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.
Does anyone have a recording of the original broadcast? Surely there exists one recording somewhere in the world? I've been looking for years!
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.
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
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...)
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
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
It appears that latw.org runs IIS and has been hacked. Try purchasing the CD of the broadcast.