if you were bowie, you’d know radío flomm was meta even before it was released

“Well, I’m not a scientist.
But I know all things begin
and end in eter­ni­ty … Don’t worry,
I don’t want to hurt you.”
—David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)
 

I’m watch­ing In­va­sion (2021) on Ap­ple TV+ and slow­ly – and I mean  s l o w l y  – the sto­ry is sup­pos­ed­ly com­ing to­geth­er and then I re­al­ized, right now it’s

War of the Worlds Season!

That spe­cial time when un­ex­plained vis­i­tors show up. Like out­side, to trick.
 

 

As a kid,

I first read about trub­ble­mak­er Or­son Welles in a re­al­ly old Su­per­man com­ic book. I learned that he, at age 23, per­formed a pan­ic-in­duc­ing ALIENS ARE HERE fake news broad­cast – last Sun­day in Oc­to­ber, 1938:

 

And re­cent­ly, PBS has been re-air­ing a doc­u­men­tary about the whole thing, fea­tur­ing a bunch-o-very odd in­ter­views with dead people:

 

Plus, here’s an open­ing clip from The Night That Pan­icked Amer­i­ca (1975), a made for tee vee movie about Welles’ night of fun. 

John Rit­ter and the guy who made The Wrath of Khan cut their teeth on this. Bonus: Mr. Cun­ning­ham from Hap­py Days:

 

There’s also a 1988 NPR ver­sion [LINK] with Ja­son Ro­bards, Steve Allen and the Sky­walk­er Sound FX library.
 

“I don’t know why
you’d rather go to
New York. The clutch
pops so don’t sue me
for whiplash.”
—An­nie Potts in The Man Who Fell To Earth tv pi­lot (1987)
 

B U T

the most fun I had with all this was three years ago when I de­cid­ed – at the last minute – our small team of RADíO FLoMMers should ac­tu­al­ly put to­geth­er our ver­sion – where we’d de­stroy Sacra­men­to in about an hour.

The script was hasti­ly adapt­ed one af­ter­noon, rewrit­ten the next. Any­one who had a voice was record­ed, wher­ev­er I could find them and whether or not they knew how to pro­nounce the words they were given. 

SDFX were lift­ed from a bunch of pub­lic do­main sources, old record­ing equip­ment, the FLOMM game app, as well as the orig­i­nal broad­cast it­self – their heat ray was trans­formed into our laser thing. 

RADíO FLoMM [pan­ic] aired 30 Oc­to­ber 2018 on the 80th An­niver­sary of Welles’ orig­i­nal show. No one knew wat we were do­ing, nei­ther did most of the cast and we just kept go­ing with a Tues­day dead­line in the distance. 

You can lis­ten here: Or wher­ev­er you get your reg­u­lar podcasts.

 

ALSO we were just guess­ing, but turns out Sacra­men­to does have work­ing air raid sirens. Who knew?

 

Jeni Soto with a set from Mars at Ho­tel Marshall

Milk Sur­face in Placerville

Jes (and Mur­phy) with the News

Ja­son Spyres

Elks Tow­er, down­town Sacramento

 

RADíO FLoMM will return. 

DIE NÄCH­STE SEA­SON ist in die werke.
 

“Chi­we­tel Ejio­for [is] everything
we could imag­ine and a million
things we can’t.”
—Alex Kurtz­man and Jen­ny Lumet re: The Man Who Fell To Earth se­ries (2022)

 

—steve mehal­lo

Flom­mist Steve Mehal­lo is a graph­ic de­sign­er, il­lus­tra­tor, font de­sign­er, ed­u­ca­tor, food­ie and gad­fly. He is the cre­ator and founder of FLOMM! Hed­line by Milk.

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