The War of the Worlds, HG Wells, with 960 Old Time Radio SCI FI Episodes

Don't be fooled by other collections that claim to contain more episodes.  Many of these shows were aired on multiple dates in reruns, so you have plenty of sellers out there padding their collections with reruns!  We feature all known episodes in existence and do not add "fluff" to our collections to increase our claimed episode count like many others. 

NOTICE: This collection is all in MP3 format supplied on DVD.  You play this in your computer and then can copy all the MP3 files to your MP3 player of choice.  This DVD will NOT play in a regular CD player in your car, or your TV's DVD player, it is intended for your computer only which will allow you to transfer the MP3 files to any device that can play MP3's.  This collection remains the largest most original collection on ebay.

The War of The Worlds:

The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on Sunday, October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It became famous for allegedly causing mass panic, although the scale of the panic is disputed as the program had relatively few listeners.

The first two-thirds of the one-hour broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins. The first news update interrupted a program of dance music to report that a series of odd explosions had been spotted on Mars, which was followed soon thereafter by a seemingly unrelated report of an unusual object falling on a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Martians emerged from the object and attacked using a heat ray during the next interruption, which was followed by a rapid series of news reports describing a devastating alien invasion taking place across the United States and the world. The illusion of realism was furthered because the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show without commercial interruptions, and the first break in the program came almost 30 minutes into the broadcast. Popular legend holds that some of the radio audience may have been listening to Edgar Bergen and tuned in to "The War of the Worlds" during a musical interlude, thereby missing the clear introduction that the show was a drama, but recent research suggests this only happened in rare instances.

In the days following the adaptation, widespread outrage was expressed in the media. The program's news-bulletin format was described as deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. The episode secured Welles' fame as a dramatist.

H. G. Wells's original novel tells the story of a Martian invasion of Earth. The novel was adapted by Howard E. Koch for the 17th episode of the CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast at 8 pm ET on Sunday, October 30, 1938. The program's format was a simulated live newscast of developing events. The setting was switched from 19th-century England to contemporary Grover's Mill, an unincorporated village in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, in the United States.

The first two-thirds of the hour-long play is a contemporary retelling of events of the novel, presented as news bulletins interrupting another program. "I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening," Welles later said, "and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play. This approach was similar to Ronald Knox's radio hoax Broadcasting the Barricades, about a riot overtaking London, that was broadcast by the BBC in 1926, which Welles later said gave him the idea for "The War of the Worlds". A 1927 drama aired by Adelaide station 5CL depicted an invasion of Australia via the same techniques and inspired reactions similar to those of the Welles broadcast.

He was also influenced by the Columbia Workshop presentations "The Fall of the City", a 1937 radio play in which Welles played the role of an omniscient announcer, and "Air Raid", a vibrant as-it-happens drama starring Ray Collins that aired October 27, 1938. Welles had previously used a newscast format for "Julius Caesar" (September 11, 1938), with H. V. Kaltenborn providing historical commentary throughout the story.

"The War of the Worlds" broadcast used techniques similar to those of The March of Time, the CBS news documentary and dramatization radio series.[12] Welles was a member of the program's regular cast, having first performed on The March of Time in March 1935.  The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The March of Time shared many cast members, as well as sound effects chief Ora D. Nichols.

Welles discussed his fake newscast idea with producer John Houseman and assistant director Paul Stewart; together, they decided to adapt a work of science fiction. They considered adapting M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World before purchasing the radio rights to The War of the Worlds. Houseman later wrote that he suspected Welles had never read it.

Howard Koch had written the first drafts for the Mercury Theatre broadcasts "Hell on Ice" (October 9), "Seventeen" (October 16), and "Around the World in 80 Days" (October 23).  Monday, October 24, he was assigned to rescript "The War of the Worlds" for broadcast the following Sunday night.

Tuesday night, 36 hours before rehearsals were to begin, Koch telephoned Houseman in what the producer characterized as "deep distress". Koch said he could not make The War of the Worlds interesting or credible as a radio play, a conviction echoed by his secretary Anne Froelick, a typist and aspiring writer whom Houseman had hired to assist him. With only his own abandoned script for Lorna Doone to fall back on, Houseman told Koch to continue adapting the Wells fantasy. He joined Koch and Froelick and they worked on the script throughout the night. On Wednesday night, the first draft was finished on schedule.

On Thursday, associate producer Paul Stewart held a cast reading of the script, with Koch and Houseman making necessary changes. That afternoon, Stewart made an acetate recording, with no music or sound effects. Welles, immersed in rehearsing the Mercury stage production of Danton's Death scheduled to open the following week, played the record at an editorial meeting that night in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel. After hearing "Air Raid" on the Columbia Workshop earlier that same evening, Welles viewed the script as dull. He stressed the importance of inserting news flashes and eyewitness accounts into the script to create a sense of urgency and excitement.

Houseman, Koch, and Stewart reworked the script that night, increasing the number of news bulletins and using the names of real places and people whenever possible. Friday afternoon, the script was sent to Davidson Taylor, executive producer for CBS, and the network legal department. Their response was that the script was 'too' credible and its realism had to be toned down. As using the names of actual institutions could be actionable, CBS insisted upon some 28 changes in phrasing.

"Under protest and with a deep sense of grievance we changed the Hotel Biltmore to a nonexistent Park Plaza, Trans-America to Inter-Continent, the Columbia Broadcasting Building to Broadcasting Building," Houseman wrote. "The United States Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C." was changed to "The Government Weather Bureau", "Princeton University Observatory" to "Princeton Observatory", "McGill University" in Montreal to "Macmillan University" in Toronto, "New Jersey National Guard" to "State Militia", "United States Signal Corps" to "Signal Corps", "Langley Field" to "Langham Field", and "St. Patrick's Cathedral" to "the cathedral".

On Saturday, Stewart rehearsed the show with the sound effects team, giving special attention to crowd scenes, the echo of cannon fire, and the sound of the boat horns in New York Harbor.

Early Sunday afternoon, Bernard Herrmann and his orchestra arrived in the studio, where Welles had taken over production of that evening's program.

To create the role of reporter Carl Phillips, actor Frank Readick went to the record library and played the recording of Herbert Morrison's radio report of the Hindenburg disaster over and over.  Working with Bernard Herrmann and the orchestra that had to sound like a dance band fell to Paul Stewart, the person Welles would later credit as being largely responsible for the quality of "The War of the Worlds" broadcast.

Welles wanted the music to play for unbearably long stretches of time. The studio's emergency fill-in, a solo piano playing Debussy and Chopin, was heard several times. "As it played on and on," Houseman wrote, "its effect became increasingly sinister—a thin band of suspense stretched almost beyond endurance. That piano was the neatest trick of the show."

Dress rehearsal was scheduled for 6 pm.

"Our actual broadcasting time, from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes," wrote Houseman. "During that time, men travelled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air. And millions of people accepted it—emotionally if not logically.

And more Bonus Radio Shows:

As a sampler of our old time radio library, we are including these classic old time radio shows on this DVD-ROM at no extra charge: