Blast from the Past – Tuning in to Radio Broadcast Shows

circa 1930s

I’ve never actually sat down and had to listen to a story being narrated to me for my own entertainment before until I had to listen to “The War of the Worlds” and the first episode of the SERIAL podcast. Wait…I’m lying. This wasn’t for my entertainment, I just realized mid-thought that this was homework. So ok, it was like my 5th time has to listen to a story being narrated and then having to write a piece on what I heard. Thanks for taking me back to the standardized testing days Professor Dunphy (I’m kidding, of course.) But yeah about these two broadcasts set about almost a century apart.

Man, what a way of scaring the hell out of an entire nation right before Halloween in the year 1938. Can you imagine what is like for a naïve 8-year-old child living in in the middle of Manhattan frantically trying to see if his/her city was actually being invaded by extraterrestrials while listening to the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s “The War of the Worlds”? A bunch of real-sounding news bulletins about an alien invasion attacking Earth. Gees, I know that probably would have scared me a bit (or A LOT!!) if I were that age listening to the radio broadcast. My ultimate question is for the adults who actually believed this was happening was ‘Would you really think only one radio station would be reporting of such an event like an alien invasion?’ That’s like broadcasting a news clip from a science fiction movie on one of the local stations during primetime. All you need to do is flip to other stations or channels that give news and you can easily figure out it’s fake. But hey I’ll admit, it did kind of sound like a real news broadcast from the early 20^th century. That’s probably what made this radio broadcast such a hit during that time. What I liked about listening to this radio drama was that it led the audience to use their own imagination and create their own version of what it might have looked like in real life. Orson Welles did a great job with the whole production. And to think that he was around my age and already the one of the biggest names known in entertainment is pretty cool. I don’t think anybody in my generation that is in my age group has done that.

The other radio broadcast I listened to was the first episode of this podcast called “SERIAL” hosted by Sarah Koenig. This show was about a real life investigation in the conviction of Adnan Syed, who was convicted for murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee during high school. This broadcast was different than “The War of the Worlds” in the sense that this was actually a non-fiction as opposed to the dramatized news bulletins I listened to before in “The War of the Worlds”. This broadcast didn’t seem as confusing as the last one. It was not too hard to differentiate between what the other characters were saying and what the host was saying. I feel like I was listening to an episode of a show that would have been shown on a channel like Investigation Discovery; you know, the kind where you see all these dramatizations of actual events that happened mixed with actual footage of court sessions and news clips. For some reason, I found this type of show more interesting than “The War of the Worlds”. I guess it’s because it tells the story and eyewitness accounts of an actual event that took place so it leaves you wanting to know more about what happened further in the story. Also, I have always liked investigative journalism pieces. It is great to see that there are journalists out there that really want to know the truth and aren’t afraid to question the authorities and things like our justice system.

Now I can’t really judge on whether I prefer fiction or non-fiction entertainment broadcasts based on these two radio recordings but I can say this; listening to audio broadcasts and using your own imagination to create images of the details being dictated feels pretty nice every once in a while. It’s like a step up from reading a book but not quite like watching a film or a TV show. Pretty much it’s a movie or TV show without the visual aids. Makes me wonder if people’s attention spans were greater back in the day compared to this generation. Nowadays, society relies so much on visual aids and the fast transfer of information due to mediums like film, TV, and especially the Internet.