June 11, 2026 • 57 mins
Few science-fiction stories have had a stranger afterlife than The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells first launched his Martian invasion in the 19th century as a devastating reversal of empire: what if humanity was not the conqueror, but the conquered? What if something colder, smarter, and more technologically advanced looked at us the way powerful nations had looked at the people they considered beneath them?
In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace how Wells’ nightmare managed to invade three different centuries. In 1938, Orson Welles turned the story into a radio broadcast so convincing it became a modern media legend, moving the Martians from Victorian England to New Jersey and making the invasion feel like breaking news. In 1953, Hollywood reimagined the attack as a Cold War apocalypse in Technicolor, where science, faith, flying machines, and atomic anxiety collided on screen. Then, in 2005, Steven Spielberg brought the invasion into the 21st century, turning it into a story of terrorism, sirens, refugees, broken families, and the terrifying sense that the attack had already begun before anyone understood what was happening.
Bryce and Brent also bring the Mars obsession closer to home, with personal stories about the Red Planet’s hold on their own imaginations — from Bryce covering the first Viking lander as a young radio newsman to later writing and selling a screenplay about a Mars mission, known along the way as The Face. Because in science fiction, Mars is never just a place. It’s a screen we keep projecting ourselves onto.
From imperial guilt to radio panic to nuclear dread to post-9/11 trauma, War of the Worlds has never really been about Martians. It’s been about us — our fears, our arrogance, our vulnerability, and the awful possibility that we may not be at the top of the cosmic food chain after all.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What Are the Worlds may be the strangest franchise in
science fiction because it managed to invade in three different centuries.
It began in the nineteenth century when HG. Wells looked
at Imperial Britain. It was confident, powerful, certain of its
place in the universe, and he asked a devastating question,
what if we were not the conquerors but the natives.
What is something colder and smarter and more technologically advanced
(00:24):
looked at us the way we look at animals or insects,
or amiba's or just people we thought are beneath us.
That was the terror of that first book. It wasn't
just Martians, it was potential humiliation. And then in the
twentieth century Orson Wells took that Victorian nightmare and turned
it into a modern media event. Suddenly the Martians weren't
(00:44):
landing in England. They were landing in New Jersey, though
they were doing it through your radio speaker and in
the middle of what sounded like breaking news. And after
that came the nineteen fifty three film where Wells Invasion
became the Cold War Apocalypse in technicolor, and then science
Faith and atomic bombs and flying war machines all collided
(01:05):
on screen, and then in the twenty first century, it
got its turn, with Spielberg talking about nine to eleven
and terror, broken families, refugees, sirens, and that awful feeling
that the attack had already begun before anyone even understood
what was happening. Television at the same time was stretching
this into conspiracy, survival and identity crisis, and then, not
(01:30):
to be outdone, just last year, we somehow got a
War of the World's remake that was an Amazon age
surveillance thriller starring Ice Cube that was so badly reviewed
it became almost historic in its own right. Proof that
even when the execution collapses, the title still has enough
gravity to pull Hollywood back in. And that may be
(01:51):
the secret to the War of the World's. Every generation
remakes it, because every generation feels watched or judged, threatened,
maybe just a little less in control than it pretends
to be. So in that regard, it's not the Martians,
it's about us. So in this episode, which we call
the three Century franchise, we're not just asking why the
(02:12):
Martians keep coming, We're asking why we keep inviting them back.
I don't know, Brant, what's your take on that one.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That's a great question for me. I think it has
a lot to do with when we look up into
the sky. Mars is one of our closest neighbors. In fact,
it is our closest neighbor that could theoretically be habitable.
And so for the longest time, I think the fact
that we could see it and it appeared red, it
was cloaked in mystery.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
And I think HG.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Wells may have been the first to actually contemplate that
there was life on that planet and coming to invade Earth,
but there was probably millennia of mythology and stories about
the Red Planet. I think the other thing about it
is it's popped up in the news over and over
again throughout history. The minute that they found microbial life
(03:02):
on Mars, suddenly it provoked, well, could there have been
actual life forms on Mars? People saw canals quote unquote
on Mars. Could there have been water on Mars? Could
there have been a whole civilization on Mars? And to
this day, we haven't been to Mars. Actually we've sent
rovers we've explored it to some degree, but we actually
(03:23):
don't know what the history of mars Is, and I
think that is part of what makes this three century
franchise so endearing, is that we're still waiting for answers
about what really happened on Mars.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
This one was a little awesome to research, to be
quite honest with you, because the more you looked into it,
the more you go, Oh my god. How many different
versions have been made of this thing. We got books,
we got feature films, we got multiple TV series, we
have a musical which we'll get into later. It just
goes on. There's comic books, there's gains. It has been
(03:56):
the gift that keeps on giving. We're going to jump
into that in just a second, so stay with us.
(04:19):
I'm Brent Friedman.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
I'm Bryce Abel. You're listening to sound, light and frequency.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Before we take off to Mars, or I should say,
before Mars comes to us. This is one of the
first science fiction stories that I can remember reading.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
HG. Wells.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
War of the World's captured my imagination when I was
just a kid, and it stuck with me for a
long time. And it's so interesting to think that in
the same way that it provoked my imagination, it's provoked
people's imaginations for three centuries.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That's a long time. Let's think about this. We called
it the three Century franchise because it starts in actually
eighteen ninety seven, when it's a cereal it's in Pearson's
Magazine in England, but it's in Cosmopolitan here in the
United States. And you know what's so interesting, that's so
long ago. My grandmother, bless her Heart, wasn't even born then,
(05:48):
and she lived a very long life. It was just
around for a long time. And then a year later,
because it was a page turning catastrophe story the way
they did it as a serial was delivered installed, so
it was the equivalent of a television series today as
it first went out. Then it became the equivalent of
the feature film because the next year, less than a
(06:10):
year later, it became that book that everyone famously talks about.
And the book itself is published in eighteen ninety eight.
And I just think there's something that's very strange that
we should point out that you learn something new every
time you do this brand. It's fantastic. I had no idea. Yes,
it was serialized then there was a book. At the
same time the book is coming out, two American newspapers,
(06:32):
the New York Evening Journal and The Boston Post, both
ripped it off. I thought it took years to rip
something off, but not back then. In believe it's eighteen
ninety eight or ninety nine. The New York Journal comes
up with something called Fighters from Mars or the War
of the World's and they moved the location to New York.
And then the Boston Post, right on the heels, not
(06:54):
to be outdone, comes up with Fighters from Mars or
the War of the World's in near Boston. I guess
what it proves is this is a very portable concept.
The Martians could land in Surrey, England, or in New Jersey,
and later on they'll land in Los Angeles and Boston
or even on somebody's laptop screen. The story's DNA allows
(07:15):
every new version to ask what if the invasion happens
here now? And to us yes.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And I think what makes it such a durable franchise
is that Aliens are probably among the best villains that
you can have in any storytelling format. They are the other,
the archetypal other, and the way at least Wells contemplated them.
They were coming here for resources. They had ruined Mars
(07:41):
and now they needed what we had here on Earth.
And I think that idea of something that challenges our
dominance of this planet. That is one of the great
existential fears that we have as humanity. Which part of
storytelling is you want to live those fears cathartically. It's
why horror movies are so popular. I don't really want
(08:01):
it to happen. I don't really want aliens to invade
this planet, but I want to see the story and
imagine how I would feel what if it would happen.
I think, as you pointed out, another thing that makes
it so durable as the global.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Nature of it.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yes, even if they landed in New Jersey, it would
still be a threat to all of humanity. So no
matter where they land or, as later incarnations of the story,
wherever they arise from on the planet, the whole world
is threatened. And I think that's another great aspect of
the story is that it unites everyone against a common enemy,
(08:35):
and those are very powerful narratives.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
That book, the first book that comes out. HG. Wells
writes it, he took the bold approach. Instead of having
a main character who's involved in fighting aliens or stopping
the invasion, his character is really just someone who's observing it,
observing this ongoing catastrophe. It's a lot less that book
anyway about military vicary. Then it is really human helplessness
(09:02):
or social collapse or biological irony. Because let's face it,
everyone knows now and this is not a spoiler. If
you don't. If you think this is a spoiler, like
like we said, you're a couple of centuries too late
for that one. The Martians are destroyed not by armies
but by microbes. And that's what made it so much
fun and so interesting. Now brnt the thing that and
(09:25):
we can continue to surf around that area as well.
But one of the things, in addition to finding out
that it was ripped off almost instantly, which made me
feel like, wow, some things never change, I found out
something else. Everybody believes that the first time it ever
reared itself again was in nineteen thirty eight when another Wells,
(09:45):
not HG. Wells, the author of the book, but orson Wells,
this young playwright with a deep voice in New York
ends up doing that sort of Halloween broadcast. That freaks
everybody out, and we're going to get to that in
a second. I was shocked, and it really enjoyed realizing
that you and I aren't the only people that have
(10:05):
tried to get things made in Hollywood over the years
and been stymied. And that's a modern feeling that everybody.
Everybody wants to make something, but it's so freaking hard.
Listen to this story. In nineteen twenty five, Okay, so
this is a quarter of a century after the book
comes out, Paramount actually options the book. Okay, great, who
do they option it for? Cecil b to Mill? They
(10:28):
optioned it forl B to Mill, who is going to
make this epic spectacle and he's coming off the success
of The Ten Commandments, so this is no small thing.
I mean, he would have been making a pretty major film.
And they actually wrote a script for it, so it
was in development.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I would love to have seen that movie. But I
would love to find that script. I wonder what it's
online somewhere.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
If we find it, we'll post it. One of the
things that's interesting about it, I don't have that the
detail in front of me, but I recall that they
revised the story considerably about a human alien hybrid. Sound
familiar to what's going on today. Okay, Christ, while they're
busy doing all that around comes nineteen thirty and Sergei
Eisenstein is thought that he should this master of Soviet
(11:13):
montage is going to make the movie for them, And
this was because Paramount briefly assigned him because he was
under contract at the studio. And it really is, if
you think about it, Brent, this is one of the
great alternate history kind of things, because imagine if Eisenstein
had made it, he would have probably emphasized the aliens
less than mass panic and crowds and all this sort
(11:36):
of after disclosure panic stuff and into a montage. Okay,
But just when you said, okay, that's crazy, we got
Cecil b to Mill, we got Eisenstein. What can you
do to eclipse that? Okay. In the nineteen thirties, Alfred
Hitchcock approaches HG. Wells and says, I'd like to option
your book, and HG. Wells says, you can't option my
(11:58):
book because Paramoun has it. And if we're talking about
alternate visions of something, imagine Hitchcock's version. I sure wish
that would have happened. His ghost version would have had
the story would have been about dread and delayed revelation
and social panic, and he probably would have had an
individual who was trapped inside this big thing. And then,
(12:20):
finally in the late nineteen thirties, to catch us all
up before Orson Wells comes in, you got Alexander Korda,
who is a British producer director, and he wants to
bring it to the screen. Only he wants to make
it the sort of the authentic British version, and so
he would have made it with its British roots, but
that fell through too. So that's a lot of development. Hell,
(12:42):
if there are any writers or budding screenwriters listening, you're
not alone and always everyone that you know in development. Hell,
but so were these guys. Which takes us to October thirtieth,
nineteen thirty eight, take it away.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Before we jump into that, I just want to say,
I think it's fascinating that one of the most endorsing
franchises in media took that long to get off the
launching pad. It's incredible. And one other thing you said,
which I think is interesting, is Alfred Hitchcock approaching h
G Wells about the rights to his book. One of
the reasons I would venture that it's being still remade
(13:18):
recently with ice Cube is that it's now in public domain,
so anyone can make something based on War of the Worlds,
whereas back in the day Alfred Hitchcock had to go
get the rights and he wasn't capable of that. So anyway, yes,
jumping into nineteen thirty eight, I find it fascinating that
Orson Wells, who was went on to make arguably one
(13:40):
of the great movies of all time, Citizen Kane, chose
not to make the movie of War of the World's
but a radio play. And it really I think it
was the perfect vehicle for something because it wouldn't have
looked real, but you could make the idea of an
alien invasion over the radio where people got their news.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Boy did they. This happened the day before Thanksgiving, and
at the time Orson Wells was the sort of the leader.
He's twenty three years old. Think about that, he's the
leader of the Mercury Theater of the Air and he
didn't even really want to do this. But I think,
like a lot of places, if you have to get
things done, you get a little desperate. We got to
get something out there. So with very little time, with
(14:24):
a script by Howard Kotch, they come up with this
idea that they're going to tell it as a breaking
news story. That was their concept. They moved the invasion
to contemporary America, and they had it start at Grover's Mill,
New Jersey, which is probably the most famous thing that
has happened in that place. They probably have statues there.
I bet they do the rap on this has been
(14:46):
for years that this broadcast created mass panic across America,
and that was something that everybody took as an article
of faith. Like a lot of things in history, has
gone through some reevaluation over time. Modern scholarship suggests that
the real panic occurred in pockets. But that and get this,
(15:06):
I find this so interesting. It was greatly exaggerated by
newspapers because they were competitive to try to portray radio
as irresponsible and dangerous, so they fanned the flames a
little bit, which I also think is powerful to consider.
And I was listening to some podcasts that had occurred
(15:27):
over the last couple of decades on this because it
had its eightieth anniversary less than a decade ago. And
in two years it'll have its ninetieth anniversary, So this
has been around a while. And one of the things
they said is that the Mercury Theater of the Air
was not the most popular show out there. The one
that they were up against was wildly popular, but had
(15:49):
a boring something going on, and a lot of people
were switching over. But they switched over after Orson Wells
had made his this is all fiction and his disclaimer
if you will. His show had about twelve million people
listening to it, which, frankly, in today's world is a
lot few. Back then, there wasn't that much competition, and
(16:10):
it was amilies gathered around the radio at night. And
what the podcast that I listened to said was of
those twelve million people, about ten percent might have panicked,
which gives you one point two million people right they're
panicking in the streets. So it was enough. But something
you pointed out when we were talking earlier before the
(16:31):
show was this became possibly the predicate for why Roswell
was treated in such a hush hush way.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And going back to those newspaper headlines, I think the
New York Times headline was radio listeners in panic taking
war drama as fact, right, which is very judgmental, like
you said, of the radio format, but that panic it
had to be something that when Roswell happened years later,
people took note of that. Yes, it was thirty eight
(17:00):
and Roswell was nine years later, but I think that
had such an impact on popular culture that certainly the
government took note that. Look what happened when people thought
that aliens were real and that they were coming here.
If we have actual evidence, not just for radio play,
but actual evidence that we're going to take photos of
(17:21):
and put on newspapers, what is that going to do
to the general population.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
It's interesting to note that even when Dolan and I
were writing our ad after disclosure and trying to portray
what might happen after some disclosure statement is made, which
is very relevant to today, we had to take into
account this nineteen thirty eight broadcast because the feeling it's
been cited over and over. That's why people are cautious
(17:47):
about disclosure. They don't want people panicking in the streets.
That was certainly a concern. Then it's a concern now,
which sort of takes us to the big Daddy that
got things really rolling. In terms of the Hollywood aspect
of this and put it portrayed, so you got Orson
Wells again, no relation to H. G. Wells, folks. It's
not a father son thing being passed on or anything.
(18:10):
Just happenstance. Now long comes nineteen fifty three, and as
we've talked about in an earlier episode, the fifties are
the flying saucer mania of the time, and they literally
started in nineteen fifty The first big Saucer movies are
fifty one. In fifty three, along comes The War of
the Worlds, which is a feature film, and it was
(18:31):
produced by George Powell, who was a pretty major producer
of the time, and it was directed by Byron Haskin.
It is, as I said earlier, in technicolor, and in
this case, they moved it to my home ground here.
They moved it to Los Angeles. It starts Jeen Berry
and a woman named Anne Robinson, who that's the name
of my college girlfriend. So I always look at that,
(18:52):
and I don't know why, but it gets my attention.
But they replaced the walking tripods with Manna ray like
war machines. It seemed to float on invisible legs, and
I don't know. I'm just going to put this out
here before a voice and opinion. I saw it many
years ago that in anticipation of us doing this show,
I saw it again, okay, but before I voiced my opinion.
(19:15):
What is your take on the nineteen fifty three version.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
I think it's a great time capsule of what type
of movie was effective at that point in history. It's
charming in a very kind of campy, strange way, and
I think in a strange way for me, the book
actually felt more real than the movie. And one of
the things I wanted to point out was that when H. G.
Wells wrote his book, the aliens themselves were like these
(19:41):
large brain like organisms. Sure, and everything felt like it
was all told through the filter of the fantastic, whereas
I think in the movie. In the fifty three version,
everything felt a little bit more I'm not going to
say grounded, but it felt a little bit more believable,
and there was the more integration of modern technology in
(20:01):
terms of the tripods and how they were represented. And
so it's one of the things we're going to see
throughout those three centuries is that the aliens keep changing,
not just what they look like, but what their motives are,
and the one thing that remains constant through all the
iterations is what kills them right. Never does the story change,
(20:22):
at least through some of the larger expressions of the franchise,
from that idea that it's bacteria or viruses on Earth
that take out the mighty Martians or the later versions
the aliens who come to conquer us.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
I will say this before I voice any negative opinions here.
It did win an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects,
and of the time they are pretty good. It's just
that wow, the characterizations at the beginning just threw me
for a loop. But the main guy is this nuclear physicist,
doctor Clayton Forrester any spell. I don't know, man. He's
(21:01):
just there's a crashed saucer out there, and you know
what he does that night? Since nothing's happening around the
crash saucer, he goes to a square dance in town.
Were very popular in that, yes, they were. Also he
is not really super involved in fighting back. He is
involved again as a bit of an observer here. The
(21:22):
woman who he hangs out with, they, I think the
studio said, we've got to have a love story in here.
So that female character, she's I believe she's a librarian
library science, so she's not dumb, but she doesn't get
to do much in this thing. There is a religious aspect.
He goes looking for her by going to the various
houses of worship and all that. Look, it's not terrible,
(21:44):
but it's not as good for my money as other
things that happened. People disagree with me, though, but I
do believe it does have the Cold War nightmare in
its DNA. It has science, it has religion, it has
nuclear weapons. They actually use a nuclear weapon. Yes, that's amazing, right,
think about that, which is also strange because most of
(22:07):
these fifties movies seem to be aliens are pissed off
at us because we have nuclear weapons, right, and so
we're coming down to set you people straight, so they
use them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
I think that's one of the interesting things about the
movie is that in that way, it almost feels more believable.
At that time, we had already used nuclear weapons to
settle a score and try and win a war. Why
wouldn't we use them against aliens. I'm not saying it's right,
but it makes sense that humanity would try that, and
so it really served as a cautionary tale in that regard.
(22:40):
As you pointed to earlier, in many ways, War of
the Worlds is about us. It's not the story of
Martians looking for a new home or looking for resources,
or whatever the new plot might be in any version
of the story. It's about how we respond to that threat.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah. So to recap, we've gone from serialized newspaper for articles,
to a book, to a radio broadcast to the first
feature film, and then there were some TV things covering
the nineteen thirty eight event, but nobody doing the drama
until I didn't even know this existed. I was alive
for it, but I didn't know they existed. That in
(23:18):
nineteen seventy eight, they made a musical of it, a
musical version shocking.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, that gets to the point where you say, Okay,
I think the franchise is dead. Now it's jumped the shark,
as it were.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
That's what it feels like.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
But no, there were many more expressions of the franchise
to which.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
We should get to. But I'm going to take a
slight detour here. Yes, and here's the reason for the detour.
You and I are both writers at heart. We're also
producers and hosts, and we've directed things and all that,
but at our heart were writers. We value the words
and how they get put together. And the one thing
you have to say for HG. Wells is he came
(23:56):
up with some words that is in the open of
the book that have defined all of the genre exploitations
of it. Nobody seems to be able to make something
without getting to them. Now in the actual book itself,
it's three paragraphs long. But I'm just going to read,
and you've got to forgive me. I can't be some
(24:17):
of the people that have read these things, but these
are the words that touched people so much. He wrote.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to
our minds as ours are to those of the beasts
that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their
(24:40):
plans against us. That's powerful, drew their plans against against
us captured. It captures the fear that we all live under,
and it's very relevant even today. We're on the verge
of some form of disclosure. So we're told in the
news and what if that disclosure is there are aliens
making plans against us. I was just going to say
(25:02):
that the words that he's chosen, vast and cool and unsympathetic,
those are just powerful, and they mean they're not exactly evil.
They're not passionate, they're not demonic. They're worse than that.
They're superior. They're detached, they're calculating. It's very scary. And
then he uses the phrase envious eyes, which is also disturbing.
(25:26):
They want Earth. This is not curiosity that draws them
to Earth. It is strategic desire. And then also that
final phrase slowly and surely drew their plans against us,
which means this invasion has long range planning. It's not
like an impulse. They didn't wake up one day in
Mars and go, you know what, these earth Wings don't
(25:46):
seem to have their shit together, Let's take them down. No,
they've been thinking about it and making plans. Okay, here's
what I just wanted to make clear to everybody. There's
nobody that has avoided this. In the nineteen thirty eight
radio broadcast, they did their own revision of it, and
a guy named Dan Seymour wrote it in the nineteen
fifty three film. There's Sir Frederick Hardwick. I don't know him,
(26:10):
but I certainly heard of the very good work. And
he does the nineteen fifty three film. And in that
musical that we've made fun of, Richard Burton. Richard Burton
does of all People, and in a film that we're
going to get to later, which is the two thousand
and five Spielberg Cruise version of it, Morgan Freeman, the
(26:31):
man who has made more money voiceovering things than probably
any human on earth. And look, I'm not saying that
we are going to read them all, but I thought
maybe we should take our shot at a couple of them.
We've got the Richard Burton version and the Morgan Freeman version.
Take your pick, my friend.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
I'm going Burton all the way. It's the musical, right,
how can I.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Not give us and that way people can sort of
judge how things evolve and get revised over time. So
go with Burton. By the way, the movie's a musical.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
That does not mean I will be singing this no please,
Although I lot of expectations from yes that would be
in the outtakes portions of the show. No one would
have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds
of space. No one could have dreamed that we were
being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that
(27:23):
swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men
even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And
yet across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to
ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and
surely they drew their plans against us.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Wow and scene, yees see. Nice job. Many people who
are listening to us are like Richard Burton. I don't know,
but he was the bomb in the sixties. He was
married to Elizabeth Taylor. The guy had a good life.
Say no more. Yeah, okay, now I'm going to read
them Morgan Freeman part. But that's pretty bold because nobody
on Earth living today is as successful as so this
(28:07):
is not an impersonation in Morgan Freeman. I'm asked, thank
you for clarifying that. Listen to the rewrite that they
did in two thousand thoughts. That's wasn't it. Yeah, that's
what Freeman is saying, So here's what he got to deliver.
No one would have believed, by the way, the reason
we're reading these is because we can't afford to use
Morgan Freeman's voice. That'll cost this fortune. We're doing this
(28:28):
podcast on a budget, folks. Okay, no one would have
believed in the early years of the twenty first century
that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than
our own, That as men busied themselves about their various concerns,
they observed and studied the way a man with a
microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply in
(28:49):
a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to
and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over
this world. Yet across the gulf of space into life,
vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our planet with envious eyes,
and slowly and surely through their plans against us.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Nicely done, Thank you. You know what word jumps out
at me? Yes, there's some little nuances in there, But
for me, there's a key word in there right that
frames how this story was being told and the point
of view of it, and that is complacency. Yes, it's
the first time that you get a sense that somehow
we deserved this, we let our guard down. The other
(29:32):
versions of the stories was nope, they're coming down. They
see our planet, they're better than us, they want it.
Good luck stopping them. This was in our infinite complacency.
And so I think that's two thousand and five. Is
that when the film was made. So yeah, I think
that it's another example of how the story has transformed
(29:54):
itself over the decades, the centuries, and now it's taking
on a completely new tenor where Spielberg changes some other
aspects of the story which I think are fascinating, But
in that particular instance, there is that sense of we
deserve this somehow and we're going to have to redeem ourselves,
(30:14):
and that plays out a little bit in the micro
kind of drama of Tom Cruise and his family and
proving himself to be a good father and protector. So
it was interesting just with that one slight addition, it
gives the whole thing a different kind of patina, if
you will, I look.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
At War the world's the way we look at Superman.
Every generation gets the Superman they deserve. Yes, right, and
every generation gets the War of the Worlds that they deserve.
And we have jumped to two thousand and five, but
I just wanted to backfill one thing. About a decade
after that musical came out, there was a War of
the World's TV series. This is the first time it
(30:51):
appeared on TV in nineteen eighty eight and it ran
for two seasons. And what was interesting about the TV
series is they did not remake the book. They took
the nineteen fifty three movie starring Jean Barry and Anne
Robinson and made that their starting point. They assumed that
had happened, right, that the Martians maybe didn't die, they
(31:15):
just kind of went into hiding, and now they're back.
So it became a much more normal alien invasion kind
of thing. And I want to come back to two
thousand and five, but I just want to fill the
time period a little bit because people may not appreciate
Mars has had a couple of areas of great interest
in Renaissance. Obviously, the first time Mars came to the
(31:39):
forefront was at the end of the Yeah the nineteen
hundreds in eighteen ninety eight, when that book was coming out.
Perceval Lowe was writing about canals on Mars that was
going down, and in the world of eufology, there were
all these airships that were being spotted, so it was
an active paranormal but Mars kind of thing. The other
(32:00):
time when Mars really became big was in nineteen seventy six,
a couple of years before that musical version. And I
know this because this is my little coming of age story.
But in nineteen seventy six, I was a radio reporter
at a hippie radio station in Eugene, Oregon, at KSEL,
and I did the morning show, and I went in
(32:21):
on that day on July nineteenth, nineteen seventy six, because
at five o'clock, Viking lander was landing on Mars. And
what made this the most dramatic news event that I
experienced completely by myself, because there was nobody else other
than the disc jockey in this radio station, is that
there was a nineteen minute delay between what was going
(32:44):
on at Mars and what was being reported over the
AP machine that was spewing out interesting okay. So that
meant when I saw the AP stuff coming over associated
press paper coming over, it could have it was either
dead or was there the lander, and so I literally
(33:05):
wrote down that bulletin. It says bulletin AP, and I
want you to think about this coming over at teletype,
clicking in the paper. It's spooling slowly, one line at
a time. First line says bullet in AP. Second line Pasadena, California.
This is all caps, the unmanned Viking one lander has
and that's all it had on that line, right, And
(33:27):
I'm not kidding. It broke the sentence right there for
an excruciating second. I'm like, it could say has crashed?
Has what is it? And then again in all caps
it says touchdown on the planet Mars. It took nineteen
minutes for radio signals from the spacecraft to reach the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, confirming the landing. Now,
(33:49):
the reason I bring that up is because the lander
survived in seventy six, it started doing something that really
played into the Mars history to come in the world
the worlds because it gave us our first pictures of Mars.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Now I remember that too. It was very impactful at
the time.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Oh my gosh, and you have people today going, ah, Mars,
you've seen one Mars picture you've seen Wall. We've had
a lot of landers there. But when nineteen seventy six
came that first I got a picture of Mars from
NASA and I framed it in this stupid, ugly frame.
But for the next fifteen years, wherever I would move,
I would hang that up in my bedroom because I
found that to be so powerful. People have this thing
(34:30):
about Mars that the modern version starts in seventy six.
Now let's jump to two thousand and five, because again,
there are certain actors and directors that say, you know what,
I want to put my imprint on that, And boy,
you could not have a better collection than to say,
Steven Spielberg with David Kepp as the screenwriter, does that
(34:51):
sounds familiar? And those credits are on disclosure Day as
yes they are. And they work together on this story
of this adaptation of War of the Worlds, and they
hired Tom Cruise to play the guy, and you started
to talk about it. But it seems to me very
interesting that their choice was Tom Cruise. Is this I'm
(35:14):
not sure exactly what he does.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
He's like a blue collar dad, right, struggling. I think
he and his wife are separated or that there's some
family drama that was never part of the earlier versions
of this story.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
And he's not that good at being a dad. Kids.
It's all movie kids. They don't get along with their parents,
and that's going to have to be solved by the
movie that you're going to watch. But boy, Spielberg did
a great jobs as showing aliens arriving and coming to
life and destroying shit.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Then there's some key differences here again that I feel
are obviously Steven Spielberg wants to tell his version, as
you said, put his imprint on this work. But at
the same time, I feel like the audience appetite for
science fiction had changed. What was it acceptable in nineteen
fifty three in terms of representation of aliens was no
(36:04):
longer in two thousand and five, and so this time
we get biomechanical creatures, right. That was some kind of
infusion of organic and technology that felt very cutting edge
and science fiction. They were instead of tripods, they were hexapods, right,
So everything was more sophisticated and complicated. But the big
difference they had was these aliens weren't from Mars.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
These were embedded underground that had been there like some
ancient evil waiting to rise up. I believe they were
there for at least a million years, waiting to come
up and reclaim their planet. So that was a whole
new take on War of the Worlds. And yet, so
that's a whole new take.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
That's Spielberg and Cap and crews probably saying, let's go
for it, right, let's do this. But what Spielberg did
was also do a throwback to the eighteen ninety eight
book Where Again, and the main character is somebody who's
observing the catastrophe. But Cruz's character, as you said, is
he's a bad dad, and he's a blue collar guy.
(37:10):
He's not a scientist, he's not a soldier. He's just
a flawed, working class guy trying to keep his kids alive.
And that becomes what the movie's about. So the fascinating
choice the director has made here is to see this
invasion from a guy who doesn't know shit. He doesn't
know what's going on in Japan, he doesn't know if
they've invaded England, he doesn't know whether it's going good
(37:32):
or bad anywhere else. He just knows it ain't going
good where he is.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
And the interesting thing is he is not going to
save Earth from these aliens. All he is asked to
do is save his family or keep them alive long
enough for once again Earth's viruses and bacteria to destroy
the aliens. So that is again the constant that runs
through again the major expressions of this franchise.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
At least, as with all our shows, we get to
the blaze where we go, I can just keep talking
about this for another hour and a half, but we
can't do that, So I'm going to jump ahead quickly.
After two thousand and five where they laid that out,
there were several sort of faux documentaries made about it,
(38:17):
where they were TV documentaries, fake documentaries showing the coverage.
So in other words, it's a perfect homage to the
book and the nineteen thirty eight thing to do a
fake documentary about that kind of stuff. I'm not going
to go into all of those. There were by my
count at least three and maybe four at least four.
(38:38):
But what happens then, and this is all very relevant
to today. In twenty nineteen, the BBC gets in the
act and they come up with a mini series, a
three part mini series that I personally think is very
worth seeing because it takes place in England and it's
got two main characters. It's a period added and it's
(39:01):
the first one to show us that it's Edwardian England.
And I just thought it was very good. It's not
full of action, it's not an American action piece, but
it feels very much like the book come to life.
So I enjoyed that. And then in twenty nineteen, Fox
and Canal Plus make a TV series that stars Gabriel
Byrne and Daisy Edgar Jones, and that one doesn't have
(39:26):
anything to do really with the roots of it. This
one is just saying the Martians, I'm trying to remember
it's a mass extinction event. I guess the same, but
it's much more subtle. It's after the fact and these
guys are just trying to stay alive. It went three seasons,
so you've got these two TV series going on at
the same time. And now we get to ice Cube.
(39:47):
Have you got your raspberries out there, folks? Yeah? Have
you seen this one? By the way, did you watch No?
Speaker 2 (39:54):
I remember when it came out and I thought, I
just can't go there. It would have had to have
gotten like a ninety plus on Metacritic for me to
eat and think about watching it.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
This movie has some of the worst reviews of any
movie ever on a quality level of Mortal Kombat Annihilation.
If you want to have there, you go to bring
it home. Yes, exactly, folks. We wrote Mortal Kombat Annihilation,
which is a very poorly reviewed film. So we're not
attacking people where they live. We're just commenting. I watched it.
(40:24):
It didn't work. Ice Cube is this guy working for
the Department of Homeland Security. It looks like it was
made during the pandemic. It's all on screens. None of
it makes any sense. He's one guy. He's an analyst.
He's the only guy in Homeland Security on a Sunday.
He's just an analyst. He's also tracking his kids and
invading their social media spaces. And yet the President calls
(40:47):
in basking what he should do about this. It's just wacky,
And so I watched it. It was hard. It was
candidly hard to get through. Who knows where it all
went wrong, but it did go wrong, and I have
to tip my hat. I think the name of the
other podcast is how did this movie get made? Or
how did this film get made? Right? It has three hosts,
and I was just laughing my ass off with them.
(41:09):
All films have problems, and that goes our work too.
Rif you start to peel it apart, you go, wait,
what's the logic behind that. It's just that this particular
film version just doesn't bear any weight of logic. So
I guess what this would say, Brent, is that there
are people out there who should be aware, as you
pointed out, that anybody can make a war of the
(41:29):
world's Yes, sometimes that's bad, but maybe somebody will make
a great one next year, who knows.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
I think one thing we can say about the franchise
is that it could very well be a four century
franchise when all is said and done, because it's a
very durable story. It's open to interpretation by anyone, like
you said, because it's in public domain. Let's see how
actual disclosure goes in the near future. But I think
that notion of living under the sort of damocles with
(41:57):
a possible alien invasion of higher intelligence, greater technology, we
will live in that fear, possibly forever, and as soon
as they start confirming that there is actual life out there,
that fear will only get intensified. I guarantee you. One
thing I do want to point out as we as
I try and take us off the beaten path. Now,
(42:20):
one of the things that we like to do in
this show is to make connections between different ideas, and
one of the main ideas behind War of the Worlds,
as we've expressed in different ways, is this notion of
an alien invasion and what it means to humanity and
what we would do and how we would respond. We've
talked about it in another terms of ontological shock. There's
(42:42):
an interesting conspiracy theory that's been floating out there for
quite some time, I believe, going back to the nineties,
and it's called Project Bluebeing, and you may have.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Heard of it.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
So you're taking there, all right, I'm taking you off
the beaten path.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
That's here, okay, go yeah. Do you want your tinfoil
hat to I may need that. Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
So the interesting thing about this and how it relates
to War of the Worlds is that in the early
nineteen nineties there was a Canadian theorist and journalist named
Serge Manost I don't know if I'm saying that correctly,
who published a detailed account about this Project Bluebeam that
was associated with NASA, and he said it was going
(43:25):
to happen in ninety five ninety six, but then he
died unexpectedly in nineteen ninety six, and then conspiracy theorists
took that idea of his ran with it, and they
just kept pushing the date forward so that it never
had an expiration to it. It always stayed relevant. What's
interesting about it is that the theory itself, conspiracy theory,
(43:47):
if we must, is based on a couple key ideas.
The first is that the stage one was going to
be that there was going to be triggering of earthquakes
or that would unearth archaeological artifacts that might start to
change the way we think about our past. And that
also there was going to be something that comes out
(44:10):
that starts to discredit or change how we think about
major religions. Let's take it at face value for a moment.
We're there right now. They're finding things underneath the Great
Pyramids that are going to start to apparently challenge everything
we know about those artifacts. We are having apparently meetings
between pastors who are being told to prepare their flocks
(44:32):
because religion may not be what you think. So again,
conspiracy theory. But if you look at stage one, it's
already happening. Now you move on to stage two, and
this is where it starts to get interesting. Stage two
is that there's going to be potentially some sort of
gigantic space show. And what this means is that someone's
going to be using advanced holographic projectors to start putting
(44:56):
images in the sky, and those are going to start
challenging all sorts of religious leaders. We might start to
see theories around the Antichrist taking form or shape in
the skies. The idea is that it starts to create
global chaos and everyone starts to look for a new
(45:16):
spiritual leader. Okay, so now we're going We're way out
on a limb here with regards to this. However, there's
so much online chatter right now about this idea that
somehow the powers that be are preparing us with all
of the stuff that's going on for Project Bluebeam, for
some enactment of Project Bluebeam. Now, for me, I personally
(45:39):
find the whole thing hard to swallow. However, I do
think that holographic technology has advanced to a place where
I've seen images online and videos of things where they
particularly in China where they have done huge holographic displays
in the.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Sky that blew my mind.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Well again, a guy makes a conspiracy theory in nineteen
ninety five, and today in twenty six we're having pastors
that are being told to start thinking about religion might
not be what it is. There is holographic technology out
there that theoretically could pull off putting any type of
images in the sky, which makes us question and wonder
how many of the things that we are apparently recording,
(46:22):
whether it's drones on the East Coast or whether it's
UFOs anywhere in the world, might actually just be holographic technology.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Correct, I mean if I'm wrong, But isn't the essence
of Project Bluebeam that these things are going to be
brought to four to convince people that there are aliens
attacking us which will bring about one world government or
whatever the conspiracy theory is. But there aren't really aliens.
Isn't that the contents?
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Well so again, one of the interesting things about this theory,
this conspiracy theory, and as most do, they mutate over
the years. Right, what was originally positive is different than
what everyone believes today. Part of the idea is that.
Oh no, this isn't saying there are no aliens. This
is saying that the aliens are not hostile.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Look, Brent, I'm not a bluebeamer. I love that term.
I would say only this. I believe aliens are one
hundred percent real and they're here. So I don't need
a blue beam to explain anything other than if there
was some rational reason for a blue beam to confuse us.
But I don't feel we know who the aliens are
(47:28):
very well anyway right now. So it strikes me as
odd that we need a blue beam to confuse us,
because I'm confused already, and so are most of the
people listening to this show about what's really going on
in the real world. So that's my blue beam take there.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
I completely agree. I think the more you put it
under scrutiny, it doesn't hold up. There's only one thing
that I can't get out of my brain pan here,
and it goes back to the father of modern rocketry,
with Werner von Braun. So von Braun was part of
Project paper Clip. He was a Nazi scientist who was
(48:04):
brought over after World War Two to come and take
everything he had done with the V two rocket. But
to do it for the US, And so I've actually
been to the Space and Rocketry headquarters down in Huntsville, Alabama,
where there's a whole part of a museum down there
devoted to Werner bon Braun. And we would never have
gone to space without this guy. So this guy was
(48:27):
a legitimate genius. It just so happens that when he
was dying the last couple of years of his life,
he had an assistant, a woman named Carol Rosen, and
he insisted not once, but many times over those four
years to her that the whole idea of putting weapons
in space was something that was a control mechanism by
(48:50):
the powers that be, and he did not want it
to happen. He was wholly against this, and he said,
but there are plans to make it happen, and it
will happen this way. The first is that we will
make the Russians into an enemy. Then we will start
to shift our focus to terrorists, and then we will
(49:11):
start to see asteroids and space bodies that are coming
to threaten us. And the last card that will be
played is the alien card, and that is the one
where there will be an alien threat that forces the
world governments to align and put turn on all of
the space lasers to protect us. Do not believe it.
(49:32):
It will be a lie. Now, you could say this
was an old man who was dying. If he'd said
it once, I'd go okay, maybe he had too much
to drink that night. But if you listen to Carol Rosen,
who by the way, is still alive, she is emphatic
that this happened many times in their conversations. And so
that's the thing when I think about, for instance, when
(49:53):
Toby Hooper talked to us and said Steven Spielberg was
given the true it's just one person's testimony against many
decades of Steven Spielberg saying I don't know anything else.
This is just one person's testimony. But in this particular case,
Werner von Braun is somebody that you have to take seriously.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Major dude, that guy. And I've been aware of that story,
and it appears the fact that this story is probably
true that he said these things doesn't make his conclusion true.
That's a separate thing. But I believe that he said
that to Carol Rosen, And yeah, so Brent, we could
go out on blue Beam and Werner von Braun. But
(50:34):
I have a Mars oriented, Hollywood crazy story to end
on that might leave a smile on everybody's face. Let's
go with that. It seems like that might get us out,
all right. This is a story that actually happened to me,
and it's very Hollywood. Okay. It's nineteen eighty six, and
I always wanted to go to Mars ever since I
(50:54):
saw that news Clint come over and there wasn't an Internet,
but I bought books of Mars, and I thought I'd
like to go to Mars. But that's probably not in
the cards given my current age. I'm not going to Mars,
but I can go to Mars in my head. I
was working with a fellow writer, Brad Markowitz, who is
one of our co producers on This Dark Sky Yeah Yeah,
(51:16):
and on Dark Skys, and so we started talking about
Mars and I showed him a book that I had,
which was called The Face. And a lot of people
know about the Face. At the time, there were images
that looked like a sphinx like face on Mars, and
brand I came up with a movie idea that there
was a space race to go to Mars to check
(51:36):
out the Face. On Mars. One of them was a
UN group that was trying to get there, and another
one was run by some crazy space entrepreneur. So basically
we were thinking at the time like a Ted Turner,
but in fact I think we were actually channeling Elon Musk.
It was like Elon Musk versus the UN to get
there kind of thing. And I won't go into the
(51:57):
details of the story or anything, but it was success.
We wrote this script and our agents at CAA said,
we really like this. We're sending it to Joel Silver. Now,
Joel Silver is probably someone you've heard of before. He's
a mega producer from Hollywood. At the time, he was huge.
He was the producer of Lethal Weapon and I'm trying hard,
(52:18):
die hard. He was a major guy, and he had
just moved, for I believe, from Warner Brothers to twentieth
and so Brad and I had a meeting with him.
Now we were young. We had a few Hollywood meetings,
but to go to a studio and to meet with
Joel Silver about a script that we'd written seemed like
a big deal. You have to pass through parking and
(52:39):
all this, you're doing all this and you're like, oh
my gosh. And we get there and his assistant says,
mister Silver is expecting you, please wait here, and they
sit us on some kind of couch outside his office,
but his door is open, and there is Joel Silver
in what looks like a klftan to me, a large
flowing klftan. And this is the eighties, so he's on
(53:00):
a gigantic telephone, right, but it's wireless. I think he
was actually talking to somebody. He could have been doing
this just for us, but he's yelling at somebody on
the set about how to do things. And we're like, wow,
we're watching this uber producer. This is so exciting. I
wonder how this is going to go down. And then
finally he finishes, and they escort us into his office
(53:20):
and he comes around from his desk and now he's
sitting on his desk looking at us, and he said.
The first thing he says is I make movies that
make money. Do you think I should apologize for that?
And this seems so odd to me, but I said, no, sir, no,
I don't think you should apologize for that. And he says,
there are two things that make a movie make money.
(53:42):
Do you know what they are? He was very emphatic,
and I had a little notebook with me. I actually
got the notebook out with my pen because I thought
he's going to tell me the secret to Hollywood here,
and I need to write this down. Sound, light, and frequency.
That's three words that wouldn't worked. These were two words.
He says, there's two things that make for a movie
that make money. Do you know what they are? I'm
(54:04):
prepared to write them down. And I swear to God,
this is exactly what the man said. And he was
a power in Hollywood. He says, boobs and guns. Wait,
let me write that down. I've been doing it wrong
all these years. I put my notebook down. Now, okay,
there's one final piece to this story that'll crack you up.
So that happened. So then we get into the notes
on the script. The script begins with a bike with
(54:27):
a spacecraft crash landing on Mars. It's full of energy
and excitement. It would have been a fantastic beginning to
a film. He goes, No, that's no good. That's not
going to work. We can't do that. He goes, you
ever heard about SETI and we had the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. He goes, here's what you gotta do. You
gotta do this. You got a guy, it's late at night,
(54:50):
he's in the SETI headquarters, he's all by himself, and
he's watching porn and what comes over his screen is
the face on Mars. And Brad and I like, what
the f what? And so we take the meeting. We
try to push back, he's not having it. We leave
and his assistant takes this acide afterwards and we're like,
(55:10):
this doesn't make any sense. We got this great scene.
Why would he be watching porn and why would the
face in Mars appear on a porn show? What is
that all about? It's a secret. And the guy says, listen,
if you want to stay on the project, you're going
to do the note. And our agents, when they heard
of this, said, are you crazy. Of course you're going
(55:30):
to do the note. It's just a scene. It's porn.
Who cares write it? So we literally did write an
opening scene where a guy was watching porn at SETI
and saw the face on Mars. And there's more to
the story, but I'm not going to tell it because
that's a good place to add. All I can say
is that goes to show that different brains will look
(55:50):
at different material in different ways, which to wrap it
back up to the War of the World's I think
says that's why War of the World's kind of works
a roar shock test. It gives you the basic infrastructure
of the film, but different people can see it differently.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
Yeah, and that's why I say, I suspect that at
some point down the road someone is going to do
a podcast about the Fourth Century franchise.
Speaker 1 (56:14):
Yeah, I think so. And maybe one of the iterations
will be boobs and guns. I don't know. Let's hope whatever,
Let's get out of here, goodbye, We'll see you later.
Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
(56:35):
Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stumf and Hamilton Lighthouser, and Your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman. Watch the
Skies
What Are the Worlds may be the strangest franchise in
science fiction because it managed to invade in three different centuries.
It began in the nineteenth century when HG. Wells looked
at Imperial Britain. It was confident, powerful, certain of its
place in the universe, and he asked a devastating question,
what if we were not the conquerors but the natives.
What is something colder and smarter and more technologically advanced
(00:24):
looked at us the way we look at animals or insects,
or amiba's or just people we thought are beneath us.
That was the terror of that first book. It wasn't
just Martians, it was potential humiliation. And then in the
twentieth century Orson Wells took that Victorian nightmare and turned
it into a modern media event. Suddenly the Martians weren't
(00:44):
landing in England. They were landing in New Jersey, though
they were doing it through your radio speaker and in
the middle of what sounded like breaking news. And after
that came the nineteen fifty three film where Wells Invasion
became the Cold War Apocalypse in technicolor, and then science
Faith and atomic bombs and flying war machines all collided
(01:05):
on screen, and then in the twenty first century, it
got its turn, with Spielberg talking about nine to eleven
and terror, broken families, refugees, sirens, and that awful feeling
that the attack had already begun before anyone even understood
what was happening. Television at the same time was stretching
this into conspiracy, survival and identity crisis, and then, not
(01:30):
to be outdone, just last year, we somehow got a
War of the World's remake that was an Amazon age
surveillance thriller starring Ice Cube that was so badly reviewed
it became almost historic in its own right. Proof that
even when the execution collapses, the title still has enough
gravity to pull Hollywood back in. And that may be
(01:51):
the secret to the War of the World's. Every generation
remakes it, because every generation feels watched or judged, threatened,
maybe just a little less in control than it pretends
to be. So in that regard, it's not the Martians,
it's about us. So in this episode, which we call
the three Century franchise, we're not just asking why the
(02:12):
Martians keep coming, We're asking why we keep inviting them back.
I don't know, Brant, what's your take on that one.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That's a great question for me. I think it has
a lot to do with when we look up into
the sky. Mars is one of our closest neighbors. In fact,
it is our closest neighbor that could theoretically be habitable.
And so for the longest time, I think the fact
that we could see it and it appeared red, it
was cloaked in mystery.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
And I think HG.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Wells may have been the first to actually contemplate that
there was life on that planet and coming to invade Earth,
but there was probably millennia of mythology and stories about
the Red Planet. I think the other thing about it
is it's popped up in the news over and over
again throughout history. The minute that they found microbial life
(03:02):
on Mars, suddenly it provoked, well, could there have been
actual life forms on Mars? People saw canals quote unquote
on Mars. Could there have been water on Mars? Could
there have been a whole civilization on Mars? And to
this day, we haven't been to Mars. Actually we've sent
rovers we've explored it to some degree, but we actually
(03:23):
don't know what the history of mars Is, and I
think that is part of what makes this three century
franchise so endearing, is that we're still waiting for answers
about what really happened on Mars.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
This one was a little awesome to research, to be
quite honest with you, because the more you looked into it,
the more you go, Oh my god. How many different
versions have been made of this thing. We got books,
we got feature films, we got multiple TV series, we
have a musical which we'll get into later. It just
goes on. There's comic books, there's gains. It has been
(03:56):
the gift that keeps on giving. We're going to jump
into that in just a second, so stay with us.
(04:19):
I'm Brent Friedman.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
I'm Bryce Abel. You're listening to sound, light and frequency.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Before we take off to Mars, or I should say,
before Mars comes to us. This is one of the
first science fiction stories that I can remember reading.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
HG. Wells.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
War of the World's captured my imagination when I was
just a kid, and it stuck with me for a
long time. And it's so interesting to think that in
the same way that it provoked my imagination, it's provoked
people's imaginations for three centuries.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That's a long time. Let's think about this. We called
it the three Century franchise because it starts in actually
eighteen ninety seven, when it's a cereal it's in Pearson's
Magazine in England, but it's in Cosmopolitan here in the
United States. And you know what's so interesting, that's so
long ago. My grandmother, bless her Heart, wasn't even born then,
(05:48):
and she lived a very long life. It was just
around for a long time. And then a year later,
because it was a page turning catastrophe story the way
they did it as a serial was delivered installed, so
it was the equivalent of a television series today as
it first went out. Then it became the equivalent of
the feature film because the next year, less than a
(06:10):
year later, it became that book that everyone famously talks about.
And the book itself is published in eighteen ninety eight.
And I just think there's something that's very strange that
we should point out that you learn something new every
time you do this brand. It's fantastic. I had no idea. Yes,
it was serialized then there was a book. At the
same time the book is coming out, two American newspapers,
(06:32):
the New York Evening Journal and The Boston Post, both
ripped it off. I thought it took years to rip
something off, but not back then. In believe it's eighteen
ninety eight or ninety nine. The New York Journal comes
up with something called Fighters from Mars or the War
of the World's and they moved the location to New York.
And then the Boston Post, right on the heels, not
(06:54):
to be outdone, comes up with Fighters from Mars or
the War of the World's in near Boston. I guess
what it proves is this is a very portable concept.
The Martians could land in Surrey, England, or in New Jersey,
and later on they'll land in Los Angeles and Boston
or even on somebody's laptop screen. The story's DNA allows
(07:15):
every new version to ask what if the invasion happens
here now? And to us yes.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And I think what makes it such a durable franchise
is that Aliens are probably among the best villains that
you can have in any storytelling format. They are the other,
the archetypal other, and the way at least Wells contemplated them.
They were coming here for resources. They had ruined Mars
(07:41):
and now they needed what we had here on Earth.
And I think that idea of something that challenges our
dominance of this planet. That is one of the great
existential fears that we have as humanity. Which part of
storytelling is you want to live those fears cathartically. It's
why horror movies are so popular. I don't really want
(08:01):
it to happen. I don't really want aliens to invade
this planet, but I want to see the story and
imagine how I would feel what if it would happen.
I think, as you pointed out, another thing that makes
it so durable as the global.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Nature of it.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yes, even if they landed in New Jersey, it would
still be a threat to all of humanity. So no
matter where they land or, as later incarnations of the story,
wherever they arise from on the planet, the whole world
is threatened. And I think that's another great aspect of
the story is that it unites everyone against a common enemy,
(08:35):
and those are very powerful narratives.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
That book, the first book that comes out. HG. Wells
writes it, he took the bold approach. Instead of having
a main character who's involved in fighting aliens or stopping
the invasion, his character is really just someone who's observing it,
observing this ongoing catastrophe. It's a lot less that book
anyway about military vicary. Then it is really human helplessness
(09:02):
or social collapse or biological irony. Because let's face it,
everyone knows now and this is not a spoiler. If
you don't. If you think this is a spoiler, like
like we said, you're a couple of centuries too late
for that one. The Martians are destroyed not by armies
but by microbes. And that's what made it so much
fun and so interesting. Now brnt the thing that and
(09:25):
we can continue to surf around that area as well.
But one of the things, in addition to finding out
that it was ripped off almost instantly, which made me
feel like, wow, some things never change, I found out
something else. Everybody believes that the first time it ever
reared itself again was in nineteen thirty eight when another Wells,
(09:45):
not HG. Wells, the author of the book, but orson Wells,
this young playwright with a deep voice in New York
ends up doing that sort of Halloween broadcast. That freaks
everybody out, and we're going to get to that in
a second. I was shocked, and it really enjoyed realizing
that you and I aren't the only people that have
(10:05):
tried to get things made in Hollywood over the years
and been stymied. And that's a modern feeling that everybody.
Everybody wants to make something, but it's so freaking hard.
Listen to this story. In nineteen twenty five, Okay, so
this is a quarter of a century after the book
comes out, Paramount actually options the book. Okay, great, who
do they option it for? Cecil b to Mill? They
(10:28):
optioned it forl B to Mill, who is going to
make this epic spectacle and he's coming off the success
of The Ten Commandments, so this is no small thing.
I mean, he would have been making a pretty major film.
And they actually wrote a script for it, so it
was in development.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I would love to have seen that movie. But I
would love to find that script. I wonder what it's
online somewhere.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
If we find it, we'll post it. One of the
things that's interesting about it, I don't have that the
detail in front of me, but I recall that they
revised the story considerably about a human alien hybrid. Sound
familiar to what's going on today. Okay, Christ, while they're
busy doing all that around comes nineteen thirty and Sergei
Eisenstein is thought that he should this master of Soviet
(11:13):
montage is going to make the movie for them, And
this was because Paramount briefly assigned him because he was
under contract at the studio. And it really is, if
you think about it, Brent, this is one of the
great alternate history kind of things, because imagine if Eisenstein
had made it, he would have probably emphasized the aliens
less than mass panic and crowds and all this sort
(11:36):
of after disclosure panic stuff and into a montage. Okay,
But just when you said, okay, that's crazy, we got
Cecil b to Mill, we got Eisenstein. What can you
do to eclipse that? Okay. In the nineteen thirties, Alfred
Hitchcock approaches HG. Wells and says, I'd like to option
your book, and HG. Wells says, you can't option my
(11:58):
book because Paramoun has it. And if we're talking about
alternate visions of something, imagine Hitchcock's version. I sure wish
that would have happened. His ghost version would have had
the story would have been about dread and delayed revelation
and social panic, and he probably would have had an
individual who was trapped inside this big thing. And then,
(12:20):
finally in the late nineteen thirties, to catch us all
up before Orson Wells comes in, you got Alexander Korda,
who is a British producer director, and he wants to
bring it to the screen. Only he wants to make
it the sort of the authentic British version, and so
he would have made it with its British roots, but
that fell through too. So that's a lot of development. Hell,
(12:42):
if there are any writers or budding screenwriters listening, you're
not alone and always everyone that you know in development. Hell,
but so were these guys. Which takes us to October thirtieth,
nineteen thirty eight, take it away.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Before we jump into that, I just want to say,
I think it's fascinating that one of the most endorsing
franchises in media took that long to get off the
launching pad. It's incredible. And one other thing you said,
which I think is interesting, is Alfred Hitchcock approaching h
G Wells about the rights to his book. One of
the reasons I would venture that it's being still remade
(13:18):
recently with ice Cube is that it's now in public domain,
so anyone can make something based on War of the Worlds,
whereas back in the day Alfred Hitchcock had to go
get the rights and he wasn't capable of that. So anyway, yes,
jumping into nineteen thirty eight, I find it fascinating that
Orson Wells, who was went on to make arguably one
(13:40):
of the great movies of all time, Citizen Kane, chose
not to make the movie of War of the World's
but a radio play. And it really I think it
was the perfect vehicle for something because it wouldn't have
looked real, but you could make the idea of an
alien invasion over the radio where people got their news.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Boy did they. This happened the day before Thanksgiving, and
at the time Orson Wells was the sort of the leader.
He's twenty three years old. Think about that, he's the
leader of the Mercury Theater of the Air and he
didn't even really want to do this. But I think,
like a lot of places, if you have to get
things done, you get a little desperate. We got to
get something out there. So with very little time, with
(14:24):
a script by Howard Kotch, they come up with this
idea that they're going to tell it as a breaking
news story. That was their concept. They moved the invasion
to contemporary America, and they had it start at Grover's Mill,
New Jersey, which is probably the most famous thing that
has happened in that place. They probably have statues there.
I bet they do the rap on this has been
(14:46):
for years that this broadcast created mass panic across America,
and that was something that everybody took as an article
of faith. Like a lot of things in history, has
gone through some reevaluation over time. Modern scholarship suggests that
the real panic occurred in pockets. But that and get this,
(15:06):
I find this so interesting. It was greatly exaggerated by
newspapers because they were competitive to try to portray radio
as irresponsible and dangerous, so they fanned the flames a
little bit, which I also think is powerful to consider.
And I was listening to some podcasts that had occurred
(15:27):
over the last couple of decades on this because it
had its eightieth anniversary less than a decade ago. And
in two years it'll have its ninetieth anniversary, So this
has been around a while. And one of the things
they said is that the Mercury Theater of the Air
was not the most popular show out there. The one
that they were up against was wildly popular, but had
(15:49):
a boring something going on, and a lot of people
were switching over. But they switched over after Orson Wells
had made his this is all fiction and his disclaimer
if you will. His show had about twelve million people
listening to it, which, frankly, in today's world is a
lot few. Back then, there wasn't that much competition, and
(16:10):
it was amilies gathered around the radio at night. And
what the podcast that I listened to said was of
those twelve million people, about ten percent might have panicked,
which gives you one point two million people right they're
panicking in the streets. So it was enough. But something
you pointed out when we were talking earlier before the
(16:31):
show was this became possibly the predicate for why Roswell
was treated in such a hush hush way.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And going back to those newspaper headlines, I think the
New York Times headline was radio listeners in panic taking
war drama as fact, right, which is very judgmental, like
you said, of the radio format, but that panic it
had to be something that when Roswell happened years later,
people took note of that. Yes, it was thirty eight
(17:00):
and Roswell was nine years later, but I think that
had such an impact on popular culture that certainly the
government took note that. Look what happened when people thought
that aliens were real and that they were coming here.
If we have actual evidence, not just for radio play,
but actual evidence that we're going to take photos of
(17:21):
and put on newspapers, what is that going to do
to the general population.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
It's interesting to note that even when Dolan and I
were writing our ad after disclosure and trying to portray
what might happen after some disclosure statement is made, which
is very relevant to today, we had to take into
account this nineteen thirty eight broadcast because the feeling it's
been cited over and over. That's why people are cautious
(17:47):
about disclosure. They don't want people panicking in the streets.
That was certainly a concern. Then it's a concern now,
which sort of takes us to the big Daddy that
got things really rolling. In terms of the Hollywood aspect
of this and put it portrayed, so you got Orson
Wells again, no relation to H. G. Wells, folks. It's
not a father son thing being passed on or anything.
(18:10):
Just happenstance. Now long comes nineteen fifty three, and as
we've talked about in an earlier episode, the fifties are
the flying saucer mania of the time, and they literally
started in nineteen fifty The first big Saucer movies are
fifty one. In fifty three, along comes The War of
the Worlds, which is a feature film, and it was
(18:31):
produced by George Powell, who was a pretty major producer
of the time, and it was directed by Byron Haskin.
It is, as I said earlier, in technicolor, and in
this case, they moved it to my home ground here.
They moved it to Los Angeles. It starts Jeen Berry
and a woman named Anne Robinson, who that's the name
of my college girlfriend. So I always look at that,
(18:52):
and I don't know why, but it gets my attention.
But they replaced the walking tripods with Manna ray like
war machines. It seemed to float on invisible legs, and
I don't know. I'm just going to put this out
here before a voice and opinion. I saw it many
years ago that in anticipation of us doing this show,
I saw it again, okay, but before I voiced my opinion.
(19:15):
What is your take on the nineteen fifty three version.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
I think it's a great time capsule of what type
of movie was effective at that point in history. It's
charming in a very kind of campy, strange way, and
I think in a strange way for me, the book
actually felt more real than the movie. And one of
the things I wanted to point out was that when H. G.
Wells wrote his book, the aliens themselves were like these
(19:41):
large brain like organisms. Sure, and everything felt like it
was all told through the filter of the fantastic, whereas
I think in the movie. In the fifty three version,
everything felt a little bit more I'm not going to
say grounded, but it felt a little bit more believable,
and there was the more integration of modern technology in
(20:01):
terms of the tripods and how they were represented. And
so it's one of the things we're going to see
throughout those three centuries is that the aliens keep changing,
not just what they look like, but what their motives are,
and the one thing that remains constant through all the
iterations is what kills them right. Never does the story change,
(20:22):
at least through some of the larger expressions of the franchise,
from that idea that it's bacteria or viruses on Earth
that take out the mighty Martians or the later versions
the aliens who come to conquer us.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
I will say this before I voice any negative opinions here.
It did win an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects,
and of the time they are pretty good. It's just
that wow, the characterizations at the beginning just threw me
for a loop. But the main guy is this nuclear physicist,
doctor Clayton Forrester any spell. I don't know, man. He's
(21:01):
just there's a crashed saucer out there, and you know
what he does that night? Since nothing's happening around the
crash saucer, he goes to a square dance in town.
Were very popular in that, yes, they were. Also he
is not really super involved in fighting back. He is
involved again as a bit of an observer here. The
(21:22):
woman who he hangs out with, they, I think the
studio said, we've got to have a love story in here.
So that female character, she's I believe she's a librarian
library science, so she's not dumb, but she doesn't get
to do much in this thing. There is a religious aspect.
He goes looking for her by going to the various
houses of worship and all that. Look, it's not terrible,
(21:44):
but it's not as good for my money as other
things that happened. People disagree with me, though, but I
do believe it does have the Cold War nightmare in
its DNA. It has science, it has religion, it has
nuclear weapons. They actually use a nuclear weapon. Yes, that's amazing, right,
think about that, which is also strange because most of
(22:07):
these fifties movies seem to be aliens are pissed off
at us because we have nuclear weapons, right, and so
we're coming down to set you people straight, so they
use them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
I think that's one of the interesting things about the
movie is that in that way, it almost feels more believable.
At that time, we had already used nuclear weapons to
settle a score and try and win a war. Why
wouldn't we use them against aliens. I'm not saying it's right,
but it makes sense that humanity would try that, and
so it really served as a cautionary tale in that regard.
(22:40):
As you pointed to earlier, in many ways, War of
the Worlds is about us. It's not the story of
Martians looking for a new home or looking for resources,
or whatever the new plot might be in any version
of the story. It's about how we respond to that threat.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah. So to recap, we've gone from serialized newspaper for articles,
to a book, to a radio broadcast to the first
feature film, and then there were some TV things covering
the nineteen thirty eight event, but nobody doing the drama
until I didn't even know this existed. I was alive
for it, but I didn't know they existed. That in
(23:18):
nineteen seventy eight, they made a musical of it, a
musical version shocking.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, that gets to the point where you say, Okay,
I think the franchise is dead. Now it's jumped the shark,
as it were.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
That's what it feels like.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
But no, there were many more expressions of the franchise
to which.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
We should get to. But I'm going to take a
slight detour here. Yes, and here's the reason for the detour.
You and I are both writers at heart. We're also
producers and hosts, and we've directed things and all that,
but at our heart were writers. We value the words
and how they get put together. And the one thing
you have to say for HG. Wells is he came
(23:56):
up with some words that is in the open of
the book that have defined all of the genre exploitations
of it. Nobody seems to be able to make something
without getting to them. Now in the actual book itself,
it's three paragraphs long. But I'm just going to read,
and you've got to forgive me. I can't be some
(24:17):
of the people that have read these things, but these
are the words that touched people so much. He wrote.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to
our minds as ours are to those of the beasts
that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their
(24:40):
plans against us. That's powerful, drew their plans against against
us captured. It captures the fear that we all live under,
and it's very relevant even today. We're on the verge
of some form of disclosure. So we're told in the
news and what if that disclosure is there are aliens
making plans against us. I was just going to say
(25:02):
that the words that he's chosen, vast and cool and unsympathetic,
those are just powerful, and they mean they're not exactly evil.
They're not passionate, they're not demonic. They're worse than that.
They're superior. They're detached, they're calculating. It's very scary. And
then he uses the phrase envious eyes, which is also disturbing.
(25:26):
They want Earth. This is not curiosity that draws them
to Earth. It is strategic desire. And then also that
final phrase slowly and surely drew their plans against us,
which means this invasion has long range planning. It's not
like an impulse. They didn't wake up one day in
Mars and go, you know what, these earth Wings don't
(25:46):
seem to have their shit together, Let's take them down. No,
they've been thinking about it and making plans. Okay, here's
what I just wanted to make clear to everybody. There's
nobody that has avoided this. In the nineteen thirty eight
radio broadcast, they did their own revision of it, and
a guy named Dan Seymour wrote it in the nineteen
fifty three film. There's Sir Frederick Hardwick. I don't know him,
(26:10):
but I certainly heard of the very good work. And
he does the nineteen fifty three film. And in that
musical that we've made fun of, Richard Burton. Richard Burton
does of all People, and in a film that we're
going to get to later, which is the two thousand
and five Spielberg Cruise version of it, Morgan Freeman, the
(26:31):
man who has made more money voiceovering things than probably
any human on earth. And look, I'm not saying that
we are going to read them all, but I thought
maybe we should take our shot at a couple of them.
We've got the Richard Burton version and the Morgan Freeman version.
Take your pick, my friend.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
I'm going Burton all the way. It's the musical, right,
how can I.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Not give us and that way people can sort of
judge how things evolve and get revised over time. So
go with Burton. By the way, the movie's a musical.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
That does not mean I will be singing this no please,
Although I lot of expectations from yes that would be
in the outtakes portions of the show. No one would
have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds
of space. No one could have dreamed that we were
being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that
(27:23):
swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men
even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And
yet across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to
ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and
surely they drew their plans against us.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Wow and scene, yees see. Nice job. Many people who
are listening to us are like Richard Burton. I don't know,
but he was the bomb in the sixties. He was
married to Elizabeth Taylor. The guy had a good life.
Say no more. Yeah, okay, now I'm going to read
them Morgan Freeman part. But that's pretty bold because nobody
on Earth living today is as successful as so this
(28:07):
is not an impersonation in Morgan Freeman. I'm asked, thank
you for clarifying that. Listen to the rewrite that they
did in two thousand thoughts. That's wasn't it. Yeah, that's
what Freeman is saying, So here's what he got to deliver.
No one would have believed, by the way, the reason
we're reading these is because we can't afford to use
Morgan Freeman's voice. That'll cost this fortune. We're doing this
(28:28):
podcast on a budget, folks. Okay, no one would have
believed in the early years of the twenty first century
that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than
our own, That as men busied themselves about their various concerns,
they observed and studied the way a man with a
microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply in
(28:49):
a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to
and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over
this world. Yet across the gulf of space into life,
vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our planet with envious eyes,
and slowly and surely through their plans against us.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Nicely done, Thank you. You know what word jumps out
at me? Yes, there's some little nuances in there, But
for me, there's a key word in there right that
frames how this story was being told and the point
of view of it, and that is complacency. Yes, it's
the first time that you get a sense that somehow
we deserved this, we let our guard down. The other
(29:32):
versions of the stories was nope, they're coming down. They
see our planet, they're better than us, they want it.
Good luck stopping them. This was in our infinite complacency.
And so I think that's two thousand and five. Is
that when the film was made. So yeah, I think
that it's another example of how the story has transformed
(29:54):
itself over the decades, the centuries, and now it's taking
on a completely new tenor where Spielberg changes some other
aspects of the story which I think are fascinating, But
in that particular instance, there is that sense of we
deserve this somehow and we're going to have to redeem ourselves,
(30:14):
and that plays out a little bit in the micro
kind of drama of Tom Cruise and his family and
proving himself to be a good father and protector. So
it was interesting just with that one slight addition, it
gives the whole thing a different kind of patina, if
you will, I look.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
At War the world's the way we look at Superman.
Every generation gets the Superman they deserve. Yes, right, and
every generation gets the War of the Worlds that they deserve.
And we have jumped to two thousand and five, but
I just wanted to backfill one thing. About a decade
after that musical came out, there was a War of
the World's TV series. This is the first time it
(30:51):
appeared on TV in nineteen eighty eight and it ran
for two seasons. And what was interesting about the TV
series is they did not remake the book. They took
the nineteen fifty three movie starring Jean Barry and Anne
Robinson and made that their starting point. They assumed that
had happened, right, that the Martians maybe didn't die, they
(31:15):
just kind of went into hiding, and now they're back.
So it became a much more normal alien invasion kind
of thing. And I want to come back to two
thousand and five, but I just want to fill the
time period a little bit because people may not appreciate
Mars has had a couple of areas of great interest
in Renaissance. Obviously, the first time Mars came to the
(31:39):
forefront was at the end of the Yeah the nineteen
hundreds in eighteen ninety eight, when that book was coming out.
Perceval Lowe was writing about canals on Mars that was
going down, and in the world of eufology, there were
all these airships that were being spotted, so it was
an active paranormal but Mars kind of thing. The other
(32:00):
time when Mars really became big was in nineteen seventy six,
a couple of years before that musical version. And I
know this because this is my little coming of age story.
But in nineteen seventy six, I was a radio reporter
at a hippie radio station in Eugene, Oregon, at KSEL,
and I did the morning show, and I went in
(32:21):
on that day on July nineteenth, nineteen seventy six, because
at five o'clock, Viking lander was landing on Mars. And
what made this the most dramatic news event that I
experienced completely by myself, because there was nobody else other
than the disc jockey in this radio station, is that
there was a nineteen minute delay between what was going
(32:44):
on at Mars and what was being reported over the
AP machine that was spewing out interesting okay. So that
meant when I saw the AP stuff coming over associated
press paper coming over, it could have it was either
dead or was there the lander, and so I literally
(33:05):
wrote down that bulletin. It says bulletin AP, and I
want you to think about this coming over at teletype,
clicking in the paper. It's spooling slowly, one line at
a time. First line says bullet in AP. Second line Pasadena, California.
This is all caps, the unmanned Viking one lander has
and that's all it had on that line, right, And
(33:27):
I'm not kidding. It broke the sentence right there for
an excruciating second. I'm like, it could say has crashed?
Has what is it? And then again in all caps
it says touchdown on the planet Mars. It took nineteen
minutes for radio signals from the spacecraft to reach the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, confirming the landing. Now,
(33:49):
the reason I bring that up is because the lander
survived in seventy six, it started doing something that really
played into the Mars history to come in the world
the worlds because it gave us our first pictures of Mars.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Now I remember that too. It was very impactful at
the time.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Oh my gosh, and you have people today going, ah, Mars,
you've seen one Mars picture you've seen Wall. We've had
a lot of landers there. But when nineteen seventy six
came that first I got a picture of Mars from
NASA and I framed it in this stupid, ugly frame.
But for the next fifteen years, wherever I would move,
I would hang that up in my bedroom because I
found that to be so powerful. People have this thing
(34:30):
about Mars that the modern version starts in seventy six.
Now let's jump to two thousand and five, because again,
there are certain actors and directors that say, you know what,
I want to put my imprint on that, And boy,
you could not have a better collection than to say,
Steven Spielberg with David Kepp as the screenwriter, does that
(34:51):
sounds familiar? And those credits are on disclosure Day as
yes they are. And they work together on this story
of this adaptation of War of the Worlds, and they
hired Tom Cruise to play the guy, and you started
to talk about it. But it seems to me very
interesting that their choice was Tom Cruise. Is this I'm
(35:14):
not sure exactly what he does.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
He's like a blue collar dad, right, struggling. I think
he and his wife are separated or that there's some
family drama that was never part of the earlier versions
of this story.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
And he's not that good at being a dad. Kids.
It's all movie kids. They don't get along with their parents,
and that's going to have to be solved by the
movie that you're going to watch. But boy, Spielberg did
a great jobs as showing aliens arriving and coming to
life and destroying shit.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Then there's some key differences here again that I feel
are obviously Steven Spielberg wants to tell his version, as
you said, put his imprint on this work. But at
the same time, I feel like the audience appetite for
science fiction had changed. What was it acceptable in nineteen
fifty three in terms of representation of aliens was no
(36:04):
longer in two thousand and five, and so this time
we get biomechanical creatures, right. That was some kind of
infusion of organic and technology that felt very cutting edge
and science fiction. They were instead of tripods, they were hexapods, right,
So everything was more sophisticated and complicated. But the big
difference they had was these aliens weren't from Mars.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
These were embedded underground that had been there like some
ancient evil waiting to rise up. I believe they were
there for at least a million years, waiting to come
up and reclaim their planet. So that was a whole
new take on War of the Worlds. And yet, so
that's a whole new take.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
That's Spielberg and Cap and crews probably saying, let's go
for it, right, let's do this. But what Spielberg did
was also do a throwback to the eighteen ninety eight
book Where Again, and the main character is somebody who's
observing the catastrophe. But Cruz's character, as you said, is
he's a bad dad, and he's a blue collar guy.
(37:10):
He's not a scientist, he's not a soldier. He's just
a flawed, working class guy trying to keep his kids alive.
And that becomes what the movie's about. So the fascinating
choice the director has made here is to see this
invasion from a guy who doesn't know shit. He doesn't
know what's going on in Japan, he doesn't know if
they've invaded England, he doesn't know whether it's going good
(37:32):
or bad anywhere else. He just knows it ain't going
good where he is.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
And the interesting thing is he is not going to
save Earth from these aliens. All he is asked to
do is save his family or keep them alive long
enough for once again Earth's viruses and bacteria to destroy
the aliens. So that is again the constant that runs
through again the major expressions of this franchise.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
At least, as with all our shows, we get to
the blaze where we go, I can just keep talking
about this for another hour and a half, but we
can't do that, So I'm going to jump ahead quickly.
After two thousand and five where they laid that out,
there were several sort of faux documentaries made about it,
(38:17):
where they were TV documentaries, fake documentaries showing the coverage.
So in other words, it's a perfect homage to the
book and the nineteen thirty eight thing to do a
fake documentary about that kind of stuff. I'm not going
to go into all of those. There were by my
count at least three and maybe four at least four.
(38:38):
But what happens then, and this is all very relevant
to today. In twenty nineteen, the BBC gets in the
act and they come up with a mini series, a
three part mini series that I personally think is very
worth seeing because it takes place in England and it's
got two main characters. It's a period added and it's
(39:01):
the first one to show us that it's Edwardian England.
And I just thought it was very good. It's not
full of action, it's not an American action piece, but
it feels very much like the book come to life.
So I enjoyed that. And then in twenty nineteen, Fox
and Canal Plus make a TV series that stars Gabriel
Byrne and Daisy Edgar Jones, and that one doesn't have
(39:26):
anything to do really with the roots of it. This
one is just saying the Martians, I'm trying to remember
it's a mass extinction event. I guess the same, but
it's much more subtle. It's after the fact and these
guys are just trying to stay alive. It went three seasons,
so you've got these two TV series going on at
the same time. And now we get to ice Cube.
(39:47):
Have you got your raspberries out there, folks? Yeah? Have
you seen this one? By the way, did you watch No?
Speaker 2 (39:54):
I remember when it came out and I thought, I
just can't go there. It would have had to have
gotten like a ninety plus on Metacritic for me to
eat and think about watching it.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
This movie has some of the worst reviews of any
movie ever on a quality level of Mortal Kombat Annihilation.
If you want to have there, you go to bring
it home. Yes, exactly, folks. We wrote Mortal Kombat Annihilation,
which is a very poorly reviewed film. So we're not
attacking people where they live. We're just commenting. I watched it.
(40:24):
It didn't work. Ice Cube is this guy working for
the Department of Homeland Security. It looks like it was
made during the pandemic. It's all on screens. None of
it makes any sense. He's one guy. He's an analyst.
He's the only guy in Homeland Security on a Sunday.
He's just an analyst. He's also tracking his kids and
invading their social media spaces. And yet the President calls
(40:47):
in basking what he should do about this. It's just wacky,
And so I watched it. It was hard. It was
candidly hard to get through. Who knows where it all
went wrong, but it did go wrong, and I have
to tip my hat. I think the name of the
other podcast is how did this movie get made? Or
how did this film get made? Right? It has three hosts,
and I was just laughing my ass off with them.
(41:09):
All films have problems, and that goes our work too.
Rif you start to peel it apart, you go, wait,
what's the logic behind that. It's just that this particular
film version just doesn't bear any weight of logic. So
I guess what this would say, Brent, is that there
are people out there who should be aware, as you
pointed out, that anybody can make a war of the
(41:29):
world's Yes, sometimes that's bad, but maybe somebody will make
a great one next year, who knows.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
I think one thing we can say about the franchise
is that it could very well be a four century
franchise when all is said and done, because it's a
very durable story. It's open to interpretation by anyone, like
you said, because it's in public domain. Let's see how
actual disclosure goes in the near future. But I think
that notion of living under the sort of damocles with
(41:57):
a possible alien invasion of higher intelligence, greater technology, we
will live in that fear, possibly forever, and as soon
as they start confirming that there is actual life out there,
that fear will only get intensified. I guarantee you. One
thing I do want to point out as we as
I try and take us off the beaten path. Now,
(42:20):
one of the things that we like to do in
this show is to make connections between different ideas, and
one of the main ideas behind War of the Worlds,
as we've expressed in different ways, is this notion of
an alien invasion and what it means to humanity and
what we would do and how we would respond. We've
talked about it in another terms of ontological shock. There's
(42:42):
an interesting conspiracy theory that's been floating out there for
quite some time, I believe, going back to the nineties,
and it's called Project Bluebeing, and you may have.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Heard of it.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
So you're taking there, all right, I'm taking you off
the beaten path.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
That's here, okay, go yeah. Do you want your tinfoil
hat to I may need that. Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
So the interesting thing about this and how it relates
to War of the Worlds is that in the early
nineteen nineties there was a Canadian theorist and journalist named
Serge Manost I don't know if I'm saying that correctly,
who published a detailed account about this Project Bluebeam that
was associated with NASA, and he said it was going
(43:25):
to happen in ninety five ninety six, but then he
died unexpectedly in nineteen ninety six, and then conspiracy theorists
took that idea of his ran with it, and they
just kept pushing the date forward so that it never
had an expiration to it. It always stayed relevant. What's
interesting about it is that the theory itself, conspiracy theory,
(43:47):
if we must, is based on a couple key ideas.
The first is that the stage one was going to
be that there was going to be triggering of earthquakes
or that would unearth archaeological artifacts that might start to
change the way we think about our past. And that
also there was going to be something that comes out
(44:10):
that starts to discredit or change how we think about
major religions. Let's take it at face value for a moment.
We're there right now. They're finding things underneath the Great
Pyramids that are going to start to apparently challenge everything
we know about those artifacts. We are having apparently meetings
between pastors who are being told to prepare their flocks
(44:32):
because religion may not be what you think. So again,
conspiracy theory. But if you look at stage one, it's
already happening. Now you move on to stage two, and
this is where it starts to get interesting. Stage two
is that there's going to be potentially some sort of
gigantic space show. And what this means is that someone's
going to be using advanced holographic projectors to start putting
(44:56):
images in the sky, and those are going to start
challenging all sorts of religious leaders. We might start to
see theories around the Antichrist taking form or shape in
the skies. The idea is that it starts to create
global chaos and everyone starts to look for a new
(45:16):
spiritual leader. Okay, so now we're going We're way out
on a limb here with regards to this. However, there's
so much online chatter right now about this idea that
somehow the powers that be are preparing us with all
of the stuff that's going on for Project Bluebeam, for
some enactment of Project Bluebeam. Now, for me, I personally
(45:39):
find the whole thing hard to swallow. However, I do
think that holographic technology has advanced to a place where
I've seen images online and videos of things where they
particularly in China where they have done huge holographic displays
in the.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Sky that blew my mind.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Well again, a guy makes a conspiracy theory in nineteen
ninety five, and today in twenty six we're having pastors
that are being told to start thinking about religion might
not be what it is. There is holographic technology out
there that theoretically could pull off putting any type of
images in the sky, which makes us question and wonder
how many of the things that we are apparently recording,
(46:22):
whether it's drones on the East Coast or whether it's
UFOs anywhere in the world, might actually just be holographic technology.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Correct, I mean if I'm wrong, But isn't the essence
of Project Bluebeam that these things are going to be
brought to four to convince people that there are aliens
attacking us which will bring about one world government or
whatever the conspiracy theory is. But there aren't really aliens.
Isn't that the contents?
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Well so again, one of the interesting things about this theory,
this conspiracy theory, and as most do, they mutate over
the years. Right, what was originally positive is different than
what everyone believes today. Part of the idea is that.
Oh no, this isn't saying there are no aliens. This
is saying that the aliens are not hostile.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Look, Brent, I'm not a bluebeamer. I love that term.
I would say only this. I believe aliens are one
hundred percent real and they're here. So I don't need
a blue beam to explain anything other than if there
was some rational reason for a blue beam to confuse us.
But I don't feel we know who the aliens are
(47:28):
very well anyway right now. So it strikes me as
odd that we need a blue beam to confuse us,
because I'm confused already, and so are most of the
people listening to this show about what's really going on
in the real world. So that's my blue beam take there.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
I completely agree. I think the more you put it
under scrutiny, it doesn't hold up. There's only one thing
that I can't get out of my brain pan here,
and it goes back to the father of modern rocketry,
with Werner von Braun. So von Braun was part of
Project paper Clip. He was a Nazi scientist who was
(48:04):
brought over after World War Two to come and take
everything he had done with the V two rocket. But
to do it for the US, And so I've actually
been to the Space and Rocketry headquarters down in Huntsville, Alabama,
where there's a whole part of a museum down there
devoted to Werner bon Braun. And we would never have
gone to space without this guy. So this guy was
(48:27):
a legitimate genius. It just so happens that when he
was dying the last couple of years of his life,
he had an assistant, a woman named Carol Rosen, and
he insisted not once, but many times over those four
years to her that the whole idea of putting weapons
in space was something that was a control mechanism by
(48:50):
the powers that be, and he did not want it
to happen. He was wholly against this, and he said,
but there are plans to make it happen, and it
will happen this way. The first is that we will
make the Russians into an enemy. Then we will start
to shift our focus to terrorists, and then we will
(49:11):
start to see asteroids and space bodies that are coming
to threaten us. And the last card that will be
played is the alien card, and that is the one
where there will be an alien threat that forces the
world governments to align and put turn on all of
the space lasers to protect us. Do not believe it.
(49:32):
It will be a lie. Now, you could say this
was an old man who was dying. If he'd said
it once, I'd go okay, maybe he had too much
to drink that night. But if you listen to Carol Rosen,
who by the way, is still alive, she is emphatic
that this happened many times in their conversations. And so
that's the thing when I think about, for instance, when
(49:53):
Toby Hooper talked to us and said Steven Spielberg was
given the true it's just one person's testimony against many
decades of Steven Spielberg saying I don't know anything else.
This is just one person's testimony. But in this particular case,
Werner von Braun is somebody that you have to take seriously.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Major dude, that guy. And I've been aware of that story,
and it appears the fact that this story is probably
true that he said these things doesn't make his conclusion true.
That's a separate thing. But I believe that he said
that to Carol Rosen, And yeah, so Brent, we could
go out on blue Beam and Werner von Braun. But
(50:34):
I have a Mars oriented, Hollywood crazy story to end
on that might leave a smile on everybody's face. Let's
go with that. It seems like that might get us out,
all right. This is a story that actually happened to me,
and it's very Hollywood. Okay. It's nineteen eighty six, and
I always wanted to go to Mars ever since I
(50:54):
saw that news Clint come over and there wasn't an Internet,
but I bought books of Mars, and I thought I'd
like to go to Mars. But that's probably not in
the cards given my current age. I'm not going to Mars,
but I can go to Mars in my head. I
was working with a fellow writer, Brad Markowitz, who is
one of our co producers on This Dark Sky Yeah Yeah,
(51:16):
and on Dark Skys, and so we started talking about
Mars and I showed him a book that I had,
which was called The Face. And a lot of people
know about the Face. At the time, there were images
that looked like a sphinx like face on Mars, and
brand I came up with a movie idea that there
was a space race to go to Mars to check
(51:36):
out the Face. On Mars. One of them was a
UN group that was trying to get there, and another
one was run by some crazy space entrepreneur. So basically
we were thinking at the time like a Ted Turner,
but in fact I think we were actually channeling Elon Musk.
It was like Elon Musk versus the UN to get
there kind of thing. And I won't go into the
(51:57):
details of the story or anything, but it was success.
We wrote this script and our agents at CAA said,
we really like this. We're sending it to Joel Silver. Now,
Joel Silver is probably someone you've heard of before. He's
a mega producer from Hollywood. At the time, he was huge.
He was the producer of Lethal Weapon and I'm trying hard,
(52:18):
die hard. He was a major guy, and he had
just moved, for I believe, from Warner Brothers to twentieth
and so Brad and I had a meeting with him.
Now we were young. We had a few Hollywood meetings,
but to go to a studio and to meet with
Joel Silver about a script that we'd written seemed like
a big deal. You have to pass through parking and
(52:39):
all this, you're doing all this and you're like, oh
my gosh. And we get there and his assistant says,
mister Silver is expecting you, please wait here, and they
sit us on some kind of couch outside his office,
but his door is open, and there is Joel Silver
in what looks like a klftan to me, a large
flowing klftan. And this is the eighties, so he's on
(53:00):
a gigantic telephone, right, but it's wireless. I think he
was actually talking to somebody. He could have been doing
this just for us, but he's yelling at somebody on
the set about how to do things. And we're like, wow,
we're watching this uber producer. This is so exciting. I
wonder how this is going to go down. And then
finally he finishes, and they escort us into his office
(53:20):
and he comes around from his desk and now he's
sitting on his desk looking at us, and he said.
The first thing he says is I make movies that
make money. Do you think I should apologize for that?
And this seems so odd to me, but I said, no, sir, no,
I don't think you should apologize for that. And he says,
there are two things that make a movie make money.
(53:42):
Do you know what they are? He was very emphatic,
and I had a little notebook with me. I actually
got the notebook out with my pen because I thought
he's going to tell me the secret to Hollywood here,
and I need to write this down. Sound, light, and frequency.
That's three words that wouldn't worked. These were two words.
He says, there's two things that make for a movie
that make money. Do you know what they are? I'm
(54:04):
prepared to write them down. And I swear to God,
this is exactly what the man said. And he was
a power in Hollywood. He says, boobs and guns. Wait,
let me write that down. I've been doing it wrong
all these years. I put my notebook down. Now, okay,
there's one final piece to this story that'll crack you up.
So that happened. So then we get into the notes
on the script. The script begins with a bike with
(54:27):
a spacecraft crash landing on Mars. It's full of energy
and excitement. It would have been a fantastic beginning to
a film. He goes, No, that's no good. That's not
going to work. We can't do that. He goes, you
ever heard about SETI and we had the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. He goes, here's what you gotta do. You
gotta do this. You got a guy, it's late at night,
(54:50):
he's in the SETI headquarters, he's all by himself, and
he's watching porn and what comes over his screen is
the face on Mars. And Brad and I like, what
the f what? And so we take the meeting. We
try to push back, he's not having it. We leave
and his assistant takes this acide afterwards and we're like,
(55:10):
this doesn't make any sense. We got this great scene.
Why would he be watching porn and why would the
face in Mars appear on a porn show? What is
that all about? It's a secret. And the guy says, listen,
if you want to stay on the project, you're going
to do the note. And our agents, when they heard
of this, said, are you crazy. Of course you're going
(55:30):
to do the note. It's just a scene. It's porn.
Who cares write it? So we literally did write an
opening scene where a guy was watching porn at SETI
and saw the face on Mars. And there's more to
the story, but I'm not going to tell it because
that's a good place to add. All I can say
is that goes to show that different brains will look
(55:50):
at different material in different ways, which to wrap it
back up to the War of the World's I think
says that's why War of the World's kind of works
a roar shock test. It gives you the basic infrastructure
of the film, but different people can see it differently.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
Yeah, and that's why I say, I suspect that at
some point down the road someone is going to do
a podcast about the Fourth Century franchise.
Speaker 1 (56:14):
Yeah, I think so. And maybe one of the iterations
will be boobs and guns. I don't know. Let's hope whatever,
Let's get out of here, goodbye, We'll see you later.
Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
(56:35):
Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stumf and Hamilton Lighthouser, and Your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman. Watch the
Skies
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