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.
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)
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.
Does anyone have a recording of the original broadcast? Surely there exists one recording somewhere in the world? I've been looking for years!
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.
That file downloads some 20051029.smil, which has the file rtsp://archivemedia.publicradio.org/5559/kpcc/news /shows/latw/2005/10/20051029_latw.rm in it. This one can be fed to mplayer.
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.
I thought Hollywood, being Hollywood, would change it. But they didn't. Typical.
Contradiction. If Hollywood DID change it, you'd still say typical.
No, no, no. The Real format is *required* to simulate the aliens' jamming of the radio signal.
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
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
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...)
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...
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
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...
$ 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
It appears that latw.org runs IIS and has been hacked. Try purchasing the CD of the broadcast.
You know, I actually resent that comment. Arts and sciences are two of the areas that America should invest in, even with tax dollars. NPR is not state-sponsored. That's like saying that C-SPAN or the local access channels are state-sponsored. NPR does recieve Federal money, but if you look at the break-down about 1/8 of their budget is covered by Federal funds. I work at a particle physics lab and it's similar. The only difference is that the DoE actually owns the place. A consortium of universities in the Southeast US run the place. It receives money from the government and is "owned" by the government, but is run by private entities. NPR is similar, but NPR isn't owned by the government. It doesn't answer to a specific agency or anything like that. There is no "party representative" per se. I am actually very much for the subsidising of arts and sciences. Art and science are integral components of progress, but their speculative nature makes them unattractive to the private sector. To keep the two areas really functioning, we actually need government. This is the rare exception when I put aside my libertarian views.
How exactly is PBS and NPR a service for the most well off members of society? Are you well off? Do You listen or watch either of those entities?
Something tells me that the richest memebers of society arent taking telecourses on PBS at 10pm at night. Merely, it is somehow your preconception that only rich people listen to NPR, or watch PBS. Rich children dont watch sesame st, they get taken shopping by their servants.
So, lets take all govt funding out, INLCUDING the standard deduction you get on your income taxes every year. After all, it wouldnt endanger your existance in the slightest. And writing off property taxes as a deduction? Hell no, if you can afford a house, then you can afford to not take the deduction. Its just a boondoggle for the homeowners that they can be exempt from paying taxes to the govt because they pay taxes on a house.
Or, in other words, you dont have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Mainly, because the views you are expousing are not your own, you are simply parroting what you have heard other people say.
Have mercy on my tracker.... Here is a torrent for an .ogg.
I've edited out the hour long performance after it (never liked I Love Lucy anyway), so it's 53 minutes.
Leonard Nimory is good, but Orson Wells is excellent, and overall I like the original much better. Even the scratchiness of the reproductions adds to the realism (AM radio then). I would everyone get the original (linked below) and listen to it instead, or at least get both and decide for yourself.
I'll remove the link when KPCC does.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by