1. War of the Worlds
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| Image by Carl Van Vechten in Wikimedia. Public Domain. |

The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast.
On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired.
Had Welles intended, or did he at all anticipate, that War of the Worlds would throw its audience into panic? That question would follow Welles for the rest of his life, and his answers changed as the years went on—from protestations of innocence to playful hints that he knew exactly what he was doing all along.
However, the war of the worlds was not the first radio hoax. England actually beat America to that trick, because the first radio hoax was broadcast on 16 January 1926, on the BBC. A talk on 18th-century British literature was interrupted by a 12-minute series of fictitious news bulletins about a riot in London, in which Big Ben was blown up by mortars, the Savoy Hotel burnt down, and a politician lynched on a tramway post.
Adapted from: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-fluke-180955180/
Welles's directorial copy of the broadcast was auctioned in 1994, at Christie's in New York, and bought for £24,000 by filmmaker Steven Spielberg. He went on to make a version of The War of the Worlds in 2005, starring Tom Cruise.
Video by Daniel Castelo-Branco on youtube
Objetivos

Do you think the reaction of the American people was normal in 1938?
What in the announcements must have scared them the most?
What do you know about H.G. Wells and the novel “The War of the Worlds”?
How would you react today if you heard something similar on the radio, on television or on the Internet?

You have to give a short presentation on H.G. Wells and the War of the Worlds for your school's Culture Week. Use the information above to jot down the main ideas. Organize your thoughts, structure your presentation with an introduction, a body and a conclusion.
You should take only 4 minutes to prepare and speak for about 2 to 3 minutes.

