The 1996 sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks! is a movie for the kid in all of us. But if you
watched it when you were an actual kid, you may have missed out on some of the cleverest parts.
Fortunately, we're here to guide you through them all.
If there's one thing that Hollywood loves, it's scouring every medium known to man for
established ideas, whether they're from books, TV shows, comics, games, toys,
or other movies. So which of these inspired Mars Attacks!? As the opening credits inform us,
it's "Based Upon Mars Attacks! A Property of the Topps Company." In case you need
help interpreting that description, Mars Attacks! is one of the very few movies
that was adapted from a line of trading cards. And these weren't just any old trading cards.
In 1962, Topps released a series of cards with art by veteran pulp fiction artist Norman Saunders,
which were based on drawings by Golden Age comic artists Bob Powell and Wally Wood.
Saunders was hired after Topps got the idea from Wood's cover for an issue of
the comic book Weird Science. Wood was no stranger to controversy after working on
Tales from the Crypt, which was so horrifying that it landed his bosses in front of a Senate
subcommittee. History repeated itself when the Mars Attacks cards' violence
delighted children and horrified parents, who demanded that Topps pull them from the shelves.
But the memory still lingered with a generation of kids, and the movie adaptation recreates several
images directly from its inspiration, including the herd of flaming cows that opens the film.
Director Tim Burton and screenwriter Jonathan Gems have made no secret that they rotted their brains
out watching hundreds of sci-fi movies in their youths. As a result, attentive audiences might
recognize several scenes inspired by the drive-in flicks of the 50s and 60s in Mars Attacks! When
Sarah Jessica Parker as Nathalie tries to describe the Martians' flying saucer, the best she can come
up with is a "giant hubcap." That's likely a reference to legendarily terrible director Ed
Wood, as it's been speculated that he used hubcaps as flying saucers in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
That would've been on Burton's mind, as he'd just made the biopic Ed Wood a few years earlier.
Another notable reference occurs when the Martians abduct Professor Kessler and experiment on him by
lopping off his head and keeping it alive with a headband attached to a series of metal rods and
discs. Trash cinema fans may recognize that apparatus from The Brain That Wouldn't Die,
which was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
There's also a reference to a more prestigious movie, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove,
which satirized the Cold War by portraying America's leaders as a bunch of bloodthirsty
crackpots. Mars Attacks! features an homage to Strangelove's famous War Room,
which Burton renders even more cartoonish in his version.
"We will win! The eagle will be triumphant!"
The connections between Mars Attacks! and sci-fi B-movies are fairly obvious,
but Burton also had some other, bigger-budget movies in mind. In the 70s, producer Irwin Allen
hit it big with the blockbuster disaster flicks The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
They combined ensemble casts of major stars with spectacular disaster effects.
Burton called them "'Celebrities Getting Killed' movies. Soon, imitators were everywhere, from
Earthquake to Avalanche to the Airport series, which inspired the classic parody Airplane!
Mars Attacks! spoofs the Allen formula by featuring a huge cast of celebrities
whose characters each react to the disaster in their own way. The actors on screen were some of
the biggest stars of the time, like Michael J. Fox, Sarah Jessica Parker, Glenn Close, and the
then-current James Bond, Pierce Brosnan. There are also plenty of stars from decades earlier,
like Jack Nicholson, Joe Don Baker, and singer Tom Jones as himself. The cast
seems even more star-studded now, as the likes of Jack Black, Natalie Portman, and Ray J were
mostly unknown at the time, but looking back now, they're some of the biggest names in the movie.
Two more stars of Mars Attacks! pay tribute to yet another movie genre.
In the 70s, Hollywood woke up to the potential of African-American audiences with a flood of
low-budget, action-packed movies that were dubbed "Blaxploitation." Two of the genre's biggest stars
were Pam Grier and Jim Brown, who appear in Mars Attacks! as ex-husband and wife Byron and Louise.
Grier got her start as a switchboard operator at the low-budget studio A.I.P. before director Jack
Hill got her in front of the cameras, resulting in cult classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown.
As for Brown, before he started acting, he earned spots in both the Pro and College
Football Halls of Fame for his career as a running back for the Syracuse Orangemen
and then the Cleveland Browns. He parlayed his gridiron success into an acting career in both
Blaxploitation and prestigious studio films, including the war classic The Dirty Dozen.
Even though Grier and Brown ran in similar circles, Mars Attacks! was actually their
first movie together when it arrived in 1996. But it wouldn't be their last,
as that same year, they teamed up with several other Blaxploitation icons for Original Gangstas.
"It's me, Byron Williams, heavyweight champion of the world!"
A major reason that Mars Attacks! is so much
fun is thanks to Tim Burton's deeply idiosyncratic filmmaking. You can see
the fingerprints of his style everywhere. Natalie Portman as the president's bored,
morbid daughter, for example, could be the twin sister of Lydia from Beetlejuice.
Burton also puts his trademark curlicue design over everything, from the Martian spy's dress
to the gangplank on the saucer, which unfolds like the curly hill in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Burton also made sure to take some of his closest collaborators along for the ride. Sarah Jessica
Parker had just worked with him on Ed Wood, while Sylvia Sidney had played the caseworker
in Beetlejuice. Fresh off of Batman Returns, Danny DeVito shows up as a sleazy gambler,
and the Martian spy is even played by Burton's then-girlfriend, Lisa Marie. There are also
plenty of familiar names behind the camera, like Colleen Atwood, who's designed costumes for nearly
all of Burton's movies, and composer Danny Elfman, who's worked on almost every Burton film as well.
Tim Burton is known for creating timeless on-screen worlds that exist somewhere out of sync
with reality, and that holds true in Mars Attacks! As you'd expect from a tribute to 50s sci-fi and
70s disaster movies, Mars Attacks! is temporally all over the place. The military is all decked
out in Vietnam War-era uniforms and gear. And at one point, a general talks on a walkie-talkie the
size of a blimp, even though cell phones had been on the market for years when the movie came out.
The hippies who greet the Martian landing are 60s flower children, while the Martian assassin hides
her enormous cranium under a 50s-style beehive hairdo. Lukas Haas' [HAHS] Richie looks like he
could've walked out of a 90s Smashing Pumpkins concert. And as for Sarah Jessica Parker,
her hair and fashion sense couldn't possibly be any more 60s. Neither could her TV studio, with
its groovy polka-dotted papasan chairs and a can of the discontinued soft drink Tab on the table.
For the most part, Mars Attacks! is the farthest thing from subtle, but it does actually contain
a few subtle details that you'll need an adult-sized attention span to catch. For instance,
when Michael J. Fox as TV reporter Jason Stone goes out to cover the Martian landing with his
partner Nathalie, he's sporting a very silly-looking tie covered in doughnuts.
That accessory isn't just there to make him look silly. When the Martian commander delivers his
first message to the people of Earth on TV, he moves his hand in a circle. One character
recognizes it as "the international sign of the doughnut." So it's not a stretch to think that
Jason's trying to make a good impression with the one thing he knows for sure the Martians like.
But even if that interpretation is correct, it probably doesn't matter as far as Jason, or
anyone else, is concerned. The Martians pretty quickly make it clear that they're
not interested in making new friends when they open fire on the crowd. Nathalie grabs Jason's
hand in the hopes of getting to safety, but then she finds out that his hand is
all she's grabbed, as the Martians have vaporized the rest of him!
Mars Attacks! is rated PG-13 for "sci-fi fantasy violence and brief sexuality,"
and while kids may delight in the over-the-top violence, a lot of the more suggestive material
is likely to go right over their heads. For instance, Martin Short appears as presidential
press secretary Jerry Ross, who we see cruising around Washington in a limo just before the
Martian landing. He chats up some scantily clad ladies on a street corner who ask him
if he's interested in a "date." Kids might imagine he's about to buy them dinner, but
adults should have no trouble recognizing the ladies as streetwalking sex workers.
The Martians are obviously paying attention as well, since they send their assassin
to pose as a sex worker herself so that Jerry will let her into the White House.
And it's hard to imagine even the youngest viewers misunderstanding the situation when Jerry jumps on
her with his tongue waggling and knocks her onto the heart-shaped bed in his secret seduction room.
And if you pay close attention to the dialogue, there's another inside joke for the adults in the
audience, especially the baby boomers and history buffs. Jerry describes the hidden
bedroom as "the Kennedy Room," named after President John F. Kennedy, who was infamous
for his many alleged extramarital affairs, including one with superstar Marilyn Monroe.
Pam Grier's character Louise has her hands full raising her two sons, Cedric and Neville,
while working full-time as a bus driver. One day on her route, she drives past the arcade
and sees her boys happily shooting at video game aliens when they're supposed to be at school.
She then yanks them out of the arcade and disciplines them in front of a whole bus full of
passengers for wasting their time playing games when they're supposed to be learning.
"You think it's smart to cut school, huh? Do you? Do you? Huh?"
"No!"
"No, mom, cause it's dumb, you're gonna flunk, and you're gonna go to jail."
Later though, when Cedric and Neville are on a school trip at the White House,
they get ambushed by some real-life Martians. They steal some of the invaders' ray guns and start
firing away just like they did while playing the arcade game.
They acquit themselves well against the actual Martians, even saving the president's life.
Kids may not recognize the underlying message here, but it's a fantasy that plenty of them have
probably had at some point. You see, despite their mom's worries, Cedric and Neville didn't rot out
their brains at the arcade. Instead, they learned the skills that made them heroes in real life.
The invading aliens seem completely unstoppable for most of Mars Attacks! as they obliterate
all of Earth's armies. But the plucky Richie finally finds an unexpected solution
when he discovers that his grandmother's yodelling music makes the Martians' heads
explode, and he then starts broadcasting it around the world. For kids, that probably
seems like just an appropriately silly way to take out a very silly threat.
But the well-read adult may recognize the twist from a classic alien invasion story.
In H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The War of the Worlds, the Earth's military forces are similarly helpless
against a Martian invasion. But then one day, the Martians have all dropped dead,
slain by bacteria that they were unprepared to handle. As it turns out, the Martians'
immune systems are vulnerable to the diseases that humans have learned to take for granted.
The aliens in Mars Attacks! are equally vulnerable to Earth's infections, but
in this case, they're infected with earworms, as Slim Whitman's yodel on "Indian Love Call"
ends up being the key to Earth's victory. In this wonderful tribute to mid-century kitsch,
is there any better ending than a decades-old Broadway song saving the day?
"What's killing 'em?"
"I think it must be my music."
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