Stuff You Should Know - The Great War of the Worlds Panic Myth

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

On Halloween 1938 young radio star Orson Welles scared the pants off of America with a fictional news bulletin claiming Martians had landed and were destroying the country. People across the nation ran wild with panic in the streets – or did they? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.

It's just the two of us batching it up without you here. Hi. Hi. Oh, man. I think Jerry's inclusion, we're still batching it up. How do you mean? I mean, does she really ruin the batch scene for us? Sure, she's very maternal and judgy.

That's true. Oh, yeah. You were headed down a kind road for a second. I was with Jerry. Yeah. That doesn't sound like me. So for all of you who are just tuning in for the first time, welcome, this is Stuff You Should Know.

To everybody else who's tuning in for the multiple times, welcome, this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, we never do that. Some shows do that. What, they welcome new listeners? Yeah, and kind of say what they do, and I mean, we've literally never done that. That's fine.

That's lame. Hi, who does that? Any friends of ours? Yeah, I mean, the guys on the Flop House, they've been podcasting as long as we have, and every single episode, they say who they are and what they do. No, okay.

Well, do you want to do that this one time? No, I'm Chuck Bryant, and this is Josh Clark, and this is a podcast where we explain things in a lighthearted and fun, and sometimes even funny way. I disagree with all of that. Oh, boy. So what we're going to talk about today, because I think we need to talk about this one

in a slightly somber tone. Chuck, it's a blemish in the history of America, really, if you think about it. Well, yeah, and you know what? I've never actually had listened to it until this week. Same here. And it's a lot of fun to actually listen to. I would recommend it.

Yeah, especially in a dark room where that's all you're concentrating on, not like a second screen kind of thing, like where you're really listening to this radio play. Yeah, and try and put yourself there a little bit, like what it must have been like in, well, not 1898, that's when the book came out. Yeah, but in 1938, I mean, what, 40 years later,

just in that 40 year stretch, I mean, think about the difference between 1980 and 2020, not ridiculously different periods. It's just gotten crap here. 1898, exactly. Oh, yeah, it's gone downhill. And don't think that had nothing to do with Reagan's election in 1980.

But the difference between 1898 and 1938 are, it's just like two different worlds, man. Two different worlds, comma, war of thee. So I guess we should start with the book written by the great H.G. Wells. It was the very first alien invasion story to hit the bookshelves. And that's a pretty remarkable thing.

It was a serialized thing at first in magazines and Pearsons in the UK and then Cosmo here in the U.S. And then they finally slapped all those serialized versions together into a book and it sold pretty well. Yeah, it's never been on the print since that first edition in 1898. That's pretty respectable.

I expect as much for our book as well. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be still being published in 40 years. Or 100 years. Yeah, 140 years. Yeah, well, let's hope. So in this book, and like you said, first alien invasion story ever published, which is, you know, just the fact

that this is a completely new premise, new conceit made it, you know, kind of scary. But in the book, H.G. Wells describes like this alien invasion. And part of the thing that was so scary about it, at least at the time from what I can gather, is that it was about like the breakdown of society. And we're talking like Victorian era, England society,

where like rigid social rules and customs and mores and guidance for all behavior at all times was like the norm. So the idea of that breaking down was scary in and of itself. I think that made the book kind of scary to contemporary readers. Would that be right? Readers back then.

And that was one big theme that Wells explored. Another one that he explored in that, at least I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on it, said that the main point of this, the main subtext was learning how humans dominion over animals can be, you know, cruel and thoughtless because all of a sudden with these alien invaders

who were just wiping us off the map, we were like, you know, domesticated animals to them. Yeah, so the shoe was on the other hoof. And sure, it caused, or at least it was intended to cause people to take kind of a hard look at pre-animal farm to make sort of a social statement about how we treated animals. Yeah.

And so that was in 1898. If you flash forward to Orson Welles in his Mercury Theater version, he, this is, you know, like you said, we're right in the middle or we're in the Great Depression and we're headed towards war. And it's sort of an uneasy feeling in the United States as a whole.

So he thought, perfect time to go in there, put a fresh coat of paint on this thing and scare the bejeebas out of the American public by doing something that they had never heard before, which was sort of a Verite style production. Yeah. And I mean, it's easy to overlook today, but radio was still rather new at the time in 1938.

It was like, you know, cutting edge technological medium. And it was not fully defined. So the idea of creating this, I guess, hoax broadcast is the best you can call it. This fictionalized version that was, what would you call it, man? I hate that word so much. It's really taken on a bad tang here lately.

Yeah, I mean, it's Verite. It's, you know, a faux documentary style thing that no one had ever heard. Like there's no way when people heard this, they would think, oh, this is, you know, I know Christopher Guest. This is sort of a scary version. I've seen Blair Witch.

I know what's going on here. I recognize Lenny from Laverne and Shirley anywhere. I know it's not real. Yeah, so they were prepared for this in 1938 when Orson Welles, he was already a big name in radio as the voice of the shadow, which was big hit. And his Mercury Theater was pretty, pretty well respected at the time.

Yeah, it's like a live stage theater. So they'd only had this show for a few months by the time October of 1938 rolled around. But their whole jam was they were on CBS and CBS had them do our long radio adaptations of classic like novels like Treasure Island. They did around the world in 80 days. And so since it was October,

they wanted to do something spooky around Halloween. Something not boring. So they decided, yeah. So they were like, well, what's the most boring scary book there is? And they said, HG Wells, War of the Worlds. So they decided to adapt it. Yeah, so they got together, they're rehearsing.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in a sec, but there wasn't a strong feeling among the cast and crew and the production group that thought it was gonna be awesome because I think probably because they had never done anything like this. They had never heard anything like this. And they thought, is this even gonna be any good

in a couple of different sources in the production went to a radio critic ahead of time? It's like, thanks a lot. And they said, by the way, this is gonna be a real stinker. They said, apparently two different people in the production said that this will put everyone to sleep.

And I don't have the impression that it's strictly because they didn't have any frame of reference to judge it against because no one had done this before. From what I can gather, originally, it was going to be really bad and really terrible. And the production and the cast and crew knew this. They knew that they were marching toward embarrassment

with the early versions of the script. Yeah, so Orson, he's sort of distracted. He's got a stage production going on. He's got his partner and his group, the great John Houseman, who you all know from the paper chase, kind of a legendary actor. He was one of his original partners.

And he got together with Howard, is it Koch? I never know if it's gonna be a Koch or a Koch. Doesn't matter. All right, K-O-C-H. And he was the writer who was adapting the novel. And they were like, we gotta make this thing better. And one thing I think we can do, this was Houseman talking.

I'm not gonna do a John Houseman. But everyone knows how he sounds. Right, when I came across John Houseman being involved, I was like, I can't wait. I don't even remember. I mean, he was just very serious and sort of, all I can think of is paper chase. And what was the TV commercial, was it?

I wanna say it was like Schwab or Merrill Lynch. I think it might've been Merrill Lynch, maybe, I don't know. But one of those finance firms he did, he voiced for. Well, yeah, he was very famous for having a very high-pitched, squeaky falsetto voice. And he talked very, very fast. And actually, I know who it was. It was FedEx and Dunkin' Donuts

that he was well-known for. That's right. He was the time to make the donuts guy. Right, with the Mustang. So, Houseman and Koch Koch went in there and he said, one of the things we should do, probably, to make this a little more scary and a little more believable,

that it's an actual broadcast, is time passes in the book. And we can't do that here. So let's just get rid of all that stuff so it gives the appearance that it's going down right now. Yeah, that was enormously, a huge change. Totally. And I don't know if he did that to help the pacing

move a little faster or what. But that would pan out to be a really important difference in the original script that Howard Kaye turned in and the one that they ended up doing. And then even beyond that, some of the other changes came just hours before broadcast because apparently if you worked with Orson Welles, you should be on the lookout for him to come in

at the last minute and be like, all the stuff we've been practicing for a week or two, forget all of that, we're doing this instead. And part of that, from what I can tell, is that he was trying to shake up the actor, shake them out of whatever complacency they'd worked themselves into with rehearsal and to get this raw or more terrified performance.

And apparently it worked, I mean, I can't imagine, I didn't hear any rehearsals or anything like that. I would have loved to have compared the week before to the actual broadcast, but everyone delivered these really great performances and they really nailed by showtime the realism in a lot of ways, not just in the performances, but also in just little details.

Like they were doing a mock radio program which we'll talk about a little more in detail in a second, but they were pretending to have news bulletins break and so they were doing the things that news bulletins did. And one of the things that stuck out to me was one of the eyewitnesses, so it's an actor, but one of the eyewitnesses is like being interviewed by a news reporter on the scene

and they start to talk and the news reporter goes, can you speak more loudly and move into the microphone, please? And I think the actor actually says, how's that? And the guy repeats himself and then the actor has to repeat himself what he was originally saying. So it has that veneer of authenticity

just from little details like that that really stood out to me when I was listening for him, but if you're not listening for him, it makes you buy into the whole thing that much more. Yeah, and the other big change that Wells brought along was stretching out the first two halves of the thing such that it went past, it went 40 minutes and radio at the time, every 30 minutes,

like on the half hour, they would check in with a station ID check and listeners, even though radio was new, were well honed to this station break every 30 minutes. And so when 10 minutes passed, the half hour go by and there ain't no station break, that really makes people kind of buy in to what they're listening to as possibly real.

And then you add to the fact that there were no sponsors for this show. Yeah. So they weren't cutting to Casper or... Or... Me undies. Me undies ads. Right.

All of a sudden, I couldn't remember any sponsor. Except for Casper. Can you imagine John Hausman saying, made with Modal? No, I thought it'd be made with Modal. Yeah, that's right. That's a much better Hausman. I had something in my throat. So yeah, there were no sponsors.

So basically, it really came across as something that was super, super realistic sounding. Right. So all that is to say that they had really, by the time this broadcast aired at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30th, 1938, they were not going to be the laughing stock. And this is not going to be embarrassing.

It was gonna be pretty awesome, actually. Should we take a break? I think so, Chuck. And then we'll come back and we will reveal the broadcast after this. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. What about you? What about you?

What about you? What about you? What about you? What about you? What about you? What about you? What about you? What about you?

What about you? What about you? What about you? Just get in the service. We've reached showtime, airtime, 8 p.m. Sunday, October 30th 1938, Mercury Theater on the Air began broadcasting its adaptation of HG Wells War of the Worlds.

And at the very beginning, it's introduced as much. There's an announcer who says that, right? I think that's lost probably to time, somewhat, because everyone probably thinks that they just tried trick everyone but no they actually introduced it as what they're doing and you know that this is a radio place at one year in the future. Right right and yeah Orson Welles so it's introduced by an announcer Orson Welles comes in does the introductory essay and then they did something really smart and interesting especially for the time. They went to a musical program that was

supposedly being broadcast from the meridian room in the hotel park plaza so if you were just tuning in right then you would have no idea that this was mercury theater on the air you would have no idea that this was a teleplay you would think that you were listening to something that was pretty regularly broadcast which was live music at some like ballroom in a hotel somewhere in new york that they set up like a radio transmitter to transmit out over the radio that was pretty frequent but this was part of the show like if you hadn't paused it that is right right exactly so but that was a huge part of the show because that lulled listeners into kind of complacency and listeners who tuned in late and missed that introduction thought that this is what they were

listening to and then the first news bulletin hits yeah and that's where things start to get really interesting they break in you know one of these interrupt your previously scheduled programs kind of things right right and they come in and with these bulletins but they're not super long at first because they treat it kind of how it would be in real life it's just sort of a breaking story something's going together it was fairly obtuse and they didn't like you know say martians are attacking us right now everyone from the get-go you sort of left it up to the listener to kind of piece it together little by little they would go back to the meridian room for a bit and it wasn't for very long but because you know they couldn't waste too much time but

it was long enough it wasn't for like 10 seconds they did it for like a minute minute and a half right it made it seem right then like that was what you were listening to that that was the program and the bulletin was in fact the bulletin rather than the opposite being true yeah so eventually you start to piece together what's going on and you have this attack in new jersey of all places and uh princeton university they had like a princeton astronomer on they have government officials and they kind of dole it out a little by little until about the 17 minutes 17 and a half minute mark and then that's when it really kind of gets uh super scary and people really see the full picture of what's going on so chuck um i feel like we should read a little bit of the

script there's this one part starting about the 17 30 minute mark i think you said where they um i as i like to say they tore the lid off the sucker do you want to be announcer or phillips i'll be the announcer all right okay but i want you to do phillips as sammy davis jr so here's the announcer wait hold on i'm getting on my tap shoes okay okay you ready candy man uh huh sure babe i'm not gonna do it that way okay all right so let me give you a little bit of background real quick so these news bulletins up to this point have basically said there's some weird thing that landed they thought it was a meteorite at first that landed in grover's mill new jersey um and then later bulletin said that oh actually there's some weird tentacle like weird

things emerging from this thing we thought was a meteorite so now we're back at grover's mill so i'm the announcer we are bringing you an eyewitness account of what's happening on the wilmuth farm grover's mill new jersey and that was kind of like uh they were breaking in to let you know that and then they go back to more piano for some reason and then we now return you to carl phillips at grover's mill ladies ladies and gentlemen am i on am i on ladies and gentlemen here i am back up a stone wall that adjoins mr wilmuth's garden from here i get a sweep of the whole scene i give you every detail as long as i can talk as long as i can see more state police have arrived they're drawing up a cordon in front of the pit about 30 of them no need to

push the crowd back now they're willing to keep their distance the captain is conferring with someone we we can't quite see who oh yes i believe it's a professor pierce and yes it is now they've parted uh the professor moves around one side studying the object while the captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands i can see it now it's a it's a white handkerchief tied to a pole a flag of truce if those creatures know what that means what anything means wait something's happening you can cut in anytime who can take a rainbow oh wait sorry a hump shape is rising out of the pit i can make out a small beam of light against a mirror what's that there's a jet there's a jet flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men

it strikes them head on good lord they're turning into flame now the whole fields caught fire the woods the barns the gas tanks the automobile spreading everywhere it's coming this way about 20 yards to my right very nice and scene okay that was a great chuck so um they you mentioned or i should say philips the uh reporter on the scene mentioned right professor pierce him and he's this he ends up being the main character and he's uh he's an he's an astronomer that's interviewed earlier on and then he's on this scene as it happens um and the program just keeps going like that like there's another there's a main announcer um who i played i thought rather well great job thank you same to you bravo quite a future as a fully artist if i may say so thank you very much

i've been practicing you want to hear my uh machine gun i've been doing that one since i was like six all right how about walking through the forest all right now how about a good punch to the face oh wow that was good thank you i've probably punched myself in the thing okay i'm dedicated that's how dedicated to the art of foley oh man so um the the announcer just keeps bringing in more and more news as this thing goes on and unfolds of like now these things aren't just in new jersey they're in chicago they're like out west they're they're starting to invade everywhere and they're killing people left and right that you said there was a government official that reads the statement is actually that they say that it's the secretary of the interior which

i thought was particularly genius because i mean probably not that many people were familiar with the secretary of the interior yeah totally herald x yeah um but they had him sound like fdr so that it would kind of play on everyone's um i guess unconscious or i'm sure there were people who were like that sounds just like fdr but at the very least it would kind of evoke that government authority the reality of like a government figure you know yeah so meanwhile on the other stations there's one that's running uh opposite which is a really really popular radio show at the time um probably the most popular uh chase and sandborn hour which had the very very famous ventriloquist edgar bergen and his dummy charlie mccarthy and we talked about that on

our ventriloquism episode remember that they started out on radio which is hysterical i don't even know uh why they would even bother with the dummy part just due to you wouldn't even have to wear you that's what he did you wouldn't even have to wear pants no no you just sit around down in your spaghetti stained undershirt and and yeah naked from the waist down maybe some socks doing a couple voices that's right here's your contract edgar bergen what do you think about that charlie oh don't get me started like that's it i could be a famous ventriloquist on the radio you just you just did it i think i think hollywood's gonna come with calling uh but the real sort of interesting um factoid here i think is that people were channel surfing back then when you cut to

commercial just like we used to do when we didn't have pause buttons and fast forward buttons and what is this pause button you keep mentioning i've never heard of this you've never paused television no wow you're you need to i don't believe i've ever paused anything in my life it's funny we were emily and i've been watching that uh german sci-fi series dark which is very challenging to follow and uh there's a lot of rewinding like wait wait who is that what did they just say and we rewind it a bit and do that again and or you know of course i got to go the bathroom let me just pause it and i was thinking about how not too long ago you just if you missed something you missed it you just peed the couch or you peed yourself on the couch yeah there was no

like cleared like let me go back and clear this up it's like right what did he say i have no idea guess we'll never know there's no internet to even look it up i guess i should probably stop watching this show all together you go walk up to the vcr and press a jack but at any rate uh back then let's say charlie mccarthy goes to break and i'll work for mark dancer and they flip it over to war the worlds at this point in the broadcast when the s is hitting the fan and it's gonna scare the pants off of people in 1938 well yeah even more than i think that they would have dialed over even before that so they might have caught like a news bulletin and then maybe some of that music from the meridian room um so it really would have caught them and there were supposedly a

substantial number of people who did dial over and were like wait wait what what is going on here and now we come to the reaction the response because if you picked up the paper the next day in america um just about anywhere in any major city you're going to find huge blaring headlines like the one that the new york daily news printed in tall bold letters fake radio war stirs terror through the us yeah stories of of uh shock and hysteria stories of people taking their own life stories of people dying from heart attacks the ap said a man in pittsburgh found his wife with poison in her hand and said i'm gonna i'd rather die this way than like that and you know talking to wells afterward in the aftermath of this he apologizes publicly says they didn't intend to do this

um we had we didn't know it was gonna cause a panic and then you know if you look over the years more interviews it sort of seems like wells is a little more like you know we thought it would be pretty fun to scare people and i didn't know if it was going to cause a panic but we definitely intended it to have this effect on people uh whereas houseman and and coach were like no we really didn't mean it um so it was sort of conflicting reports from the production on what they thought was going to be the result right um and i've read an interview with john landis the great director who um worked with wells on a project that never got made toward the end of wells life and he didn't say that wells admitted to him that he meant to but he got to know him enough that he

was like yes if you watch this this initial press conference where he's apologizing because the whole country was ripped apart in chaos and were running wild in the streets and like nearly rioted because of his broadcast he is not at all he's just as happy as a lark that this all happened of course even though he's pretending to apologize and he said that was just that's his awesome wells did you just say apologize it's a it's a new version i'm testing out i like it it's it's good kind of yeah it's it's at least as good as i apologize so this was just a couple of days in the news cycle it wasn't the biggest deal in the world even though it was fairly sensational story writing for for newspapers and it might have just gone that way had it not been for a

princeton university social psychologist a couple of years later named hadley cantrell and cantrell released a book on the real effects of this thing and basically said that you know people were praying crying they were frantically trying to escape death from the martians six million people listened to this thing and at least one six of them were frightened or disturbed and i have the evidence right here yeah the evidence that he had was based on a series of interviews with 135 people almost all of them were in new jersey which remember that's where the the crux of the invasion and destruction being described took place because grover's mill in new jersey is actually a real town in jersey so he went to jersey because he was in princeton so he went where he was

and interviewed 135 people and he said were you scared by this broadcast and the participant would say yes and he'd say you're in my study and he'd ask the next one were you scared were you scared by this broadcast and he'd say no he'd be like you're not in the study that's crazy and so yeah he said in the in the methodology that he selected 100 out of the 135 because they had been scared by the broadcast and so he took this these interviews of people in new jersey and he extrapolated it to the rest of the country and he said yep this is this is real this is a really great example of people being fooled into into terror and panic and you know the responses when this happens like we saw after the world war the world's broadcast people will run out into the

street they will flee the city they will call their friends and neighbors they will they may attempt suicide they may die of a heart attack like the new york times reported 20 or so people in new york alone needed to be treated for for shock and hysteria this is what happens when somebody toys with the public trust and um yeah it's pretty nuts the end yeah that was what that was the end of hadley's hadley's book right uh yeah not the end of this episode right so this is what this specific study is what if you've ever taken a mass media or communications uh college class you've probably studied war of the worlds largely because of this study basically it might have just come and gone if it weren't for this um this academic paper that

were put out and all of a sudden for decades and decades it's reported on as like a a cautionary tale almost of responsibility in media even fictional media and you know as recently as 2013 pbs american experience documentary said this was the case our old pals at radio lab in 2008 did an episode about this uh where that was the case but there were a few problems with this paper beyond the supremely bad methodology behind just getting scared new jersey people to go in there and and give their report was they found up we they ended up finding real ratings for this thing and not a ton of people even heard it it turns out right so so his six million estimate was way off way way way off and they did a survey during the program that said two percent of respondents

said that they were listening and some markets like big cities like boston even preempted this thing uh for local programming so it wasn't a ton of people it wasn't a ton of people being scared and like just literally losing their minds with fear and panic and things swing so far the other way that it the the narrative became you know what no one was really scared at all and what newspapers really did was they put out hit pieces on a competing medium uh like radio and how you shouldn't trust it anymore so so what happened over the last within sometime within the 21st century but sometime in the 2010s the the the myth that america lost its mind went bonkers and ran wild in the street because they were panicked by the war of the world's broadcast was shown to be a

myth that it didn't happen and that was the new understanding for a little while um just a few years until another guy came along and said you know what um they're actually both both are right and both are wrong in a lot of ways should we take a break and talk about the truth always being somewhere in the middle mm-hmm on the podcast hey dude the 90s called david lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult classic show hey dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces we're going to use hey dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s we lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it it's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop

references to the best decade ever do you remember going to blockbuster do you remember nintendo 64 do you remember getting frosted tips was that a cereal no it was hair do you remember aol instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist so leave a code on your best friends vapor because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your gameboy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s listen to hey dude the 90s called on the i heart radio app ample podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm lance bass host of the new i heart podcast frosted tips with lance bass the hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get

tough or you're at the end of the road uh okay i see what you're doing do you ever think to yourself what advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help this i promise you oh god seriously i swear and you won't have to send an sos because i'll be there for you oh man and so my husband michael um hey that's me yep we know that michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life step by step oh not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye

bye listen to frosted tips with lance bass on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts i'm mangesh atika there and to be honest i don't believe in astrology but from the moment i was born it's been a part of my life in india it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately i've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it so i rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages k-pop but just when i thought i had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology

my whole world came crashing down situation doesn't look good there is risk to father and my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer i think your ideas are going to change too listen to skyline drive and the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts all right i said the truth is always somewhere in between that's not always the case with everything in life obviously but that's that's a saying for a reason and that's definitely seems to be the case in this case with a gentleman named a brad schwarz he's a probably the leading war of the world scholar and he went back and he went and investigated the letters and the cables

that that came in they were at the university of michigan archives and these are the letters that actually came in two wells and the mercury theater in the days after the broadcast and what he contends and i agree is that this is what you need to be reading is what people were really thinking at the time that weren't just cherry picked in the town where that got attacked in new jersey who were obviously they were going to be freaked out more than anyone in the country right so one of the things that he points out is you know everybody been you know since around 2010 or maybe a little earlier everyone had been wailing on hadley cantrell for his terrible terrible methodology but they the the revisionists were also kind of doing the same thing they were

making all sorts of suppositions like the idea that the newspapers had basically conspired to target radio its rival to show how irresponsible it was and how it shouldn't be trusted with the news there's really newspapers that should be handling the news and maybe you can listen to little orphan annie on on the radio but that's about it that that was all supposition that was as much supposition as hadley cantrell extrapolated his findings in new jersey to the rest of the country and a brad schwarz one of the reasons i think he's doing a good job is because he's he's saying no where if you actually sit down and read these letters and these cables that were coming in in the days after they really probably paint the most accurate picture anyone's ever found to

this to this point of how it was actually received like you can see almost in real time at the time what people were saying about this by in their letters to orson wells into the mercury theater on the air yeah and it was a range of feelings it was everything from people who said you know what we knew it wasn't real but it was really scary and super awesome uh i don't know if they said things like super awesome he said that a number of people wrote in who actually made fun of the people who fell for it and said that you know they're they're gullible they're they're rubes and one writer even said they should be sterilized and disenfranchised yeah because they'd shown that in an actual emergency they were undependable they would just run around like chickens with their

heads cut off in the streets yeah and Swartz sort of draws a line uh between what was going on back then to us today with this whole fake news hoax garbage that we have to listen to day in and day out and uh basically said this was the first viral phenomenon in media was the war of the world's broadcast and it was a mixed bag some people loved it some people did think it was real and panicked but it certainly was not this widespread panic across the country like you were talking about yeah he said less than a quarter of the letters described what he would consider panic but even most of those weren't actually angry when they were writing the letter a lot of them were thrilled like you got me he did right but he did say um that yes there are cases that you see

in these letters and in cables that that describe people panicking so that did happen in some cases most of it seems to have been isolated in new jersey so if Hadley Kent Trill had not extrapolated his findings and had you know interviewed more people who had different reactions to the broadcast but if it had just been like an investigation into the reaction in new jersey that study or that book would have been much more useful but the fact is he just screwed that screwed the methodology up so badly that it's it's basically useless but he wasn't he didn't make up the the panic that he described necessarily he may have exaggerated it who knows but it did it does seem to have actually happened in some cases but it was sporadic few and far between certainly not

organized and certainly not seen across the rest of the country like it was reported on by the papers the next day yeah which sort of leads us to the story of the the poor pulses of Manhattan this Manhattan couple they did fall for it they were very scared apparently as the story goes they got their last six dollars together and got on a train to get the heck out of new york assuming not going west into new jersey they went north toward Connecticut got as far as they could on what little money they had get off the train and you know there's a bunch of other passengers that they're telling you know they're warning everybody of what's happened right and this one guy there goes over and gets the and i just pictured this in the movie it's like no one's

listening to this guy and he he picks up the newspaper basically the tv guide it's like it's the dunking donut he says hey guys it says right here war the world's broadcast is supposed to be on at that hour like it just says right here in the newspaper it's a it's a radio play everyone no one right everyone no one nobody okay and then he just goes and gets on a train and leaves but they feel bad for them that the other people that were you know that had gathered together they loaned them or gave them i guess some money and chipped in and got them back to new york city and then later uh estelle paltz wrote a 15 page letter uh the next day to orson wells that was very admiring and uh said how thrilled she was but i can't imagine what else is in that

15 page letter it's a lot of pages i know i know hell of a story i think is what which she just kept just over and over and over right so um so that was one of the letters that abred shorts turned up in that trove and like it very clearly describes a couple panicking because they mistook the war of the world's broadcast but again um this was not like across the nation like the papers reported and schwarz actually explains the papers basically um as a combination of a couple of things one is a bias i can't tell if it's selection bias volunteer bias or confirmation bias but the bias is as follows if you're in a newsroom and all of a sudden your phone starts ringing off the hook and you're getting 150 more calls that night and all of them are people asking about this

martian invasion and what's going on and is this real or is this a hoax or have you guys heard anything about this and some of those calls are even from the local police who are also getting similar calls and now they're calling you to find out then it seems like there's a lot of people calling and freaking out about this martian thing but if you step back if you zoom out and look at that number of people that actually called the newsroom it's just this minute fraction of the population of whatever town it is um so it wasn't a bunch of people freaking out but to the people answering the phone in the newsroom who are getting swamped with calls way more calls than usual it did seem like that so that combined with anecdotal reports that no one followed up followed

up on from the wire services that people were attempting suicide or having heart attacks or whatever that just being reported and relayed as fact led everybody to believe that this was actually happening out there in the country that people were running well maybe not my town because I stuck my head outside of the newsroom and I didn't see anything but I hear they're going crazy in Chicago right now or I hear they're really going nuts in Milwaukee or whatever um and that's how it got reported and that's what everyone thought happened people who lived through this thought that this happened the next day Orson Welles thought his career was in jeopardy the next day because he accidentally made America go berserk and that's how that myth began and that's how it

stood and and abrad Schwartz basically traced it back to lazy lazy reporting so myth busted thanks to abrad Schwartz and us and us for sure I'm glad you included us so there's an interesting footnote here though because this actually did kind of play out that way um eight years later in night was it eight years later yeah 1948 in Ecuador so this is in Quito Ecuador these broadcasters recreate the Orson Welles radio play and they did a version that went a lot further than his did and got other radio stations to join in and add to the reporting which really pretty brilliant move there to increase like you turn the station and it's happening over there too right and this really did scare people they really did take to the streets and panic

there was you know public panic going on and then the crowd finds out that it's fiction and they get angry and actually turn into an angry mob and burn down the local newspaper building that had the radio station inside of it killing six people yeah six people died 15 people were injured like they knew that the staff was in that building and they set the building on fire to try to kill them a bunch of people escaped out the back but a lot of people didn't escape and the two people who were responsible for the broadcast including Ecuador's most beloved and trusted presenter were indicted for it like they're more safer basically yeah exactly and they were they were indicted for their role in this like people died because of it and this actually does seem to have happened in in

Ecuador amazing yeah so there you go the idea that America fell into chaos and panic after the war the world's broadcast in 1938 is largely myth go forth and spread the gospel everybody unless you're in Ecuador and then you're like no that's actually happened here and since I said that actually happened here I think Chuck is time for Listener Mail so this is from Tom in the UK did you see this email I don't think so it's great it's one long sentence and I'm gonna try and read it and how I think Tom speaks I'm gonna do as a candy man as Tom from the UK because just the way he wrote it I think Tom probably talks a little bit like this this isn't Tom from the UK who was our tour manager when we did our UK tour is it no

well shout out to that Tom yeah okay this is an engineer and this is what he has to say all right sup Josh and Chuck Tom engineer from the UK stoke on Trent big fan of the show been binging for about two years and got through all of them all are you lot even Jerry have got me through a lot these last couple years and I put a few people onto your podcast wanted to email you lot for a while and finally managed to get round to emailing a load of things to people about stuff that really doesn't matter email the TV show about one of their actors a part of a particle physicist about using a light year of lead as a frame of reference the company super noodles for the excellent job they've done with their super noodle pot but I'm not much for the peas

and I just wanted to say I know you like the Japanese mayo but you really need to try the Polish mayo spot on all the best Tom boy oh boy Tom that was great and Chuck that was a fantastic stoke on Trent accent the most accurate I've ever heard and the first Tom that was a great email and you're right Chuck I love that email so much I had so much fun you were right to choose that one so thanks Tom thanks for writing in thank you for including us in your list of people you harass via email and keep listening okay and keep writing in maybe we'll make this a regular thing Chuck I would love that yep so Tom right in again and if you want to write in too we want to hear from you you can send us an email to stuff podcast at I heart radio dot com stuff you should know

is a production of I heart radios how stuff works for more podcasts from my heart radio visit the I heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows on the podcast hey dude the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show hey dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces we're going to use hey dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s we lived dead and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it listen to hey dude the 90s called on the I heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass do you

ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts