Today I Learned …

Okay, so everyone knows that Orson Welles’ Halloween 1938 radio presentation of War of the Worlds scared the paste out of listeners. And some people even know that this was because a lot of the audience tuned in late, and missed the disclaimer at the beginning of the show that it was fiction and not a real broadcast. But do you know why people tuned in late?

Mercury Theater, which is the show Orson Welles worked for, was aired opposite The Charlie McCarthy Show, hosted by Edgar Bergen and featuring the famous ventriloquist’s dummy, the titular Charlie McCarthy. It was much more popular than Mercury Theater, so people would tune in to it first, and if the guest for the show didn’t grab them, they’d wander down the dial to the less popular show. Mercury Theater was fully aware of this, and they didn’t even try to compete with the talking dummy. Instead, they ran episodes of the classics, usually Shakespearean dramas, commercial-free. For the Halloween show, they decided to air an updated version of H.G. Wells’ science fiction classic, The War of The Worlds, rewritten and narrated by Orson Welles. The folks who had started their evening with Charlie McCarthy and had gotten bored with Charlie’s guest … well, they got quite a surprise. And that’s how Orson Welles was able to inadvertently scare the paste out of radio America on Halloween night, 1938.