Trivia / The War of the Worlds (1953)

• Blooper: During the main attack scene, there's a brief shot of the heat ray hitting a tank with the ray itself being green for a split second before it turns back to it's usual red. Seeing as the anti-meson rays are green, this was most likely the result of a colouring error.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: The sound effect of the green disintegrator rays would later be reused for the photon torpedoes firing in Star Trek: The Original Series.
• Referenced by...: Someone on the writing staff for Invader Zim really loved this movie, as references to it frequently pop up. In "Germs," he and Gir watch a parody of the film which turns Zim into a germaphobe. A cut scene from "Door To Door" has Zim showing a VR simulation of an alien invasion with space ships not unlike the ones in this film.^note Due to the show's close proximity to 9/11, the scene was deemed too visually similar to the fallout from the attacks, forcing the crew to reanimate it into something slightly tamer (the original version was aired once due to a mix up of the master tapes, however).
• Science Marches On:
  • While preparing to make the movie, producer George Pal talked to military representatives who let him know in no uncertain terms the tripods of the original novel would be cut to pieces by modern weaponry before their drivers would suffer so much as a sniffle. Hence the movie Martians came equipped with nuke-proof force fields.
  • The 1953 movie opens with the narrator explaining why none of the solar system's other planets were suitable for invasion, and getting most of his information completely wrong. Which is kind of a shame, because the shot of erupting volcanoes on Jupiter is pretty well done for the time.
  • The movie opens with Chesley Bonestelle paintings of the other planets of the Solar System except for Venus. In 1953, the nature of what lay beneath that world's clouds was unknown – deserts, swamps, and global seas of carbonated water or petroleum were all considered possibilities. Ironically, the grossly inaccurate description of Jupiter is far more telling of Venus' surface conditions, and Venus was the first planet examined by a probe, in 1962.
• Technology Marches On: Back in the source novel the alien war machines were vulnerable to artillery fire and a torpedo ram, which were the most powerful weapons available at the time. In this film the aliens can survive an atom bomb blast, because otherwise they would be defeated very quickly. Reportedly, George Pal asked a Pentagon representative how contemporary armed forces would do against the Martians from the novel. He replied in no uncertain terms it would be a Curb-Stomp Battle in favor of humanity.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, at the time the biggest director in Hollywood, had Paramount obtain the film rights in 1925 with the intention of setting the film in the novel's original time period of 1898 and would have used stop-motion tripods, but ultimately abandoned the project. In fact, when pre-production began on the 1953 version, they had to renegotiate the film rights with Wells' estate as the rights obtained in the 1920s only allowed for a silent version of the film to be made.
  • After Cecil departed, rising British director Alfred Hitchcock expressed interest in adapting the story in 1931, but for one reason or another it never went any further.
  • Ray Harryhausen apparently always wanted to take on the story, but never got the chance to do so. He did, however, produce several concept drawings and a very impressive stop-motion clip of a Martain emerging from one of the spaceships which show he intended to keep the design of the Martians very faithful to the novel's description.

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