Slashdot Mirror
War of the Worlds by the Star Trek Cast
eDavidLu writes "Here is a radio remake of The
War of the Worlds. From the promo: 'Join actors from Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation as they recreate this classic radio thriller. The breathless pace and convincing details make it clear why the 1938 broadcast of an eyewitness report of an invasion from Mars caused a nationwide panic in 1938. Originally performed by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre of the Air, War of the Worlds is truly the mother of all space invasions, offering a rare combination of chills, thrills and great literature.' My local NPR station KPCC broadcast this show last Saturday night, and the streaming audio for the entire program is available for one week only on their site. I was going to submit this story for Halloween eve, but KPCC was in the middle of a fund drive. Now that the fund drive is over, the slashdotting can begin. If you like this type of programming, remember to contribute to your local NPR station." Update: 11/05 17:53 GMT by Z : Edited for jerks. Thanks, guys. Seriously. Way to be responsible members of the internet community.
Stop reading the comments idiot, get downloading before she blows!
That's cold man, they operate on the funding of listeners, and so you 'save' them from a slashdotting during a fund drive.
(Score:0, Interesting)
Uh, I haven't listened to the progam, but its probably based on the H.G. Wells book (or the radio drama by Orsen Wells, which is based on the book) not the movie, which had very little do with the actual novel.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Resistance is Futile
Yeah I couldn't help it.... but that better be said at least 8 times in this version...
I was willing to listen to an act or so, to see how bad it was. But then I realised it was in Real Media format. Sorry, I refuse to download that piece of spyware onto my computer, and I haven't had much luck downloading alternate applications and getting them to work with the Real Media format. I'm not going to try, yet again, merely to listen to something I'm likely not going to like. There are very few sites that use this format. Why do the fringes continue to use it though? I'll never know.
It is from 1994.
The movie version is completely Hollywoodized. While it may be easy to say the "War of the Worlds movie is bad, so everything War of the Worlds is horrible", remember that often excellent stories are chopped up, minced and gutted when they are ran through the movie industry. If you wanted to get a taste of the original version, check out the original broadcast here.
From what I have read elsewhere the whole 'Panic' phenomenon surrounding the War of the Worlds Radio Show is an Urban Myth. The Police reports show nothing unusual for that night. Then again the Police may have been in on the whole invasion anyway...
ANYONE?
1938 broadcast of an eyewitness report of an invasion from Mars caused a nationwide panic in 1938 http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Redundancy
Does anyone have a recording of the original broadcast? Surely there exists one recording somewhere in the world? I've been looking for years!
No matter how you slice it, the ending sucks. It hears/reads/looks like the creator went "Well shit. The baddies are undefeatable, and humanity doesn't have a hope. But I have to finish this in 10minutes/pages, I know! I'll have all of the aliens suddenly die. Now what's a good reason, ooh! A virus. And it's scientific, so everyone will think I'm oh so clever."
Sure, it's scientifically plausible. But as a novel/play, it sucks. It sucks big time. Just because something is scientifically plausible, doesn't mean it's good. And it's the one consistent element in every incarnation of War of the Worlds. I thought Hollywood, being Hollywood, would change it. But they didn't. Typical.
Could anyone convert the Real stream into MP3 and torrent it?
In the preferences page you can set threshhold to -1 and Anonymous bonus to -6, which should hide all AC posts that arnt +5
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Go to your comment preferences, and change all the "Reason Modifiers" to +1, then set the Anonymous Modifier to -6. Then browse @ 0 and you should see everything except Anon Cows.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
That won't work, because the system won't let anything go below -1... thus Anon Cows simply stay at -1, don't go to -2/-3/etc.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
For those of us newer to free software, can someone provide a url (or better yet, a working command and url) for capturing the stream? I've tried mplayer -dumpstream http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/kpcc /news/shows/latw/2005/10/20051029_latw
but that redirects to a different url in a browser window, and I can't see the url in the source code of the redirect page.
Any help would be appreciated. tia.
Socialists anyway...
If you want to download the stream, convert to mp3, and then play on your iPod/iTunes/whatever, check out this link. And Mac OS X users should look at this.
Oh - and the original 1938 broadcast can be found here.
If you want to get a taste of the original version, check out the BOOK, here - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/36
Unless, of course, you are American, in which case you will require the story to be transfered to the USA, as was done for the radio show.
In 1938, it was pretty damn clever, actually.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Actually, I could see an invasion ending exactly that way. "Let's scan for harmful bacteria. Yep, there's plenty. Let's innoculate ourselves. Ok, we're innoculated. Nothing can stop us now....... Oh wait. This bacteria is growing immune to the vaccine/it's interacting with other bacteria in us/the vaccine (or some drug, whatever) caused it to mutate, etc."
Of course, that depends on the aliens being just as prone to mistakes and overconfidence as we humans.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Different strokes, to be sure... but I think the ending's defensible as one of sci-fi's all-time greats. (Don't be misled by the century of fiction since it was written.)
Meanwhile, fans of War of the Worlds, in all its incarnations but especially the original 19th-century book... should definitely check out the "other", much maligned, direct-to-video recent version. You may (repeat may) find it to be an unexpected treat, as I did...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
You're quite correct. I recall reading in an article republished in the NZ Herald, the first version of work as H.G. Wells originally wrote it, the martians *won*. Humanity was destroyed - everyone, irrespective of your socio-econonmic class.
It was only after his publisher balked at this that H.G. Wells changed the plot so that humanity survived. However, note that humanity didn't save itself.
The next day, newspapers across the country carried stories of terrorized people hiding in basements, panic flight from New Jersey and New York, stampedes in theaters, heart attacks, miscarriages, and even suicides. During the months that followed, these stories were shown to have little if any substance, yet today the myth of War of the Worlds stampedes and suicides persists as part of American folklore.
-Prof. David L. Miller, Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action.
Here's the passage online.
It was the cutting edge of science when the book was first published in 1898 (the discovery of viruses and the common cold being relatively new).
It's public domain now and you can read the original book here, along with HG Wells complete works (which I highly recommend - he's the grandaddy of science fiction).
> In 1938, it was pretty damn clever, actually.
And the basic plot device was used in Independence Day... when everything else failed the aliens were vulnerable to a computer virus... but since their computer network was not compatable with anything on earth, and appletalk is also not compatable with anything on earth... makes for a simple resolution.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
OW was a genius. And I'm quite sure that it would work today too.
[troll]
The panic was total in the USA last year when the president announced that Irak will attack.
[/troll]
----
http://www.milliondollarscreenshot.com/
Million Dollar Screenshot
I thought Hollywood, being Hollywood, would change it. But they didn't. Typical.
Contradiction. If Hollywood DID change it, you'd still say typical.
Anonymous Coward Flamer: "Like I am going to donate to a bunch of communists. PBS I yes, but no way in hell am I donating to NPR."
Oh, sure. Now you'll contribute since Tomlinson has committed to turn PBS into GOP BS
That makes sense, because the story just wasn't built up and ready for that ending, and it's hard to imagine that such a great writer as H. G. Wells would miss that. For a good ending, the story has to build up for it (which doesn't mean it can't be surprising - but it still has to be plausible as seen from _inside_ of the story). For a random example, if you are into anime, this is precisely the key difference between Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke. Deus ex machina.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
I noticed that the program listed after War of the Worlds is the Brothers Karamazov. The 1958 movie version of this story co-starred none other than William Shatner as the brother who became a priest.
Some slimeball has hacked the LA theater Works website and put a picture of Mr Goatse on it. Well done idiots. *slow hand clap*
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Go to your comment preferences, and change all the "Reason Modifiers" to +1, then set the Anonymous Modifier to -6. Then browse @ 0 and you should see everything except Anon Cows.
He'd also lose any comments posted with a karma penalty putting them straight to -1. Don't think there's a way to fix that though so your way is probably as close to what he wants as he's going to get.
Yeah, I sure want to convert all my things into an extortion format to play via my DRM promo program, instead of enjoying any kind of freedom. Sheesh.
So instead you want "and we went in and blew them up, yay for us humans"? I thought this was a much more thoughtful ending. You know what, we're not invincible.
Any sources online for the original version? I'd be quite happy to read a good ending for once :D
Actually, I'd be much happier with an ending that didn't involve a deus ex machina (it was IMO definitely artificial, yes good science, but bad literary device). Any other ending couldn't have been worse. Having the martians have factions, with a faction opposed to the war, and finally stopping the invasion. Having the machines use be extremely old and eventually fail. Hell, have the martians win.
I knew the movie was going to end the way it did... however...
:D" happy-go-lucky-with-a-twist-of-thought-provoking ending as standard in any War of the Worlds retelling.
:)
A good bit before the end, humanity (in the form of Tom Cruise - egads!) *DID* find another method to at least destroy the walkers. I had thought they would at least explore this a bit more, show a few more walkers getting destroyed, etc. But alas, it wasn't to be.
However, I believe they still set up the possibility that humanity *could* defeat the invasion on their own - and the ending as it was, was just a "Hah.. well whaddayaknow.. 'guess we won't have to bother at all
Oh, and I rather enjoyed the movie for what it was
Keep in mind that one of the book's themes was a criticism of imperialism - which was rampant at the time. The prevailing view was might makes right. Consequently, it was important that the human race be portrayed as completely impotent against the martians. That is what is so terrifying about the concept in the novel - that every counter devised by men to the invasion was doomed to failure from the start, as the martians were far superior in every respect, and had every advantage conceivable. Man was simply to be systematically exterminated.
Just as rats in a home have no hope of resisting a human extermination plan, humans would have no hope of resisting an invasion from a far more technologically-developed culture.
The idea of the humans turning things around and saving the day, while exciting, completely defeats the whole point of the novel. In some sense I was a bit disappointed by the recent movie adaption in that they had to factor in the cheap-shot missle attack against the staggering tripod. (Did a sick martian accidentally flip off the shield generator? I doubt that the bacteria made that sick...)
Orson Wells and Mercury Theater had very few radio listeners in England. If the idea is scare the piss out of your audience, re-locating it in their backyard makes sense.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I can't help but think that hearing voices associated with Star Trek, TNG and such will not exactly be making a positive contribution to the immersive suspension of disbelief which so distinguished Orson Welles' original broadcast.
I don't think thousandss of people are going to be running into the streets after hearing Patrick Stewart and Leonary Nimoy, f'rinstance, declaring that aliens are among us...
On a related note, don't miss BBC7's 4 week broadcast of Doctor Who, Invaders From Mars starring Paul McGann. If you're quick, that link should get you Episode 1. Episode 2 is broadcast today and will be available to Listen Again from Sunday.
s frommars.shtml>Big Finish.
More info on this story (and CD) at http://www.bigfinish.com/drwho_main/bf028_invader
No matter which way you do this, you're merely switching masters—from the proprietary RealPlayer format to the patent-encumbered MP3 format. Unless there is some new reverse-engineered RealPlayer codec I don't know about, merely decoding the RealPlayer data will require proprietary software.
The first page you linked to is particularly unintentionally funny on this ground: its author boldly claims that there is a "spyware free" RealPlayer program from the BBC. How would most users learn what the program actually does if the program is proprietary? They wouldn't, of course, users are encouraged to take on faith that this program has no spyware; perhaps because other users of this program didn't (somehow) see this program do anything untoward. So these early users simply assume that the program is incapable of doing anyhing undesirable outside the perview of the user. The idea that looking at a program's user interface and not knowing all that the program is doing (or capable of doing under the right circumstances) is apparently thrown out of consideration. Because if that line of logic were taken seriously, proprietary programs would be considered unwise to run by default.
I think it is better to preserve your software freedom, get the $15 audio CD, and rip it with free software into an unencumbered format like Ogg Vorbis. This way you don't have to live with DRM, you don't have to settle for a low-quality encoding of the performance, and you can transcode it into a number of other formats as your whim dictates all without losing much quality.
Digital Citizen
Ok, who the F hacked the LA Theatre Works site and put that goatse image up there??? I thought when slashcode got changed to show the URL I'd never have to see that horrible thing again!!
FYI.
I was happily surfing porn sites, and in the midst of an otherwise lovely thumbnail gallery, there was Mr Goatse.
Worse...it was a different shot of him, so we've only seen the beginning of this horror.
I quickly closed the window, but it wasn't quick enough to prevent the horror, as it is hard to act quickly when surfing with only one hand...
The content of the .ram file shows http://www.earthstation1.com/WOTW/War_of_the_World s.ra for those who prefer wget.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Way harsh, dude. :'(
I bought a copy of the original broadcast a few years ago, and I listened to it many times. This remake sucks. It seems hurried. The voices are too forboding, too hurried, too excited, or flat. It seems to lack a sense of timing. The dialog almost seems to run on continuously. Also the sound effects in the original far outshine the generic sound bytes used in this recreation.
The mercury theatre worked together very well, Orson Wells knew how to tell a radio story, and they had a great sense of timing.
Part of that performance that realy made it good was the music at the beginning. It was good music, and worth listening to on it's own(it's supposed to be "the ever popular Stardust"). When the report cut away you were annoyed, and when it got back to the music it left you there long enough to almost forget the first report.
I sit here wishing my copy of the original wasn't scratched.
-John Fenley
Thank you for your suggestion. I find the music interesting.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Why is goatse on the L.A. Theatreworks page? I mean, I'm as much a goatse fan as anyone, but it was a little much first thing in the morning...
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
Very cool. But I couldn't help being disappointed that Patrick Stewart wasn't in it.
$ HEAD http://latw.org/audio/detail.aspx?title=War%20Of%2 0The%20Worlds:%20Invasion%20From%20Mars
200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 14:55:14 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Length: 17505
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Client-Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 14:52:51 GMT
Client-Peer: 66.77.245.167:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=wq0hme4534e45b55owp5vmi0; path=/
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
How do I trolled web?
... courtesy of the federal government. Until that changes, I see no reason to open my wallet any further. I like a lot of thier programming, but something about a state-sponsored media outlet just gives me the heebie-jeebies. Besides, it seems like the only time they have the really good stuff on is during their stupid fund raisers. Frankly, I'd rather have commercials. Once the fund raiser is over, it's back to the pipe organ music show...
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Orson Welles collection. I have it. It's worth listening to, as an educational experience at the least.
It appears that latw.org runs IIS and has been hacked. Try purchasing the CD of the broadcast.
...proprietary programs would be considered unwise to run by default.
If taken to it's ultimate conclusion: any code you didn't write yourself, and compile with a compiler you wrote yourself, to run on hardware you designed yourself would be unsafe to run. And that's making the big asumptions that nobody snuck in and changed things without you knowing, and that you can trust your own memory.
-John Fenley
I assume you're being funny. A friend of mine bought the DVD from Amazon US (not available outside US due to copyright reasons), and 3 of us watched it one night, not expecting much.
We were right. I haven't seen many films that are fucking diabolical, but that was one of them. It was unbelievably long, the acting was terrible, the effects quite literally laughable (pretty sure they were all done on the director's laptop). And there was so much walking! I've never seen so much footage of people walking. My friend was asked by his wife what the running time of the movie was, and he said it was about 90 minutes, but that unfortunately the walking time was another 90 minutes.
Re: acting - The main character was, I presume, trying to do an English accent (as were they all, but his was the most execrable). It was pathetic, ranging from 'posh' (I assume that's what he was going for - it sounded like an effete Afrikaans speaker) to 'cockney' - all from the same character, of course, and quite often within the same sentence. To hear him keep saying the word 'tennacles' in the midst of his presumably upper-class speech was perhaps an unexpected treat indeed. The rest of the acting was terrible too. And there's a dinner table scene that is presumably included for comic relief that quite simply beggars belief, it's so bad. So bad.
The director (Hines) was actually quoted re: this film saying that adaptions of books are quite hard, and that unlike what most people think, it's not just a case of changing the past tense to the present. I think that tells you all you need to know about the director, really. Especially as it seemed that about all he actually did do was change the tense.
On the flip side, I saw the Tom Cruise version at the cinema, and I thought it was great. But then I wasn't expecting a slavish adaptation of the book - although I was fairly surprised how closely it did follow the book in various places, even if only in spirit. I went in expecting an entertaining Hollywood version of WotW, and that's what I got.
But my god, the Hines version is bad. Bad director! Bad! Back in your box!
Get bent.
Absolutism isn't that useful. One has to begin somewhere and using the computers we have in order to liberate ourselves from the control of proprietors is perfectly reasonable. Just as 20 years ago people questioned that anyone would write a free software operating system, people today use absolutism to avoid directly challenging if we are better off now then we were then.
Clearly it is foolish to settle for proprietary or patent-encumbered encoding algorithms in favor of freely available, publicly-specified, and unencumbered algorithms to do the same job.
--jbn-o
Anyone have a torrent for a converted mp3?
I want to download it now and listen to it later, but I dont even have realplayer on this computer, and it would have to stream anyway.
Is there any method for downloading an "rm" faster than real time? The methods I know of are basically to run a media player and capture its output.
Dude, get some perspective; at least the audio streams are common, for example broadcasts from the BBC (unless you want wmv[9?]). I have seen *users* viewing real video streams and have sometimes found rare content (which I could then dump as raw and encode as I wanted).
You certainly loose quality that way, but in times where a 'stream' is often advertised as a 'download' I like the ability to actually *store* the content.
And I found this act a bit boring, you didn't miss too much.
Yeah, you guys are both libertarians except when the government is paying for something you like.
NPR and PBS have the best-educated, highest-paid demographic of any broadcast media outlets. If the government pulled funding, their existence would not be even slightly endangered. This is just a boondoggle for the rich and upper-middle class. We're basically taxing the poor (and underfunding much-needed services for the poor, like schools and police protection) to provide a service for the most well-off members of society.
Seriously.
Using RealMedia to stream this? What's so hard about linking to an MP3, and let us feel free to listen to it at our leisure?
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
We should be demanding clean, uncluttered, format neutral downloads of material that they are offering anyway from every provider.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I can't tell whether you're serious or joking...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Connecting...
error -14 [SR_ERROR_NO_HTTP_HEADER]
bye..
shutting down
Thanks, guys. Seriously. Way to be responsible members of the internet community.
Is Zonk seriously suggesting that Slashdot is some sort of responsible member of the Internet community?
Christ, even Linus Torvalds hates you guys. You post false or exaggerated news, dupes, and you kill everybody's webservers and don't give any crap at all because you're busy getting money from page hits for your corporate employer, OSTG.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I always preferred "The Kraken Wakes" by Wyndham, but this was well worth a listen. Anybody have a Streambox dump torrented yet? It'd keep their server from being slashdotted.
BTW, I've been told that there is a spyware-free version of RealOne player, although the stream seems to work with Real Alternative.
I would no more find The War of the Worlds improved by having it moved to America than you would find Christine (by the quintessentially American author Stephen King) improved by changing the car from a 1958 Plymouth Fury to a 1959 Morris Mini.
Time and landscape are part and parcel of stories like these, and they rarely benefit from being translated. Only because Welles was a master storyteller himself was the Mercury Theatre production so successful.
In fact, my wife and I prefer the Bloomsbury editions of J.K. Rowling, because the Scholastic Books versions have been so painfully Americanized—("Sorcerer's Stone", indeed!)—so I can understand where your attitude arises.
P.S. Of course, since one of my favorite British authors is Nevil Shute, my image of England tends to be stuck in the '50s when everything was falling apart and the smart people were leaving for Australia.
P.P.S. It's spelled transferred, not transfered.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Ditto for Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Things like recording technology (and IIRC, the methods of hypnotism) were new at the time, and they were included to give the novel a modern feel. If we're recommending books for everyone to read, it gets my vote. H.
Not being funny. (Not intentionally, anyway.) I confess that I'm only halfway through the Hines version, but I'm guessing that's enough to reliably opine. What Hines was trying to do (imo) was to channel the movie Wells would've made in 1898, including camera-work, pacing, film-stock, acting, etc. (I know there's a ton of anachronisms in there, but make allowances...) I'd even include the movie's Warhol-ian 3 hour running time. For a somewhat related well-regarded effort, take a look at the recent DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY. (Rent or borrow, don't buy... and do have a fallback dvd on hand...) And, fwiw, I though the Spielberg WOTW was the summer movie of the year...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
That was George Takei.
Grabs audio on the fly from any app--local or streamed. I use it to make sound clips from my DVDs.
http://rogueamoeba.com/
Instead of bow-wowing about how bad goatse is, why don't you hack in and undo the goatse pic? (Maybe a nicely dressed Jennifer Aniston ???) I'd do it myself but I'm not a hacker, just a loser-lurker...
Evil Overlord Rule #86. I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.
Haven't you seen Buckaroo Banzai?
No matter which way you do this, you're merely switching mastersfrom the proprietary RealPlayer format to the patent-encumbered MP3 format.
How much time is left on those patents anyway?
Wikipedia says: MP3 is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format invented and standardised in 1991...
So what, 2008?
Well, I found the trice, but it's pretty small. I don't think my freedom is going to fit.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
mplayer can convert the audio to Vorbis directly.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Am I not seeing the sig because I'm posting as AC and not signing in? I went to the parent's home page and don't see any sig there, although it is so short I might've missed it. But I'm now assuming that since I'm AC and not signing in, I can't see sigs.
Watch out for the tennacles!
And keep an eye out for the horses! You'll swear they're not actually there ;-)
It should be noted that the radio broadcast version has been noticeably cut down from the CD version due to time constraints. It's a good story, one of BF's best so far IMHO, although their Welles impersonator isn't the best ever and as with so many British productions all the "Americans" tend to sound like they've been dipped in Boston Harbor.
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