Parenthesis: Enhance the image digitally? (War of the Worlds Press Kit Video)

Special thanks to Vincent Dawn for uploading this.

It can be hard, in a time when geek culture is so prominent and television has become a mature and respected medium, to remember how recently television was largely treated as disposable trash, and how little there was to consume about television shows beyond the text itself. Shows like Doctor Who or Star Trek were the exceptions in terms of shows for an adult audience which had significant merchandising. Anything that gave you a look behind the scenes was rarer still.

That’s not to say there wasn’t anything produced that would give you a look at how the sausage was made, but it was rare, and generally not intended for mass consumption. One thing which pretty much always did exist was a press kit. And through a bit of luck, the video press kit for War of the Worlds is now watchable on YouTube.

In terms of content, it’s similar to a demo reel or pitch tape, like the one we saw many long years ago for George Pal’s own attempt at making a TV show out of his movie. But there, the focus was on getting interest to move the project into production. Here, the show is already on its way to air and at least the pilot is in the can. The press kit’s target audience instead is the media. This twenty minute presentation is basically background research and B-roll for journalists to use when doing pieces on the show. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the original source for some quotes I’ve seen in the various articles I’ve come across about the series.

About half of the 20-minute runtime is an overview of the series. It opens on stock footage from the 1953 movie, some of the same clips from the show’s opening. A narrator lays out the backstory as usual: an alien invasion, stopped by bacteria, then we cut to footage from the pilot, the scene of Ironhorse’s crew filming the dump site, as the narrator explains how the alien remains were stored and forgotten. We cut to the money shot from the credits of the alien hand pushing its way through the melting drum lid as the narrator informs us that one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction stories of all time is coming to television:

We get some nice behind the scenes footage, a very short clip from “The Resurrection”, and from the jail scene in “Thy Kingdom Come”. There’s an interview with Greg Strangis, who explains how the series contradicts the film by changing the aliens’ death into forced hibernation, and their new ability to possess human hosts. Greg is filmed in the Land of the Lost Cave set, and though he’s upbeat, he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable giving an interview on camera, stumbling a little over his words and with a slightly nervous posture. His father seems much more comfortable in his own short clip, talking up the threat of aliens infiltrating society at all levels.

Greg places a bit of emphasis on the fact that when the aliens abandon a host, the body is left, “worthless; you wouldn’t want to be in it any more.” I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always found it a little bit surprising that the show from the get-go took the possibility of saving a possession victim off the table — even if it wasn’t ultimately possible, it’s surprising that they didn’t try to get some mileage out of the team trying. Greg Strangis here confirms that yes, that’s intentional. Even at this stage, it’s baked right into the basic concept of alien possession that the process ends with the host body destroyed. I’d be interested whether Strangis ever gave any more insight into his reasons for going that way.

After a few cast interviews (Those are repeated in a longer form later, so I’ll hold off on the details), we get to the part that’s probably the most interesting to a fan of the series: a few minutes about the visual effects.

There’s some really cool shots of an alien arm prosthetic in various stages of construction, showing the mechanical armature and the latex covering. It’s really neat how much articulation they had. Bill Sturgeon (Who the narrator reminds us is duly famous for his work on An American Werewolf in London and Videodrome) shows off the secret behind the signature well-lubricated look of the aliens: everything gets rubbed down with methylcellulose. I’m never going to look at a wet diaper the same way again.

The last segment looks at the work that went into recreating the alien ships, which is bittersweet to watch knowing that they only actually show up twice (and I’m not even sure that the one in “Eye for an Eye” is the same prop, given how much worse it looks). According to post-production consultant Bernie Laramie, they took great pains to recreate the look and sound of the Al Nozaki props exactly. They certainly got the sound right, but I’m a little iffy on the look. The video shows a couple of stills of the Nozaki blueprints, to imply that they were working from those, but, like, Robinson Crusoe on Mars did a better job of recreating the original prop.

That said, when you actually see the models on the set, it’s certainly impressive. Even if the accuracy to the original isn’t quite what they thought it was, seeing the prop as a real physical thing… Does anyone know what happened to it (I’m guessing they only made one and composited multiple shots to show three of them on screen)? Hard to imagine they faced the same fate as the 1952 originals, since I suspect they weren’t really made of copper. I’m shocked at the scale of the prop. Having seen behind-the-scenes footage of the George Pal film, I’d say this is about two-thirds the size of the originals. Maybe about four feet? I kind of wonder why they made them so big given that they’re basically smooth and never need to interact with anything close-up. The main “hero” model of the Enterprise-D, for instance, was six feet long, but that was because it needed to be big enough for the windows to be visible. But for shots where you didn’t need as much detail, they used a two-foot model because filming a six foot long model space ship whose center of gravity isn’t inside it is hard. The alien war machine is smooth and doesn’t really have a lot of visible small detail beyond the fresnel on the lens, so I don’t see why they made the models so big.

One sign this was made in 1988 comes in the form of how much detail Laramie goes into about how computers and nonlinear editing is a thing now. He seems to struggle a bit finding the vocabulary to explain to a non-industry audience how, in the ’50s, George Pal had to build tiny sets for the war machines to fly though and actually blow them up as they went, whereas in 1988, through the magic of chroma key, the TV series would composite the alien ships into full-size sets. This all sounds pretty straightforward in 2019, but it was pretty advanced stuff at least for television in ’88.

Of course, the compositing in “The Resurrection” to show the war machines superimposed on the sets… Hasn’t really aged well. They look flat and janky and don’t really look like they’re physically present. That said, when you compare it to the ’53 movie, you can sort of understand what Laramie is talking about: the war machine scenes look amazing in the movie, far better than anything in the TV series… And they’re very, very empty. The aliens fly over empty fields and through empty cities and the model work is fantastic, but there’s no people and everything other than the aliens themselves is perfectly still. There’s only one shot where you see a person and a war machine on-screen at the same time, and it’s a very janky, very fake-looking rear projection. So even if the results haven’t held up, I can understand why the production team would be proud of how much more dynamic the composition of their war machine scenes is. The war machines and the live actors and location shots don’t integrate seamlessly, but they do integrate.

At this point, the author’s daughter decided she was part cat, or something, because she suddenly desperately wanted daddy to understand that although it was eleven thirty and she’d had dinner hours ago, she had literally never been fed in her entire life and would surely expire if daddy didn’t make her a bedtime snack right now. 

To be continued…