These days, two ‘War of the Worlds’ may be scarier than one

The economy was bad, war loomed on the horizon, and Orson Welles thought the nation could use the distraction of a good scary story, a Halloween fiction that terrorized thousands who took it as fact.

Now, 64 years later, talk-radio host Glenn Beck sees a similar environment, and so is breathing new life into “The War of the Worlds,” Welles’ adapted radio play of a Martian invasion.

“The lesson is very parallel to what we’re going through now, and the wake-up call we heard on Sept. 11. It’s the whole lesson that you’re not in control of everything,” said Beck, who will stage the play live on Wednesday. KLAC-AM (570) is carrying it locally, from 5 to 6 p.m.

Beck, whose morning program airs on more than 100 stations nationwide, including ones in San Diego, Palm Springs and Bakersfield, will join a cast of a dozen actors, a live orchestra and foley artists creating the sound effects in a performance hall at the Washington, D.C., studios of XM satellite radio, which is also carrying the broadcast -- a re-creation of the original performance.

On Oct. 30, 1938, Welles and his players from the Mercury Theatre of the Air updated the story by British science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, and had the Martians begin their world domination by landing in Grover’s Mill, N.J. Making the most of his medium, Welles presented the story as news bulletins interrupting music programming, and listeners who missed the announcements that it was merely a radio play fled in panic, sure that the Martians’ tripod machines would be marching up their streets soon, blasting their homes with deadly heat rays.

At the time, the Great Depression still gripped America, and Adolph Hitler was only months away from starting World War II. Now the economy is faltering, Saddam Hussein is a target, and Beck noted the parallels by referring to Welles’ original introduction to the program: “With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the Earth about their little affairs.... [Yet] intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic regarded this Earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

“The Martians are Al Qaeda. It’s foreign invaders. Nobody really thought at the time this could really happen,” Beck said. “We now know that we have been studied, and we have been scrutinized.”

Like any good scary story, with the requisite dose of “what if?” to tingle the hairs on the back of the neck, “War of the Worlds” would simply not have been as effective during the carefree dot-com boom of the late ‘90s, Beck contends.

But over at KNX-AM (1070), Welles’ original broadcast is being aired in the spirit he said he intended: “The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘Boo!’ ”

“There are certain things that are classics, and this is a classic,” said George Nicholaw, vice president and general manager of KNX, which is airing the program Thursday from 9 to 10 p.m. (repeated at 2 a.m. Friday), continuing a Halloween tradition now in its third decade. “We said, ‘Gee, it’s Halloween. Let’s scare the world.’ The response was so positive, it became an annual thing.”

Scholars argue that anxiety over the days’ headlines contributed to the panic among those who heard the program in 1938. With saturation coverage from all-news channels on radio and television, Nicholaw said he doubted a similar broadcast could generate such hysteria today. “Information is presented on a minute-by-minute basis,” he said. “People are much more aware of what’s going on in the world now than they were at that time.”

Beck said the story would need a plot change, such as a smallpox outbreak, to create a similar sensation today. Even then, a flip of the dial would debunk the tale.

Nicholaw said he’s skeptical, though, about using the story as a metaphor for contemporary events.

“It’s stretching it a little bit, but then again, when the title is ‘The War of the Worlds,’ and we’re in a period of time when there’s global concern for terrorists, there may be a connection,” Nicholaw said. “But it is a stretch.”

Beck said he intends his program as entertainment and doesn’t want to weigh it down with any heavy message. But if there is anything listeners could take away from the show, he hopes that in a post-Sept. 11 world, they see a reflection of themselves in the show’s characters -- heedlessly going about their lives, then jerked by the unexpected into appreciation of what’s dangerous and what’s precious.