MARTIANS SUCK!
H.G.Wells - War of The Worlds
By: Mike Marino
Roswell, New Mexico, 1947.
The dragrace for space was off and running to a Jet Age George Jetson afterburner start with an army of ex-Nazi rocketeers trying to beat the Russki red star to the angry red planet of little green men. Silver saucers, and not flying Stuka's this time around, were plying the night time skies of the American Southwest. Rumours bloomed like a garden of desert cactus with tales of sightings of strange flying machines whizzing and whirring merrily about, confident and supreme across the nightime expanse.
Then something happened. The flying discs began to spin erratically and rotate eerily out of control. The strange round crafts were now firmly in the gravitational deathgrip of our home planet. The Earth sucking force on these bizarre machines was exuding so much pressure that the descent would have them hurtling hellbound and headon towards Earth, making a thudding, and stunning impact. Silence. Darkness. Quiet now.
The strange survivors, the anal probing aliens with the asteroid sized attitudes are whisked away by a macabre phantom government agency to a place of top secrecy and myth, called Area 51. Monsters, Mystery and Martians locked away behind barbed wire fences. Was it science fact or science fiction? Neither. It was the Age of Conspirious and the first interplanetary galactic Pearl Harbor. It was The War of the Worlds!
Our collective Earthian sci-fi G spot has been psycho-sexually aroused since Giordano Bruno, the Italian scientist, first claimed that the universe was boundless. He also claimed it had endless possibilities. and that it was conceivable to him anyway, that other life forms, superior to ours perhaps, could exist in the far reaches of the Solar System. As it turns out the Inquisition didn't have much of a sense of humour, or an appreciation for inquiring minds like Bruno's, so he was unceremoniously burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600.
This wet dream fear of an invasion by spaced out beings from far flung planets fueled by an agenda of our total annihilation as a species has tickled our horror bone for centuries. This fear was finally put to print and published in 1898 in a book written by H. G. Wells in the classic tale of alien intrusion, The War of the Worlds. Since it's publication as the sun was about to set on the 19th Century, the tale has captivated Homo Sapiens, and Martians alike on radio...on the big screen...in our homes on television and yes, even as a Martian musical complete with Broadway showtunes. That alone proves that there's no business like alien show business!
The cosmos achieved literary orgasm in 1866 with the birth in Jolly Olde England of Herbert George Wells. His father was a simple shopkeeper and cricketeer, and his Mum worked as a maid. Working stiffs who understood the value of the dollar, or pound in this case. It was this blue collar social dropcloth, and his spherical all encompassing interest in the sciences that launched H. G's lost in space outlook on life, and penchant for all things proletariat and planetary. In time, these planets of interest would collide and lead to his joining the fabled Fabian Society which included such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in its elliptical orbit. The Fabians believed that a socialist society could result through natural attrition of the political process and not through blood-red red blood spilling revolution. These philosophies appealed to Wells and only helped to increase his involvement in power-to-the-people Socialist causes, and affected his writing as well.
H. G. Wells was not the first astronaut of literature to guide themselves on an exploration of outer space through the imaginative space craft of inner space. By the time his life was launched into orbit here on the earthly plane, Jules Verne had already published "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1864 and "From The Earth to The Moon" in the year 1866, the year Wells was born. Though not the first to propose a journey outside our oxygen rich atmosphere, Wells was however, the first to suggest and publish a storyline involving an interplanetary invasionary force coming here and earning frequent flyer miles in the process by returning time and time again.
The social class system of Britain was prevelent in much of Wells' work and his first book, "The Time Machine" published in 1895 is as thick with that message as an Irish brogue on a leprechaun guarding his pot o' gold. Next came "The Island of Dr. Moreau" in 1896 and "The Invisible Man" in 1897. As the old agrarian century was about to be plowed under, fallow and awaiting a sping planting, Wells was already blooming with the release of a book that would gain him lasting infamy and a cult following that would grow proportionately and exponentially with each succeding generation. Earth and Mars would never be friends again. The year was 1898. The book was "The War of the Worlds"
The new century would certainly see "scientific" advances that were mere literary proposals in works by Wells, and by Jules Verne earlier. Two World Wars fought between humans and not invaders from Mars would toss science fiction aside and science fact would erupt like a Vesuvius with weapons unforseen in earlier conflicts. Bombs falling from the air, ships that sailed silently beneath the waves and eventually the atom would split with a schizoid dementia and man would eventually take one small step for man, and one giant step for mankind on the surface of the moon. The Martians would arrive, theatrically however, in 1938...one year before Germany would invade Poland and launch a lunatics very real frenzy right here on Earth.
After the Great War ended in 1918, H.G. rolled up his fabulous Fabian sleeves and busied himself doing research for the newly emerging League of Nations, while at the same time, enjoying all that the continental lifestyle had to offer a Bohemian socialist living the highlife in France in those madcap roaring and raving 1920's. He did however find it prudent to return to the safer harbor of the bosom of Mother England as the many faceted heads of the facist Medusa began to emerge and grow unchecked on the European politcal stage.
Like springtime, war was also in the air and ready to bloom and blossom, and he used this time to study the dictators who were beginning to take over the European garden like an invasion of demonic weeds. The piece, published in 1939 was titled "The Holy Terror" and was a psychological study of the Three Stooges of Fear and Death; Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Another event, tantamount to cataclysmic, that indirectly involved H.G. took place on the radio airwaves in America in 1938, just a year before Panzers and Stukas invaded the plains of Poland. No Nazi's yet. This time it was those pesky blood sucking vampires from the angry red planet, the Martians!
Halloween 1938. Grovers Mill, N.J.
New ground was about to be broken. It was the golden age of radio and the airwaves were about to give birth to the first electronic presentation of H.G.'s "War of the Worlds" by a group of mercurial radio actors called, appropriately, the Mercury Radio Theater. Formed in 1937, the group included talent by the likes of former agricultural salesman, John Houseman and actor, Joseph Cotton, and was headed up by a guiding force from Wisconsin, a 23 year old ex-bullfighter and enfant terrible named Orson Welles. The resultant broadcast became infamous as a work of art for it's style and presentation, as well as testifying to the electronic power of the theater of the mind.
It was a 50 minute radio broadcast like no other dramatic radio broadcast before, or since. It was fiction, pure and simple, delivered in a documentary style to simulate a "newscast" rather than a group of actors involved in a radio play. In an attempt to replicate the realism and feel of a docu-cast, Orson had actors listen over and over again, to the recorded screaming newscasts that shrilly described the fiery horror of the Hindenburg Dirigible Disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
To further heighten the effect of the broadcast, and to test the outer limits of man's meager imagination, Orson brought "War of the Worlds" to American soil rather than British, and the Martians were now poised and ready to conquer the Earth from their new ground zero in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. It's interesting to note, that although disclaimers were given at the beginning of the broadcast, they were given just prior to the musical interluded of the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Radio Show, one of the most popular shows of the day. However, when Edgars show broke for the musical break, the dial was turned to search for something else to fill the void until Edgar and his Wooden Buddy returned. When the interlude began, the disclaimer ended, and the war had begun! Coincidence?
Panic stricken listeners jammed police phone lines and ran to the streets to look at the skies. Some claimed they saw round saucer like vessles flying high while others swore that they way giant explosions in the distance caused by the heat rays and other weapons to advanced and too horrible to describe. The eastcoast was locked in a deathgrip of hysteria as the "martians" continued to pillage the earth like a ship of interplanetary pirates and in one case, a group of brave souls, ventured to a field and brought down one of the invading ships, only to find out later they had mistakenly taken down a farmers water tower with volley after volley of shotgun fire!
Once the furor over the broadcast had settled down, somewhat, CBS knew immediately that they had made radio history, even though it left the citizens of New York and New Jersey jittery for a long time after the broadcast. If you think Martians have a preference for attacking Anglo's only, your mistaken Amigo. Even Martians like to go south of the border, and on similar radio broadcasts aired in Chile in 1944, and Ecuador in 1949 produced the same results, only in a different language, and this time the illegal aliens were actually from another planet! Muchas Martians!!
Paramount Pictures had successfully purchased the rights to "The War of the Worlds" in 1925 having high hopes that no less than Cecil B. DeMille would produce it. That never came to pass, and it wasn't until 1953 that a Hungarian born puppeteer and cartoonist who had escaped the Nazi's took on the task when George Pal produced, and Bryon Haskin directed Gene Barry as Dr. Clayton Forrester in this 85 minute sci-fi classic. Special effects were created by Wunder Maestro Gordon Jennings and the film snagged Oscars for it's special effects.
The voice over work this time was provided by the very correct Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and the use of stock WWII military footage greatly enhanced the "realistic" portrait Pal & Co. created on the screen. In the book, the Martians attacked London. In the 1938 Wells radio production, New Jersey was the intended invasion target. Then, for the 1953 film version, and in typical Hollywood fashion, it was time for the west coast to get upclose and personal with a dose of alien insanity. The Martians, with George Pals assistance, chose this time to land amongst the palm trees at Linda Rosa, California. Dude!
Audiences couldn't get enough zipping and zapping at the hands of these intriquing intruders from Outer Spaced, and the film was box office boffo, and in it's vapor trail spawned numerous celluloid bastard offspring. The best will always be the original, but the finest parody has got to be Tim Burton's 1996 production of "Mars Attacks!" a title he borrowed from a series of bubblegum cards in the sci-fi 1950's!
Books, radio broadcasts and movies. There was also a made for TV movie in 1975 called "The Night That Panicked America" which was a thinly disguised ripoff of the original, and in 1978, "The War of the Worlds" (The Martian Musical) was put to vinyl starring none other than Richard Burton as the narrator, and also featuring the music of Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, and rockster David Essex.
The TV series ran from 1988 to 1990, and also in 1988, the original radio script was updated and aired on Public Radio featuring the voices of Steve Allen and Jason Robards, and won a Grammy in the bargain. In 1998, "The War of the Worlds" video game debuted featuring the music from the 1978 album, and of course, the massive Steven Speilberg version of this cult classic starring Tom Cruise.
H.G. Wells remained in London during the Second World War, and lived through the very real blitzkrieg and hell on earth. He had spent his life as a witness to an emerging world of rockets, jet engines and the splitting of the smallest particle known to man, the atom. Interestingly, in his book, a single celled bacterium destroyed the invading monsters from space, and in WWII it would be the smallest particle known to man that would be split that would unleash a nuclear pitbull of power that was unknown before to mankind. This atom splitting process would end the war to end all wars with it's twin drops over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
H.G. Wells died in England in 1946, and you can't help but wonder what he would have thought of the world of the 1950's. Is there really life out there? Will we be visited by an invasionary force of Little Green Men in the future? Can space crafts really cross the cosmos?
Roswell, New Mexico. 1947!
Classic Cars, Rock n' Roll, Elvis, Drivein Movies & Route 66! Kerouac, The Beats, Haight Ashbury, Easy Rider & Vietnam!
The Roadhead Chronicles goes from the Cold War Fifties Pop Culture of classic cars and rock n' roll to the spaced out Spare Change Sixties of Vietnam and Hells Angels. Not the usual look at the era, instead It's written by someone who lived it and spent a life of being on the road from his beach bum days in Honolulu to the glitz and dangers of the Sunset Strip in LA, and his purple hazed and double dazed days in North Beach and the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. The Roadhead Chronicles also looks at the history of Route 66, Roadside Neon Culture and old diners and dives!
Mike Marino writes in an offbeat and irreverant style with a beat and a cadence that is all his own. His writing style has been compared to John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Terry Southern and one reviewer likened him to Frederick Lewis Allen on acid! Readers and critics call the book "wickedly wonderful", "delightfully weird" and "automotively sexy."!!
