Cartoon reprinted in Howard Koch’s The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event (1970).

In an impassioned letter to the FCC the morning after the famous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, Skulda Baner of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, protested the control that the “99%” had over network radio schedules.  Urging the FCC to stand strong against the hysterical masses unnerved by the broadcast, Baner argues:

“From morning to night radio is packed with Pacifiers.  Give us who are weaned to more solid foods something to fill our bellies, too!  Let us have our Mercury group – intact, uncastrated, unsterilized, unchained.  Or else… wrap your whole damn’ radio system in cellophane and tie it with pretty pink ribbon and hand it, in tote, to Kindergarteners Incorporated, U.S.A. to play with forever and forever! [sic]”[i]

The vivid imagery in this letter – radio programs as pacifiers, the Mercury Theater players “uncastrated,” a radio system shrink-wrapped, feminized and turned over to the masses – exposes much of the gender (and frankly class) discourses underpinning the American Broadcasting system.  What I find so intriguing about the heated public discussion immediately following the War of the Worlds broadcast – in letters to the FCC and to Orson Welles, in newspaper pages, and in industry trade journals – is not just the way the controversy comments about the power of radio or the susceptibility of the audience, but the way in which the gendered logics embedded in the broadcast system rose to the surface in these debates and informed the popular, industrial, and regulatory discussions about the mass “hysteria” of October 30, 1938.

From Herbert Corey’s article “Radio’s Growing Pains,” Nation’s Business (February 1939).

Under the cover of daytime, as Michele Hilmes would phrase it, the radio industry and its critics had long engaged in conversations about commercialism, vulnerable audiences, and broadcasters’ responsibilities to these “fragile publics.”  By the mid-1930s, the division of the broadcast schedule – daytime hours dedicated to selling products to impressionable female consumers and evening hours devoted to prestigious, big-budget programs aimed at men and their families at leisure – fueled the commercial expansion of daytime and added new force to industry conversations about the susceptibility of the female masses.  As national sponsors poured money into melodramatic serials and claimed hours in the daytime schedule for themselves, broadcasters and critics ruminated about the implications of the commercially driven daytime schedule.  How did the fragile daytime audience read melodramatic programming like serials?  Should broadcasters rein in advertisers and restore balance and variety to the daytime schedule?  Did female audiences need to be protected from the programming that presumably they and sponsors loved?  Broadcasters’ relative inaction on these questions reflected, in part, their belief that the existence of a rational audience of male-headed families and high-profile evening programming was an effective counterbalance to the hours of profit-making programs aimed at lower class, uncultured and impressionable female listeners.  However, the days, weeks, and months following the WOTW broadcast figuratively thrust popular and industrial discussions about the daytime female audience and its influence over broadcast schedules into “prime time.”  The reports of “mass hysteria” engendered by WOTW spawned a rather hysterical chorus of journalists, broadcasters, government officials, and citizens (like Skulda Baner above) amazed at the susceptibility of the prime time listening public, concerned about the mass public’s preparedness for war, and fearful of this audience’s apparent size and potential effect on radio schedules.

In this context, fear of the feminization of radio – or, if you will, the invasion of prime-time radio by daytime listeners – shaped the ensuing discussion about what the government should do or not do in response to the broadcast.  To entertain further regulation of the broadcast industry, argued Alvin J. Bogart of Cranford, N.J. in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, was to replicate the “hysteria” of impressionable listeners:

“condemnation of the network for the childish hysteria and panic on the part of many listeners would place the Communications Commission on a par with those emotional and somewhat moronic individuals who, in shame at their own credulity and panic, are now indignant and vindictive.”[ii]

To permit indignant listeners and their unrestrained emotions to control radio, suggested Skulda Baner in a follow-up letter to the FCC, was, among other things, to authorize the “emasculation” of radio.[iii]  The trade journal Broadcasting concurred in March 1939, arguing that the threat of government censorship motivated by the WOTW broadcast and the FCC’s subsequent investigations into chain broadcasting a few weeks later was making American radio “impotent.”[iv]

Headline from The New York Times (November 1, 1938).

Given this binary, the logical solution to a system threatened by emotion and the feminine masses was thus a “virile” broadcast industry.  As much as the press helped to fan the flames of the WOTW controversy as discussed by Michael Socolow and Jeffrey Pooley in their recent Slate article, the press, joined by broadcasters, some listeners, and even some members of the Communications Commission, forcefully defended the radio industry’s right to remain free of government censorship.  A strong and unfettered broadcast industry, many in the press argued, was essential to stem the tide of feminization threatening American radio and to protect the mass audience from itself.  The public interest would not be served, argued FCC Commissioner T.A.M. Craven, by a “spineless” radio industry.[v]  The only reasonable recourse for a FCC without the legal power to censor broadcasts was an Obama-like beer summit on November 7, 1938, a private chat between FCC Chairman Frank McNinch and the presidents of NBC, CBS, and Mutual that resulted in the networks’ pledge that they would watch their charges – their performers and their impressionable listeners – more closely.

Teasing out the gendered logics of the system and the discourses circulating around the WOTW broadcast, I suggest, gives us a deeper understanding of broadcasters’ relationship to their audiences and to the regulatory possibilities open to the FCC in this context.  The fear of the feminization of the prime-time radio audience , I suggest, fueled the social scientific research into susceptible audiences that Josh Sheppard spoke about in his previous post in this series, prompted investigations into programming like radio serials in the 1940s, soap operas in the 1970s and 1980s, and daytime talk shows in the 1990s, and legitimated broadcasters’ role as a “guardian” of not just the airwaves, but of radio audiences more broadly.  The discursive debates, prompted by the WOTW broadcast, allow scholars a glimpse, if only for a moment, at the operative gendered logics informing the shape and structure of the radio industry.

As From Mercury to Mars series editor Neil Verma explains in his introduction over on Sounding Out!, Pomerance presents a study of Orson Welles’s voice itself — not what it does, how it was used, or what it “represents,” exactly — but a study that tries to get at what Pomerance calls “that instrumentation [Welles] cannot prevent himself from employing except by silence.”

Click here to read Murray Pomerance’s full essay over on Sounding Out!.

This is the penultimate post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for the series’ final installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang, which will be published here on Antenna this coming Monday, January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Its approach to literary adaptation was innovative, as Shawn VanCour argued; Josh Shepperd demonstrated its impact on the history of communication research; and both Debra Rae Cohen and Jacob Smith showed us that the innovative aesthetics of The Mercury Theatre on the Air were not limited to WOTW alone.  Kathy Battles pointed to its cultural resonance at the time, and Cynthia Meyers to its continuing relevance as a teaching tool.

Yet what happened to this legacy of innovation in American radio drama that Welles’ career so emphatically marks?  We can trace the tradition of creative radio drama forward through the suspense serials of the 1940s and 50s, jump to the 1970s with Himan Brown’s CBS Mystery Theater – and then virtually nothing, certainly not on a regular basis, until we get to the present radio revival.

The conclusion to Neil Verma’s Theater of the Mind eloquently discusses the “mineralization” of works like WOTW, since we can never hear them as audiences in the 1940s did – and I would argue as he does that at least in part this is because listening to radio drama of any kind is no longer part of our everyday experience.

But let’s not forget that this is not true everywhere, or even very many other places – elsewhere in the world, radio drama has an unbroken tradition that incorporates old work with new, and where American radio’s influence is a living thing.  Just yesterday, from my temporary perch in England, I listened to a group of British and American actors perform their version of James M. Cain’s The Butterfly, complete with Western drawls and sound effects, in a joint BBC/Cymru Wales production.  It’s part of a Cain series.

Here, The Archers continues its 63-year daily run, and on the BBC Radio 4 Drama page, a list of 13 genres in the sidebar helps the listener sort through the hundreds of currently running dramatic productions: originals, adaptations, serials, and revivals of old time US radio shows. You can listen to them, too.  The launch of Radio 4 Extra in 2011 created a permanent digital platform for radio soundwork, though subject to odd release windows.

So – what happened here (putting my American hat back on)?  This is something that has never been adequately explained.  I’ve taken a stab at it, in my “Rethinking Radio” piece written some 10 years ago, but besides pointing to the re-localization of radio in the 1950s and its turn to musical formats, the other obvious difference is the lack of a national public broadcasting sector that remained strong, on task, and well funded throughout the post-TV decades and into the digital present.

The BBC never stopped producing innovative radio drama. Welles’ tradition jumped ship and emerged on distant shores.  Thanks to digital platforms and other nations’ public broadcasting systems, the legacy of American radio drama lives on – just not primarily in America.

This is the tenth post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned, as there are still more entries to come! The next Antenna post in the series will be arriving from Jennifer Hyland Wang on January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Smith argues that “Hell On Ice” stands out as a proto-environmental critique. It contemplates the catastrophic collapse of human society, not unlike the Mercury Theatre’s famous “War of the Worlds.” But whereas the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was a science fiction thriller that tapped into anxiety about the looming war in Europe, the “Hell On Ice” show (which aired three weeks earlier) used historical fiction to dramatize the error of human attempts to master the globe. Smith writes, “That makes it perhaps the best companion to ‘War of the Worlds,’ a play in which the thwarted invader is no alien – it’s us. Listening to the play today, ‘Hell on Ice’ is not only a masterpiece of audio theater (among fans, the most beloved of all Welles’s radio works) but a powerful ‘eco-sonic’ critique as well.”

Click here to read Jacob Smith’s full post over on Sounding Out!.

This post is the eighth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on Monday, December 16th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Follow @WOTW75 and tweet along with us at #WOTW75.

7:00-8:00 PM EST: An all-new audio documentary hosted by Brian Hanrahan (Cornell) and featuring critical reflections from a dozen prominent radio historians, including Kate Lacey, Kathleen Battles, Jason Loviglio, Damien Keane, Alex Russo, Tom McEnaney, and Antenna’s own Shawn VanCour and Josh Shepperd.

8:00-9:00 PM EST: The re-broadcast of the original “War of the Worlds” radio play (1938).

9:00-10:00 PM EST:  Hosted by Sounding Out! editor-in-chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (Binghamton University), this hour includes live post-broadcast chats with Keane, McEnaney, and VanCour, and experimental soundscapes and drama produced by Binghamton University students and community members.

Looking for the end of the world? Don’t panic, you’ve come to the right place. Our #WOTW75 project invites you to listen to and live-tweet Orson Welles’ classic “War of the Worlds” radio play tonight alongside hundred (thousands?) of others. This page has all you will need to participate.

When to Listen: Our project starts at  7:00 PM EST on Wednesday, October 30. Our goal is to keep in sync across listening sites everywhere.

How to Listen: Click here to stream our broadcast in your web browser from WHRW in Binghamton, New York. If this feed won’t work or goes down, see Alternative Listening Options below.

How to Respond: Use Twitter, Instagram and post on our Facebook group page using the hashtag #WOTW75. Be sure to follow @WOTW75 on Twitter and reply to one another. Posting a comment here on this page is another option. Want to follow the conversation as a whole? Try our hashtag in tagboard.

Alternative Listening Options:  There are several other listening options available. You can stream the play from wellesnet, YouTube, or archive.org. These should be suitable to play on an iPod, phone, or laptop. Please keep these links handy just in case something goes wrong with the WHRW feed (although we don’t anticipate this).

Public Radio Options: Want a real radio experience? KPCC Southern California Public Radio has generously given a feed out for free to a variety of public broadcasters, so check your local NPR, BBC, or college radio station. KPCC will have its own broadcast on Pacific time. They are sharing our hashtag, too. Here is a link with more information.

How to Help: All we need are your ears and keyboards, but if you want to help build the project, add your friends to our Facebook group and post items from that feed to your wall.

How to Document: Doing something creative while listening? Installing WOTW on a streetcorner, in a bar, an observatory? Roaming rural New Jersey with a flashlight? We need images and artwork. Snap a few for us and send them our way. Your responses will archived both digitally and in print.

There’s more: Here is a link to the most recent entry in our ongoing From Mercury to Mars web series about Welles and radio, for which #WOTW75 is the centerpiece. Also, here is a link to Howard Koch’s WOTW script, in case you’d like to read along. Here is a recent radio play contest, and here is a recent episode of the Aca-media podcast on WOTW. Check out PBS American Experience, which aired a major documentary on Tuesday night. Also, here is a new version of the story by Campfire Radio. Visiting New Jersey? There are live events out there in the moonlight, check out Raconteur Radio. Many more events and news items for the anniversary are up on wellesnet.

Thanks for joining in on the fun. We’re eager to read your tweets and posts, and proud to annihilate the world before your very ears.

Questions, ideas? wotw75@soundingoutblog.com

[Re-posted from our partners at Sounding Out!]

#WOTW75 will revolve around a 3-hour live broadcast streaming online from WHRW, SUNY Binghamton’s student radio station. The first hour of the broadcast (7:00-8:00 PM EST) will feature critical reflections from radio scholars and media historians discussing the legacy of the infamous “panic broadcast.” The second hour (8:00-9:00 PM EST) will consist of a rebroadcast of the original 1938 “War of the Worlds” program. And the third hour (9:00-10:00 PM EST) will include a panel discussion with additional media scholars mixed together with “War of the Worlds”-inspired experimental music and drama performances from Binghamton University’s Radio Drama Division.

This #WOTW75 collective listening experiment is the centerpiece of the six-month long project From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 Years, which is being produced by Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog.

More details about how to listen and participate will be posted here on Antenna and also on Sounding Out! on the day of the event. In the meantime, please follow the #WOTW75 Twitter account and check out the Facebook group page, where blank posters and e-cards can be downloaded if you wish to host a listening party in your area.

Source: http://wallsandothers.blogspot.com/2010/12/13th-of-december-post-apocalyptic.html

What is left to tell after the end of the world, and who is there to tell it? In his Mercury Theater signoff on October 30, 1938, producer and star Orson Welles boasted that the evening’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast had “annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the C.B.S.” While these scenes of otherworldly invasion from the program’s opening 40-minute act have been a source of much discussion, its 20-minute closing act is seldom addressed and stands in stark contrast to the fast action and stylistic innovation of Act I.  Featuring Welles as Professor Pierson reading diary accounts of his travels through the ruins of New Jersey and Manhattan, Act II consists of two long stretches of voiceover narration, broken up by a short dialogue scene between Pierson and a passing stranger. While faithful to H. G. Wells’s 1898 book, this act’s reliance on monologue violated norms of 1930s radio production, which dismissed the technique as a regressive print convention unsuited for radio. However, WOTW’s own use of the technique was no mere technical error, but instead spoke to much broader shifts in the aesthetics of Golden Age radio drama, whose budding crop of auteur producers sought to challenge existing norms and cultivate more self-consciously “literary” styles of narration.

Narration in H. G. Wells’s novel framed as an act of writing.

Professor Pierson in the radio version reads from his diary.

While not without their advantages, literary adaptations presented numerous technical challenges that formed the subject of extensive discussion in early production literature. Serving as presold properties and ready programming fodder, adaptations had the added advantage of lending prestige to sustaining shows such as Mercury, directly aiding its bid for commercial sponsorship as the rebranded Campbell Playhouse scarcely a month after WOTW’s airdate. However, the technical challenges of literary adaptation were often daunting. Early writers were warned to approach literary content with caution, as most conventions of print narration were wholly unsuited for broadcast purposes. NBC’s Assistant Continuity Director Katharine Seymour, for instance, in her 1931 manual, How to Write for Radio, noted that “in adapting printed fiction to radio, a complete transformation must be brought about,” since “there will be no fine descriptive passages to relieve . . . a hackneyed plot” or “make up for the lack of action.” CBS Continuity Director Max Wylie, in his 1939 Radio Writing, argued that “[no] piece of literature . . . cannot, somehow, be creditably transmitted to the radio audience,” but concurred that some posed serious problems. In particular, he noted, was “the problem of the one-man story” that “takes place substantially within a man’s mind and which we experience by being taken to this mind. Here is the radio problem . . . to whom is the man going to talk?”

“The last man left alive” – excerpt from H. G. Wells novel.

While monologue might seem the obvious choice, Wylie noted that, “radio, still clumsy in the way it handles monologue, usually handles it by leaving it alone.” In fact, he added, “leaving it alone is surely the best way to handle it,” as its use almost always “gives away the author and shows him as having stumbled into a quagmire that is the result of bad leakage in his structural plan.”

Max Wylie, Radio Writing (1939).

The WOTW script was among several tasked to Howard Koch, who recalled receiving his assignment with a copy of Wells’s book and “instructions . . . to dramatize it in the form of news bulletins,” then working tirelessly with coproducers Welles and John Houseman to refine this technique in advance of the broadcast. Dominating Act I, these news reports rely more heavily on verbal description than is often recognized, but frequent handoffs between characters and extensive action within each scene still readily satisfy Seymour and Wylie’s criteria for successful literary adaptation. Following the collapse of the nation’s radio infrastructure and extermination of the local populace at the end of the act, however, Wylie’s question returns: who is there to talk to, and how to avoid the embarrassment of unmitigated character monologue? How, in other words, to save radio from lapsing into print?

• Excerpt from Act I: Long descriptive passages by commentator Carl Phillips are mitigated by dramatic action and periodic cuts to the studio announcer.

• Excerpt from Act II: Long stretches of descriptive narration by Professor Pierson with minimal action and no additional voices.

If the reversion to novelistic conventions in WOTW from this perspective seems problematic, an alternative aesthetic trajectory may also be drawn that lets us see monologue as not merely a matter of poor craftsmanship, but rather as a contested category in larger struggles to renegotiate dominant production norms. As Neil Verma notes in his work on the aesthetics of Golden Age radio, a burgeoning group of auteur dramatists during the late 1930s and 1940s sought to stake their claim in radio and explore new storytelling possibilities for their medium. Less interested in policing boundaries between print and broadcasting than their forebears, many of these producers brought a distinctly literary sensibility to their work and pressed discarded techniques such as monologue into prominent use – from lengthy speeches in poetic verse for Archibald MacLeish’s “Fall of the City,” to Norman Corwin’s one-man play, “Soliloquy to Balance the Budget,” to more popular examples such as Arch Oboler’s Lights Out:

• The Dead Woman speaks in Archibald MacLeish’s “Fall of the of the City” (Columbia Workshop, April 11, 1937)

• House Jameson as the Soliloquist in Norman Corwin’s “Soliloquy to Balance the Budget” (Columbia Workshop: Twenty-Six by Corwin, June 15, 1941)

• A criminal flees an angry mob in Arch Oboler’s “Super Feature” (Lights Out, March 16, 1938)

Such techniques retained their vitality in popular postwar programming, as well, from Suspense, to Philip Marlowe, Dragnet, and Frontier Gentleman:

• Agnes Moorehead loses herself in the décor for Suspense’s dramatization of “Yellow Wallpaper” (July 29, 1948)

• Philip Marlowe gets a clue in Philip Marlowe, “Where There’s a Will” (October 17, 1948)

• Joe Friday closes narrative gaps for a Dragnet narcotics bust, “The Big Man” (January 12, 1950)

• Newspaperman J. B. Kendall fights rough in Frontier Gentleman’s “Charlie Meeker” episode (February 9, 1958)

As these examples illustrate, use of monologue quickly spread from a small cadre of experimental producers to a wide range of programming genres, moving in the process from a much-maligned embarrassment to an accepted and valued tool of radio narration.

Understanding the neglected second act of WOTW demands an appreciation of its problematic nature for a production culture that positioned character monologue as an embarrassing reminder of the medium’s continued struggles for autonomy and aesthetic legitimation. However, this production culture was itself significantly destabilized at the dawn of radio’s Golden Age, with its privileged norms actively contested by new writers and directors who sought to build their names and make their mark in the medium. At the end of the world, then, we perhaps find the beginning of new and larger story in the history of radio drama – one whose full telling will demand close attention to shifting styles and the production contexts in which they developed.

This is the sixth post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for the #WOTW75 collective listening experiment on October 30th that will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the original “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Click here to read Kathleen Battles’s full post.

This post is the fifth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on October 14th, featuring Shawn VanCour on the aesthetics of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

In this post, Cohen argues that Welles’s production reclaimed and exploited the media-consciousness of Bram Stoker’s original novel, a feature occluded in the play and film versions. She also asserts that Welles’s production of Dracula introduced several of the radio innovations we’ve come to associate with the Mercury Theater (and The War of the Worlds in particular): first-person retrospective narration, temporal coding, the strategic use of media reflexivity. Click here to read Debra Rae Cohen’s full post.

This post is the third in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on September 17th.

Miss the first two posts in the series? Click here to read Tom McEnaney’s thoughts on the place of Latin America in Welles’s radio work. And click here to read Eleanor Patterson’s reflections on recorded re-releases of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

As many scholars have noted, including Michele Hilmes in the recently published Radio’s New Wave (2013), radio has traditionally been considered an ephemeral medium defined by the simultaneity and liveness of broadcasting. Yet, I argue that part of the reason the WOTW broadcast has come to be so famous and notorious is that it has continued to circulate in our culture through discourse, as well as through material artifacts. This repetition shapes the cultural meanings associated with the 1938 production in ways that are different from the immediate cultural impact it had at the time of its original broadcast.

TMTOTA‘s performance of WOTW seems engineered for immediate impact as a sensational Halloween prank intended to shock, and impress critics, listeners, and other radio practitioners as a live program. This intention is implicit in the realism of TMTOTA‘s update of  WOTW’s setting from H.G. Wells’ original Victorian England location to then-present day New Jersey, along with the use of a news bulletin format for the first two-thirds of  WOTW. The infamous panic caused by the broadcast was probably also encouraged by TMTOTA‘s distinction (at the time) as a commercial-free sustaining program; listeners tuning in mid-broadcast might have believed they were listening to news of an actual alien invasion because they did not hear the product placement or reference to sponsors present in most of the other entertainment radio of that era.

The WOTW live broadcast was immediately significant in 1938 in several ways. It made Orson Welles and TMTOTA famous, which enticed Campbell’s Soup into sponsoring TMTOTA (the program became The Campbell Playhouse in December 1938). “War of the Worlds” also became a lightning rod for radio’s supposedly dangerous potential in the public sphere, and it was subsequently studied by the famous Radio Research Project. It also functioned as a way for listeners to make sense of World War II and the fear of invasion by foreign, aka “alien,” enemies.  These meanings are there for us to consider, but as contemporary audiences listen to the original broadcast through multimedia platforms like YouTube, listeners are positioned as temporal tourists of a sort. As the recording plays, audiences are treated to period photographs of Welles performing, as well as the hum and hiss of an older, analog recording, which adds a patina of age that invites listeners to revel in its pastness.

Orson Welles’ assures audiences at the end of WOTW there is no alien invasion, saying this performance  has “no further significance.” This is certainly not the case, as it was absolutely intended to have be immediately culturally significance. Yet, neither CBS, Welles, nor other members of the TMTOTA could have anticipated its longevity within our media culture. Indeed, beyond the film Radio Days, WOTW has become an intertextual marker throughout our media culture to signify moral panic and the duplicity of media audiences, and it has been referenced with pastiche in television shows like Futurama. Indeed, 75 years later, the radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” has come to be a significant artifact of residual radio, a term which I use rather than the fan term “old time radio” (OTR), although sometimes this term can be useful to define this community of enthusiasts. The term “old time radio” connotes the pastness of these radio recordings, however, building on Raymond Williams’ discussion of dominant, emerging, and residual media, I use the term residual radio to express how radio artifacts transform and change over time.

Like other recordings of radio from the first half of the 20th Century, WOTW was produced at a time when radio was considered the dominant form of domestic entertainment. The WOTW broadcast and subsequent overwhelming reaction emphasize the dominance of radio entertainment in the 1930s, a presence intended within WOTW’s original commercial network radio production culture. I argue that its lingering presence in our media culture is, conversely, residual: it continues to be present within media culture despite the indifference or neglect of the dominant media industry that originally produced it. Contemporary interest in WOTW is perpetuated by radio enthusiasts, historians, and others long after any profit imperative exists for CBS. This is made possible by several factors, the least of which is the preservation and availability of WOTW’s live broadcast on lacquer transcription discs, which have been used to distribute it as a material artifact for listeners, scholars, and radio producers to rebroadcast it.

 The 1938 WOTW radio broadcast was first commercially released in 1968 by the Longines Symphonette Society (LSS) as a vinyl LP. It had been electronically rechanneled to simulate stereo from the original transcription discs. This was part of LSS’s larger project of selling compilations of radio drama, along with other labels which were also selling OTR compilations in the late 1960s, such as Nostalgia Lane or Golden Age Records. As Derek Kompare has argued about TV DVDs, selling radio programs as discrete objects changes our interactions with them; they become something collectible, and for radio drama, they become a marker of their residuality in our culture through the nostalgic paratexts (such as packaging) that often accompany them. This 1968 release occurs during what I would call the first wave of nostalgia following the end of radio drama’s institutional presence on network radio in 1962.  WOTW was released as a cassette tape by Metacom as part of their Radio Reruns cassette series in 1977, which I think marks another moment when we see a cultural revival of radio drama occuring shortly after CBS’ began producing CBS Mystery Theater in 1974, which was a radio anthology series that showcased science fiction and horror radio drama similar to that of The Whistler or Inner Sanctum Mysteries, and the syndication of classic radio productions from the commercial network radio by local radio broadcasters, such as KNX 1070 in Los Angeles. The continued presence of radio drama, either from the classic network era or in the style of old radio drama, demonstrates the continued interest and engagement with radio drama by audiences.

WOTW’s notoriety is obviously explicitly a result of the attention the mainstream media gave it at the time, as well as the fame and success that followed Orson Welles ascendance in film, and subsequently, his position in the critical and academic canon of auteurs.  However, WOTW’s circulation through LP, cassette, rebroadcast, and mp3 also implicitly shapes how people look back at this time in entertainment history, while also allowing this recording to become an object of fetishism and desire.

Today, WOTW is available to purchase as an mp3 on iTunes, Amazon, and other sites that offer radio files from a bygone time. This technology allows us to pause, rewind, and play WOTW while surrounded by its paratexts, whether it be the album cover showcasing newspaper headlines from the time, or links in the side bar to YouTube videos of Orson Welles apologizing to the press for scaring listeners at home. The circulation of the WOTW radio broadcast encourages a contemporary spectatorship in which WOTW is not only a sensational or thrilling drama, but also a nostalgic and familiar object whose different material incarnations are sold to collectors on Ebay, and whose minor details are debated by fans online. This forum, for instance, is composed of fans that were born long after the original broadcast and yet still debate why people tuned into the WOTW original broadcasts late and missed the disclaimer that it was a fictional program. These debates, and others, point to WOTW’s function in the everyday life of listeners who engage with residual radio.  As Cornel Sandvoss has argued about other fan behavior, this artifact and its cultural meanings become a mirror for fans.  It can be a symbol of their superior knowledge of history, of their taste in quality programming, or their engagement with Orson Welles’ celebrity across media platforms. And in this way, it gives us a case study to consider how broadcast media continues to circulate in our culture long after its initial distribution over the airwaves, and how it comes to have different meanings for listeners across time and space.