New 'War of the Worlds' TV miniseries

Having what appeared to be a budget of about $200 didn't help. And five of those bucks went to that awful fake mustache.

 

And a CSO effect to have the protagonist knock upon a door...

No, the door was not 20 or 30 feet tall that required a model (either physical or digital), nor was it part of a much larger shot that depicted a huge stately manor where they couldn't stage the scene. No, this was a rather ordinary door, wood, with molding around recessed panels that can be found upon many regular houses. And the shot was zoomed tight enought that only a small amount of the frame appeared around the door. Yest, it is bloody apparent they used CSO to insert the lead actor into the image!

And don't get me started on the break-dancing Poser skeletons during the Woking sand pit massacre!

 

They also do modern mystery series, like Sherlock, and Lewis, so it's not all the dry, stuffy stuff that has become it's reputation.

 

Yeah, that movie badly needed an edit. But at least I admired them for sticking to the period. It was certainly overly long though.

 

That's what used to be called Mystery!, which was a sister show of Masterpiece Theater for 28 years. For some reason, in 2008 they merged the shows under the Masterpiece heading, and now they have Masterpiece Classic (or just Masterpiece), Masterpiece Mystery, and Masterpiece Contemporary, all with different hosts, though I think they've dropped the hosts recently.

Hmm, maybe it's because of that "stuffy" reputation you describe that they rebranded it and merged it with the modern stuff.

 

I think it's all just back to Masterpiece now, but I haven't watched anything on there in a while so I'm not positive.

 

I wonder why they "merged" them all under the same title. I kind of miss Mystery! being its own thing with the Edward Gorey titles and a dedicated host (Vincent Price! Diana Rigg!).

 

I double checked and they are all just under Masterpiece on the PBS website.
Not sure why the merged them, I also liked it better when they were separated by theme.

 

I've been waiting for this

 

Are the couple quick clips in the BBC ad from January the only footage they've released so far?

 

In the UK, yes, I've heard that both France and Germany have shown clips on TV. If it's airing early October in UK, then the BBC should be running trailers roughly 1-2 weeks before, so we should be seeing something soon.

 

Can it be anything in between, or no?

 

Trailer will air in under a couple of days here:

 

Yeah, technology dating - any show is still a product of its time and it's more the exception than a rule that a show holds up. If it does, there's something truly great about it that goes beyond the contemporary technological standards of the time.

I'd wager that a nuclear dump site on the moon going boom-boom and as a result the moon is flung across space to meet countless worlds and civilizations at sub-light speed is a slightly massively more stupid idea, though to be fair it's miraculous that the bodies survived in such a situation for decades... But "Space 1999", ignoring that problem and hold suspension of disbelief and thus rolling with certain episodes, there's still much enjoyment to be had. At least for season one. WotW also had a few outstanding episodes in amongst the mire.

It's also not inconceivable (or is just as silly) that their bodies, when burnt, would just make everyone high as if they were smoking marijuana or LSD or something.

But that aside, it does make sense to treat their bodies as toxic waste. Though as the barrels rust over x number of decades or centuries and start to leak... oops...

 

It was a conceit of the show that proximity to aliens had an effect on human memory, which was the lame excuse for why the world had mostly forgotten that the devastating alien invasion that had destroyed almost every major city only 35 years earlier had happened at all. They did an episode tying UFO abduction stories together with the WotW aliens, implying they were the cause of them all, which didn't fit at all with the premise that they'd been dormant since 1953, but it was a very dumb and wrong episode in many other ways (like having the lead character seduce and bed a patient of his who's an alien-rape survivor, which is a gross ethical violation and just plain gross).

 

Trailer's live, only bloody 40 seconds though, and still not a definite air date for the UK.

 

Looks promising. Will I finally get to see the valiant Thunderchild in live action? Only time will tell.

 

NFT preview screening on November 5th, so not running in October.