• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

The many movie versions of War of the Worlds

Like others, I just couldn't get past the outlandish explanation of worldwide mass amnesia. What did the population think caused all that damage?! Gophers??!!!

Let's face it, the 1980s of a post world wide Martian invasion would have little resemblance to the real world of 1988. Many areas would still be in ruins, but other areas rebuilt would no doubt benefit from the technology we salvaged from the ambulatory capped mushroom men, making it probably more advanced than real life.

Really, the first season with just a retelling of "The Invaders" starring Roy Thinnes, just with an ensemble cast rather than a singular star. As set up, they could shoot using contemporary sets and costumes, the only special aspects being the occasional garbage bag wrapped performer extending a sucker fingered limb. (Yes, that's a simplification, but you get the idea.) George Pal's failed 1970s TV project would have made more sense, but it would have involved a hefty budget. Had it been made, we would have seen a ship derived from the Leif Ericson model kit that was designed by Matt Jefferies. You can read a bit about it here...

http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_of_the_worlds_tv_pal.htm

I will admit I loved one thing about the series. The opening credit score! I once favorited a YouTube video that was the music without Jared Martin's narration (apparently copied from a soundtrack release), but it got pulled. One can find a video of the actual credits, but the sound quality is a bit muddled and it has Martin's monologue. What I had originally found was a crystal clear hi-fi track.

Sincerely,

Bill
 
I still have that novelization. :) I love getting the aliens' side of things!

When I was comparing it to TNG...and I guess my memory's more blurred than I thought...I mostly meant that TNG had the family-friendly somewhat sterile vibe (episodes like "Conspiracy" notwithstanding) while WotW was...doing what it was doing. :)

Wasn't The Flash on around the same time?
 
Oh, that's right, it premiered in 1988. Which may explain why its writing was so inept and so often by obviously pseudonymous writers (like "Sylvia Clayton," "Forrest Van Buren," and even "Sylvia Van Buren") -- because the '88 writers' strike was going on while the show was in the early phases of production, and thus the scripts may have been by, err, someone other than WGA-accredited screenwriters.

DonIago, The Flash premiered in September 1990, four months after WOTW aired its final first-run episode.
 
Christopher said:
There was also the 1988 War of the Worlds: The Series, a partner to Star Trek: The Next Generation in Paramount's syndication package, and a direct sequel to the George Pal film, albeit with some odd reinterpretations of some of the film's ideas for the convenience of the series -- e.g. the aliens now had the ability to enter and possess human bodies, and the world had mostly forgotten the '53 invasion due to some combination of mass denial and alien-induced collective amnesia. The first season was pretty lame but had a good cast and, despite the changes, did a decent job presenting itself as a continuation of the movie, within the limits of its small budget. The second season drastically revamped things for the worse and was almost unwatchable.
Click to expand...

I have to agree the first season of the TV series was just about passable, and the revamped second season was unwatchable.
 
About five years ago, I wrote this on LiveJournal about my dream of a WotW/TNG crossover...

Serious dreamland time here.

A Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover.

The first season of WotW coincided with the second season of TNG. Creator Greg Strangis had been hired to create TNG (he was Paramount's third choice, after Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett both passed), and Strangis was shunted aside when Roddenberry realized that Paramount was actually serious (in other words, Paramount sent Roddenberry the series bible as a courtesy), and Strangis was out as a creator, though he worked on TNG's first season as a creative producer, much as Herb Wright did (and would again, on TNG's fifth season).

Someone in Paramount Television could have had the bright idea that what WotW needed was attention, that it needed viewers to take another look at it. What if they did a TNG crossover...?

Chances are Roddenberry in '88 would have said "Piss off" if anyone at Paramount Television had floated the idea of doing a crossover between their two sci-fi franchise shows.

Let's suppose that Roddenberry didn't balk.

TNG was in its second season, when the show was still a bit goofy.

The filming logistics are going to be terrible, but they're really no worse than Barry Levinson and Dick Wolf dealt with five years later with the Homicide/Law & Order crossovers.

Let's imagine a structure like those H/L&O crossovers. One War of the Worlds episode, one Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I'd suggest kicking it off with the stronger series, so it would begin with a NextGen episode. Perhaps the Enterprise-D finds Mor-Tax. Or another planet, perhaps a human colony, that's under attack by the Mor-Taxians. (The latter could be quite good; we could have a "base under siege"-type story.) Perhaps there's some sort of time corridor, that leads back to Earth, 1988, and the Mor-Taxians are attempting to rewrite the past. (Shades of TNG's "Time's Arrow," come to think of it.) Which leads us into the second part, when an Enterprise away team finds themselves running around Vancouver.

At the time, I so hoped that Paramount would have done a crossover between the two series. I don't know if anyone there even thought of it.

If only...
Click to expand...
 
MacLeod said:
Christopher said:
There was also the 1988 War of the Worlds: The Series, a partner to Star Trek: The Next Generation in Paramount's syndication package, and a direct sequel to the George Pal film, albeit with some odd reinterpretations of some of the film's ideas for the convenience of the series -- e.g. the aliens now had the ability to enter and possess human bodies, and the world had mostly forgotten the '53 invasion due to some combination of mass denial and alien-induced collective amnesia. The first season was pretty lame but had a good cast and, despite the changes, did a decent job presenting itself as a continuation of the movie, within the limits of its small budget. The second season drastically revamped things for the worse and was almost unwatchable.
Click to expand...

I have to agree the first season of the TV series was just about passable, and the revamped second season was unwatchable.
Click to expand...
Yea, back then, if it had Aliens, and/or Spaceships, and we found something about a show we liked (Chemistry, Format, Premise, storyArc...) and everything else was bland or sucked, we (The General Audience) let the show be mediocre for a Season or two, in the hopes it would achieve it's potential. Now, people will turn off a "Mediocre show with promise" in less than 6 Episodes (often within 3 episodes)

I didn't watch WoTW Series, until about 2005 or a bit past. I watched the First Season on DVD and it had some stuff I wanted to stick with, and despite the Cheesiness, the Season 1 Finale had me excited for a Second Season, in the hopes they would fix the Cheeziness and move forward. I waited for a year or more, until S2 was available on DVD, and yea, although it was neat to see such a young Rachel Blanchard often, and Adrian Paul joining was kinda cool, But, it wasn't worth losing Ironside and Norton for adding Adrian Paul, and increasing Rachel Blanchard's presence, as well as watering down Harrison.

Suzanne, would've my been my choice to release first, but Watered down Harrison could go too (watered down Harrison could go before Suzanne even, if we need to keep the Female Lead, and don't want to try a different Female character instead)
 
^Yeah, but I think Sindatur's point is that the second-season version of Harrison stripped away everything that had made the character who he was, so it was as if the Harrison we liked was gone anyway and Jared Martin was just playing some nondescript action lead instead.

I think it was a mistake to kill off any of the original cast, because the chemistry among the four of them was superb and was really the show's only saving grace.
 
I still think you're being harsher on the show than I would be, though I haven't seen any of it in decades.

I agree though, the change in character dynamics from S1 to S2 was lamentable. Even at that age I was WTFing over the changes.
 
DonIago said:
I still think you're being harsher on the show than I would be, though I haven't seen any of it in decades.
Click to expand...

Well, I'm harsher on season 1 after seeing it again than I would've been before. It really, really hasn't aged well.

But I loathed most of season 2 at the time. I honestly don't know why I bothered to watch the whole season -- probably just because Lynda Mason Green was so gorgeous that I couldn't stop watching (and Catherine Disher was pretty hot too). It actually did get a little better in the second half of the season, and there was one episode that I recall really liking (in which the characters moved heaven and earth to ensure Debi had a happy birthday in the midst of this hellish dystopia); but the series finale was such a bizarre, idiotic cheat that it undid whatever goodwill the preceding episodes had built up.
 
Maybe it's best if I don't rewatch the show then; enjoy the memories I have instead.

Even at the time I remember my feelings for S2 ranging from "What the heck happened?" with regards to the general atmosphere, etc., to "Well this is just depressing." It was so different in atmosphere from S1 and without any explanation being provided. As I said, I don't remember precisely why I stopped watching, but it sounds like I might not have gained anything from continuing to watch either. As a gay guy watching the women would be lost on me, and I don't recall finding the men that amazing to look at...but again, I was pretty darn young in '88.

I really did want to see how it would all end, but based on your synopsis I can see myself being quite underwhelmed.

Though I don't think it's come up in conversations with my friends lately, I'm pretty sure historically I've used this series as a stunning example of Abrupt Change of Premise. Kill half the regulars, change the entire atmosphere of the show, etc...
 
^Writers today still make the mistake of killing off popular characters. Sure sometimes killing off charaters can work but you don't want to alienate your audiance too much in the process.
 
Ack Ack Ack! Ack Ack, Ack Ack Ack Ack! *



* You forgot Mars Attacks

As for the WOTW TV series, I originally shared the opinion that while Season 1 was watchable, Season 2 flushed the adaptation down the toilet.

I had reason to watch the series over again a couple of years ago, and my opinion had reversed. I actually prefer season 2. While it still blows continuity with S1 away, it holds together as a narrative much more strongly than Season 1. If it had been called anything else but WOTW, it wouldn't have been an issue. It also had a Robocop-esque satire to it that I really enjoyed.
 
I actually thought the second season of WOTW-series was cooler than the first. I would have liked to see an explanation as to how the world got to be in such a sorry state, though.
 
I didn't have cable growing up, and since War of the Worlds was syndicated, season two got picked up by the local Fox affiliate... back when you had to hold tin foil in one hand and a rake in the other hand and stand on one leg while standing on a chair to pick up reception for Fox, so I never saw it, which really pissed me off when I saw the "Norton and Ironhorse are dead!" commercials for season 2.
 
Mr. Laser Beam said:
I actually thought the second season of WOTW-series was cooler than the first. I would have liked to see an explanation as to how the world got to be in such a sorry state, though.
Click to expand...

Now, I actually have to give second-season showrunner Frank Mancuso, Jr. partial credit for that, because his thinking was that the world should still be suffering from the devastating environmental and economic aftereffects of the '53 invasion, which makes more sense than the first-season approach where it was like it had never happened. Unfortunately, the retcon was made without any attempt to reconcile it with season 1, so it didn't really work.


Aragorn said:
I didn't have cable growing up, and since War of the Worlds was syndicated, season two got picked up by the local Fox affiliate... back when you had to hold tin foil in one hand and a rake in the other hand and stand on one leg while standing on a chair to pick up reception for Fox, so I never saw it, which really pissed me off when I saw the "Norton and Ironhorse are dead!" commercials for season 2.
Click to expand...

I could watch it on both my local FOX affiliate and on the Dayton, OH affiliate 50 miles away, though the latter picture was fuzzier. That came in handy for one season 2 episode that the local station refused to play, because the plot involved subliminal messages hidden in a rather explicit perfume commercial that was basically a naked man and woman simulating foreplay with only strategically positioned body parts shielding their, err, other body parts. People give NYPD Blue credit for breaking new ground on how much skin could be shown on commercial TV, but this episode was there years earlier, and so my local station refused to show it.

It also came in handy years later when the local independent station dropped Deep Space Nine. For years, the only way I could watch DS9 was via the fuzzy picture from the Dayton station. I didn't get to see the episodes clearly until years later in reruns.
 
^I used to have to watch Space: 1999 that way after my local station stopped airing it. I had a little black and white tv with a uhf tuner that I could pull in a weak signal from some station 50 miles away. I just pretended that the signal was weak since the moon was so far away.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Admiral Archer
STAR WARS EPISODE VII - Alternate Versions, Takes and Stories
Replies
14
Views
2K
Set Harth
Set Harth
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top