October 30, 1938 ("the 39th year of the twentieth century"). In Welles' deep baritone, melodramatically filled with import and foreboding, Welles' matter of factly introduced the series of very realistic radio script elements that followed: radio engineers cutting back and forth during the broadcast from the 'music of Ramon Raquelo' to an astronomer at the Princeton Observatory in New Jersey, then to 'reporters in the field' observing first-hand the slow unscrewing of the hatch of an extra-terrestrial meteorite that had landed near Grover's Mill, New Jersey. From that point forward, the script cut back and forth from accounts of the astronomer tracking uncommon activity on the surface of Mars, accounts from the farmers and reporters at Grover's Mill, and the news studios, authorities and observers of the phenomena that ensued.
It was the very documentary style of the broadcast that was the most compelling. The 'first-hand' accounts were wonderfully similar to the kind of man-in-the-street fare that had already become the rage in Radio (e.g., Vox Pop, et al). Howard Koch's genius in orchestrating the various initially unrelated events slowly and subtlely--and wonderfully realistically--into a tapestry of a growing extra-terrestrial threat was one of Radio's most brilliant dramatic strokes.
Unfortunately, the thousands of listeners that tuned in after Orson Welles' very explicit disclaimer found themselves caught up in what can only be described as a mass suspension of disbelief. For those listeners, hearing only the brilliantly realistic radio snippets coming over their radio sets, the scenario was developing into a situation so realistic that by twenty-three minutes into the hour-long broadcast phones were ringing off the hook in radio stations, police precincts, and fire departments up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. Within hours, as the broadcast aired throughout the country, the same phenomena occured throughout radio-listening America. What with announcements of road blocks in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, declarations of martial law, and even an address by 'F.D.R.' himself, the entire nation soon became caught up in the mass hysteria to one degree or another.
The aftermath was predictable for a mid-term election year. Officials great and small were calling for Orson Welles' head on a plate. Within twelve hours of the broadcast, the FCC was demanding a review of the Columbia Chain's (CBS's) broadcast license. Within eighteen hours of the broadcast H.G. Wells himself had been contacted for comment, expressing outrage that Mercury Theatre had changed the location of his story from London, England to New Jersey, New York and Eastern Pennsylvania. But more importantly to Mercury Theatre--and Orson Welles himself--within forty-eight hours, the entire Western World was abuzz about the twenty-three year old upstart and his Mercury Players.
Technical Information:
Artist: The Mercury Theatre
Director: Orson Welles
Year: 1938
Audio Codec(s): mp3
Encoding: lossy
Bitrate: 64 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: CBR
Channels: 1
File size: 460 MB
Length: 16:50:41
Tracklisting:
01. Dracula (53:56)
02. Treasure Island (1:04:56)
03. A Tale of Two Cities (57:22)
04. The 39 Steps (1:03:11)
05. Three Short Stories: I'm a Fool, The Open Window, and My Little Boy (58:23)
06. Abraham Lincoln (1:00:09)
07. The Affairs of Anatole (1:00:04)
08. The Count of Monte Cristo (59:34)
09. The Man Who Was Thursday (57:47)
10. The Immortal Sherlock Holmes (56:34)
11. Hell on Ice (1:00:07)
12. Seventeen (1:00:21)
13. Around the World in 80 Days (57:59)
14. The War of the Worlds (59:36)
15. Heart of Darkness/Life with Father (58:29)
16. A Passenger to Bali (1:00:36)
17. The Pickwick Papers (1:01:40)
Thanks to www.mercurytheatre.info for making these available!
Mercury Theatre of the Air Megaupload Link