Hilary Booth... of course!

Last year, the International Mystery Writer's Festival produced "Remember WENN: Armchair Detectives". I so wanted to attend, but finances and location really hampered my chances. Now I've got the next best thing, since they've released audio cds of the performance. My order arrived in only a few days but I'm only now having a chance to listen to it.

It's rather jarring to hear new voices performing favorite characters. I was reminded of the WENN actors hearing the student actors in "Don't Act Like That" playing their roles. It's strange to hear something so familiar performed so differently, like hearing a quirky rendition of an old standard. The timing and the beats you're used to aren't there and the notes are hit in different ways. I think it's a real credit to all the WENN actors, even the secondary characters, that to this day I can hear each of their voices and personalities so clearly. Also that despite how broadly their characters were written initially, they grew into those roles and gave them depth and feeling and humor. I'm trying not to picture this cast in later sequences, but it's difficult, knowing what comes next.

The other thing that takes some getting used to is the audience. WENN never had a laugh track, so hearing audience reactions besides my reactions was quite strange. A little thrilling, too, knowing some of these people were hearing and appreciating WENN for the first time.

The play combined "On the Air" and "Armchair Detective" with some added bits from other episodes. The "Ghost of WENN" material was not used, which was a shame. It might have given the play a spookier edge. The mystery section was a bit thin for a supposed mystery play festival.

( Remember me, remember you... )

Ah, Halloween, when the ghouls come out to play and Martians land in New Jersey...

2008 is the 70 year anniversary of the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast.

The Hyped Panic over War of the Worlds: Chronicle of Higher Education article on the "War of the Worlds" broadcast.

Jitterbugs and Crackpots: National Archives article on the letters FCC received about the broadcast

Dark Horse adaptation of HG Wells novel

neadods has been asking about podcasts lately.

I don't listen to that many. The large bulk of mine are old time radio oriented. I had to go digging yesterday to find the superheroes one for my Green Hornet fix.

I've also listened to some of Pendant Audio fan programs, particularly the Champion of Themiscyra one. They're in the middle of their latest crossover bonanza. Some of the voices flat out don't work for me. Some do.

I've listened to a couple of the comics ones, Word Balloon or FanboyRadio, if the author/artist being interviewed interests me.

In my more recent interests, I've listened to Behind the Black Mask's author interviews. They have a second podcast called "Out of the Past" reviewing films, some classic and some modern.

Crimewav: Relatively new podcast of short crime fiction. Two of the authors with stories are Vicki Hendricks and Christa Faust. All we need is Megan Abbott for the trifecta of female noir writers... (Not remotely family friendly readings I might add, if that bothers you.)

Today is D-Day, June 6th. Rat Patrol Radio is running their complete broadcast day again. I can't seem to get Live365 to cooperate with my work browsers, so I will have to wait until I get home to storm the beaches. Apparently they're rerunning the whole thing starting tomorrrow Thursday at 9am, if you didn't want to wake up today at 3am to catch the first rumors of invasion.

Otter: A freeware Windows program to help catalog old time radio mp3s and files. Theoretically it can match your files with the logs in its system. I'm still working out the bugs myself, but it looks quite useful, especially so you don't download the same thing twice.

share_otr: Newish community for the sharing of OTR mp3s.

This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that "The War of The Worlds" has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!

Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night... so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.

So goodbye everybody, and remember please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian... it's Halloween.

from "War of the Worlds" (October 30, 1938)
Mercury Theatre on the Air

I'm listening to Live365's Rat Patrol Radio. They're airing the Complete Broadcast Day for D-Day from CBS News. For the part I'm listening to now, it's mostly news reports interpersed with occasional music (lots of military themes), although they seem to have done some programming. The most fascinating bulletin for me was a report from wartime Washington describing my "sleepy Southern town" and how it really didn't wake up until about 8am. So much has changed alas. I believe the correspondent was commenting on a intersection at E street, but I couldn't remember the cross street. I'm also grabbing some OTR programs off the binary newsgroups.

I stumbled upon a fascinating article related to old-time radio in the the Fall issue of the National Archives' magazine Prologue, entitled "Jitterbugs" and "Crack-pots": Letters to the FCC about the "War of the Worlds" Broadcast about Orson Welles' infamous "Panic Broadcast" in October 1938.

The magazine article includes actual telegrams and letters held at the Archives. The fairly new FCC received over 600 such missives from listeners with opinions on the broadcast. They also sent over 1000 letters to Columbia Broadcasting and the Mercury Theatre cast. The interesting thing I hadn't realized was how many of those responses were positive, overwhelmingly so. If anything, they were worried that the panic and fuss would hurt future radio programming, stifling potential creativity.

The documents included:

• A telegram from Eddie Cantor urging the FCC not to "garrote radio with excessive censorship".



• A long letter from a South Dakota man who stated "I suppose by this time you have received many letters from numerous cranks and crack-pots who quickly became jitterbugs during the program. I was one of the thousands who heard this window and did not jump out of the window, did not attempt suicide..."



• A twelve year old boy in Rockford, Illinois announced that he enjoyed the program very much, but "I heard about half of it but my mother and sister got frightened and I had to turn it off." Poor kid!

I've always been fascinated with the original Mercury Theatre broadcast, a classic in both radio drama and mob psychology. Reading the letters, I still wonder at why some people reacted with fear and concern and others simply saw it for what it was. Even if they came in mid-way, as many claimed, why didn't they just pick up a newspaper and read the radio listings? Were they so keyed up with potential of war breaking out at any moment? (Are we any different now? I flinch a little these days when I see a "Breaking News" up on the television, like the Martians are about to land at any moment.)

I started an awful story a long time ago with a New Jersey family without their television for one night. They caught a rebroadcast of the original show and fearing the worst. They fleed to their parents who calmly told them about "good old days" of radio. Oddly this was when my OTR listening was limited to the Shadow and Green Hornet.

"So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian...it's Hallowe'en."