- In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio Invaders from Mars, the broadcast contains a coded message. It's also used to convince the actual aliens (who aren't Martians) that a fleet more powerful than theirs already has Earth.
Fan Works
- Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. The Martian investigator TuMok has an intellect "that was vast, cool, and definitely unsympathetic", and when he reveals himself as a villain who's about to launch an Alien Invasion he quips, "I suppose you could call it a War of the Worlds."
Film — Live Action
- In The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, the broadcast is genuine; the aliens hypnotise Welles into passing it off as fiction.
- In the B-Movie Mars Needs Women, a Martian finds himself in the elevator with a human who's complaining about the 'prank' about Martians coming to steal their women; he mentions the Orson Wells broadcast in this context.
- In Spaced Invaders, a group of incompetent Martians hear the War of the Worlds broadcast, and decide to aid the invasion force.
- In Star Trek: First Contact, one of the ships fighting against the new Borg attack is the USS Thunderchild, and survives the battle.
- In Terminator Salvation, the Harvesters act as expys of the Tripods, with them grabbing humans to store them away, using their long-range missiles/cannons in a similar way to the heat-rays, and having loud drones.
- In God Told Me To, the science editor doesn't want to publish Pete's story about how the killings were religiously motivated because he remembers the panic sparked by The War of the Worlds, which in his opinion wasn't even very good, and he's worried about causing something much worse.
- In Language Arts, Charles thinks that the reporter who interviews him at school looks like the lead actor in The War of the Worlds.
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who. In "Frontier in Space", the Master is shown reading War of the Worlds while trying to arrange an actual war of the worlds between Earth and the Draconians.
- War of the Worlds (1988). The panic over the Orson Wells broadcast was actually a reaction to the real invasion, which became a Gas Leak Cover-Up. Likewise with the 1953 invasion.
- In the Animaniacs Pinky and the Brain short "Battle for the Planet", Brain (whose voice is based on Orson Welles) does a radio broadcast about a Martian invasion with the plan to stir the population into a frenzy and take over the world in the ensuing chaos.
- In the Futurama episode "Lrreconcilliable Nd-Ndifferences", Lrr fakes a video of him conquering Earth to convince Nd-Nd that he's not a loser, complete with the head of Orson Welles as announcer.
- The Halloween Episode of Hey Arnold! parodies the broadcast and subsequent panic. Maurice LaMarche even plays a character who is essentially based on Welles.
- On the Looney Tunes short "Kitty Kornered", the cats Porky Pig threw outside get even by dressing as Martians to scare him out of the house. One pretends to be a radio announcer reporting on the invasion.
- The Simpsons: "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid" of "Treehouse of Horror XVII" is a parody of the panic that the 1938 radio play caused, where an actual alien invasion is ignored because everybody believes it to be another radio play.
- In the Taz-Mania episode "The Man from M.A.R.S.", Taz hears what sounds like a news report of a Martian invasion, and flees in panic before hearing it's Tasmanian Radio Theatre. Then he runs into Marvin, who is trying to have a relaxing vacation, and hilarity ensues. Then at the end, Tasmania is invaded by aliens, and he thinks it's another spoof.
- The Terrytoons short "The Nutty Network" has a radio station in the jungle stage a fake invasion from the moon.
- The original novel is mentioned on the Walt Disney Presents episode "Mars and Beyond", in a segment on the history of Mars in fiction. The accompanying visual is of one of the tripods attacking a farmer until it destroys itself with a Sneeze of Doom.
