He's not the king of bedside manor; he's not the Tom Jones who lives next door (no, not any more). He's not the king of bedside manor, well he hardly even lives there anymore. -- Barenaked Ladies, The King of Bedisde Manor
Tantalizing enough that it’s got me kind of interested in what would happen if you tried this experiment another way around. What if you didn’t try to match up a new story with Wells’s style, but rather tried to match up the same story with a different style. I wonder…
With Roosevelt / The Skipper too / Emily Dickenson / and Mark Twain / The Relativity Guy / And The Rest…
It is May 1, 1996. More or less. Australia is reeling from a shooting spree in Port Arthur two days ago. The deaths of thirty-five people will, inexplicably, shortly lead to heavy restrictions of private ownership of firearms in Australia. Of course, as we all know, banning guns has never succeeded in reducing shooting deaths, which means it must be a coincidence that in the following 20 years, there been no mass shootings in Australia. Maybe it’s because they ban violent video games. Former CIA Director William Colby will be found dead in a marshy riverbank in Maryland, victim of a boating accident, or maybe that’s just what they want you to think. The Keck II telescope in Hawaii is getting ready for its grand opening Saturday. Gerald Williams gets six hits in a single game, the first Yankee to do so since 1934.
New in theaters this week are Barb Wire and The Craft. Twister, Mission: Impossible, Spy Hard and Dragonheart will be out later this month. Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” is revived on Broadway. I think I actually see the touring company of this in Baltimore the next year. Howard Stern’s radio show will be premiering within a week. Nickelodeon spins off their “Nick-at-Nite” TV block in the form of the TVLand network. This week will see the finales of Nick Jr. series Allegra’s Window, NBC’s Sisters and Captain Planet and the Planeteers, whose cast will go on to great things, especially Hoggish Greedly, who will eventually be elected President of the United States of America. Later this month, we’ll see the end of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Nowhere Man, and seaQuest DSV. The Daily Show with Craig Killborn premiers in July.
TV is new this week. Roseanne. Coach. Frasier. The Drew Carey Show. Home Improvement. NYPD Blue. Wings. The Nanny. Murphy Brown. Grace Under Fire. Friends. Seinfeld. ER. Chicago Hope. This is like peak TV for me, but nothing really stands out. Star Trek: Voyager airs “The Thaw”, which I do not remember at all. It’s about VR and sounds pretty close to the plot of an episode of Stargate SG-1. Deep Space Nine airs “The Muse”, in which Sisko’s son Jake is preyed upon by a sort of muse-succubus, who inspires him to start the novel they’ve been foreshadowing him writing, but nearly kills him by sucking out his life force or whatever. Also, Majel Barrett Roddenberry makes her last appearance as Lwaxana Troi.
NBC’s got a miniseries of Peter Benchley’s The Beast, which I think is a sea monster movie, and I think next week one of the other networks does another sea monster miniseries. Fox will make jokes about this in their commercials, which is petty of them given that The X-Files this week, “Quagmire”, is also about a sea monster. I don’t get into Homicide: Life on the Street until years later, but my dad watched it whenever he managed to stay up that late. This week’s is “The Damage Done”, which introduces Luther Mahoney, a Baltimore drug dealer who becomes the closest the series ever has to a “big bad”. Sliders is “Post-Traumatic Slide Syndrome”, an episode which sets up the possibility that John Rhys-Davies’s character has been replaced by an unscrupulous doppleganger. This will never come up again. Power Rangers Zeo today is “The Puppet Blaster”. It’s about a brainwashing robotic children’s entertainer.
I’m a junior in high school. This is the year I take a ridiculous number of AP tests. US History, Calculus AB, and both sections of Physics C. I’m also the Editor-in-Chief of the school newspaper, a position I’ll hold for one more semester by convincing the school to invent a “Journalism IV” for me to take next year. My stamped, official high school transcript has a hand-written correction on it. This was fun to explain on college interviews. I also appear on television this spring, in the high school quiz bowl show It’s Academic. On our previous appearance, we’d killed it, utterly crushing our competitors, but this time, luck isn’t with us. Or at least, timing isn’t with us, because we get a perfect score on the timed round, but only managed to buzz in once in the other two rounds. It was weird. Also, Mac McGarry is the first person I ever met who tried to pronounce my last name the traditional Polish way. And that amazing, deep, imperial voice he had on the show? That was his real, normal, everyday voice.
I remember being very upset this week, because the cable kept going out. I realize that is a petty thing to be upset about, but when you’re a sixteen year old boy with no romantic prospects (I’ll get there eventually), it’s kind of a big deal that the cable comes back on literally like 5 minutes before a big event epsiode of Roseanne. Yeah, in two weeks ABC airs the episode of Roseanne where Dan has a heart attack and dies. I mean, he dies during the cliffhanger at the end of the episode, but we don’t find out about it until the series finale a year later, because it turns out that from the second season onward, the series has been an increasingly fictionalized version of the family portrayed in the early seasons drawn from Roseanne Connor’s short stories. Also, Fox’s Tuesday Night Movie, which “doesn’t star a giant Octopus”, is a US-made revival of Doctor Who, starring Hugh Laurie, Marcia Gay Harden and Peter O’Toole. It doesn’t win its time slot thanks to Roseanne, but it does well enough to go to series in the fall and run for eight years Paul McGann, Daphne Ashbrook and Eric Roberts. It has some nice set pieces, but little in the way of a plot, and its middle-of-the-road ratings persuade Fox to go with the cheaper option of making a second season of Sliders instead of picking it up. Doctor Who does not return to television until 2005.
The top ten is full of things I don’t recognize. I mean, Mariah Carey is at the top with “Always Be My Baby”, Celine Dion is behind her with “Because You Loved Me”, and Alanis Morissette is hanging out at number 4 with “Ironic”, but there’s a whole lot of stuff I don’t remember at all. The top 20 is more my speed, featuring Everything But The Girl, Tracy Chapman, The Bodeans, and Jann Arden.
Popular books of 1996 include A Game of Thrones, The Notebook, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Fight Club, and Angela’s Ashes. Doing okay for itself, but not quite to that level, is this.
It is rare for adaptations and remakes and even discussion of the original novel The War of the Worlds to bring up a strange matter of geography. I mean, except when it’s me doing the discussion, because I’ve personally said it a bunch of times. Wells all but states outright that the Martian invasion was limited to England. Most people ignore this, for reasons such as: 1. It’s pretty stupid. Delightfully English, to proceed from the assumption that an advanced alien race would decide that invading just specifically England was the right way to conquer the Earth (“Naturally. The rest were all foreigners,” Doctor Who), but intensely stupid.
Come 1996, prolific science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson decided to ignore this delightful stupidity when he had (according to the acknowledgements page, while hiking in the redwood forests of California) the idea to compile an anthology of short stories about the Martian invasion across the globe. But not just across the globe, really. Because every story in War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches is told from the point-of-view of a literary or historical figure belonging to the time and place where the story is set (more or less. I’ll explain later). That, I think, elevates this anthology above being just a globalized retelling of the original story. We don’t just have “Basically Wells’s story but set in New Jersey,” or “Basically Wells’s story but set in San Francisco”. We’ve got “Jack London’s War of the Worlds in Alaska” and “Mark Twain’s War of the Worlds in New Orleans”.
This isn’t just wonderful in its own right, too. The addition of these big personalities helps smooth out the fact that there is absolutely no thematic, structural, or story continuity between the various writers. They contradict Wells. They contradict each other. They contradict the backstories of their own characters. And that’s fine, because it’s not like you were expecting Teddy Roosevelt to provide an account of fighting the Martians in Cuba and not make it all about himself. Anderson gives it a wink and a nod in his forward, as told by Wells, noting that Picasso and Verne aren’t on speaking terms over the differences in their accounts of the sack of Paris, and sniping that he doesn’t recall Henry James taking notes at the time. Anderson dedicates the book to Wells, and also to George Pal and Jeff Wayne. Sam and Greg Strangis get no love.
The dead are entirely absent from chapter eight. It goes entirely unremarked that the Martians themselves, having proved vulnerable to “putrefactive and disease bacteria” turn out to be unaffected by the reanimation fungus. There are only a handful of stories I can think of where a zombie plague isn’t specific to humans, but you’d think it would at least merit a mention. It isn’t explicit whether terrestrial animals are affected, but doesn’t seem to be the case, and the absence of any comment on this feels at odds with the thoroughness of Wells’s exposition.
For the most part, Brown doesn’t fall into the common trap of having his characters intuitively know what kind of story they’re in — that’s a common enough foible for zombie horror writers, not so much with characters intuiting the “rules”, but more often with characters intuiting the “boundaries” of their world. Most zombie stories have a scene where the characters learn of the efficacy of head-wounds or the infectious nature of bites (curiously never established in The War of the Worlds Plus Blood Guts and Zombies), but it’s rare for characters to “learn” that animals don’t reanimate, that humans don’t turn directly into zombies without dying first (In the rare stories where they do, that also doesn’t come as a surprise), or that plants can’t be zombies (Has anyone ever done a zombie plant story? Like, not “plants turn into carnivorous monsters”, but just “Dead plants reanimate and are evil, but still constrained by the basic biology of plants. So you’d have to be careful you didn’t accidentally eat a zombie apple and get infected).
The lack of curiosity about the mechanics of the zombie plague is the one area where Brown gives in to this tendency. We already know that the narrator, for reasons he never explains, doesn’t share his inside knowledge about the origins of the plague to the scientific community, and as a result, they never work out its cause. But there’s not even any mention of scientists studying the dead in the epilogue, trying to work out, if not the cause, the mechanism. No mention of anyone trying to develop an inoculation, no mention of anyone rounding up zombies for study. It would be very Wellsian to insert a paragraph about scientists discovering the presence of some element or energy that acts upon the pineal gland or something to stimulate movement in the absence of whatever, and that it only works on humans because of the unique something of the whatsit. But no. The dead only come up at the very end to mention that they’re still around, a persistent threat to all humanity, but kept at bay by sensible precautions.
But the dead do put in one meaningful appearance near the end of the book, and it’s the one place where Brown meaningfully diverges from Wells’s plot. It’s the only place where Brown deletes significantly from the original text rather than appending. Chapter nine ends, in the original, with the narrator returning home, depressed to find no sign of his wife, until:
…A strange thing occurred. “It is no use,” said a voice. “The house is deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay here to torment yourself. No one escaped but you.”[br]I was startled. Had I spoken my thought aloud?
In the original text, he turns to discover his wife and cousin just outside, leading to tearful reunion in the novel’s one moment of genuine human tenderness. But this is a zombie story now, and will brook no such happy ending. In Brown’s version, the narrator did indeed speak his thought aloud without realizing it. For he turns to find not a pair of survivors, but the reanimated corpses of his wife and cousin, drawn home by, “Some lingering aspect of their lives before death,” after dying at Leatherhead (Brown mistakenly says “Leatherwood” here). Despite his horror, the narrator manages the grisly task of dispatching his late wife with a kitchen knife and flees the house. His cousin is granted, “Peace I knew I would never find again in this life,” thanks to a pair of patrolling soldiers who happen conveniently by.
It is an odd segue, even in the original, to jump from the reunion into several pages of exposition, mostly about how many mysteries remained about the Martians: though the previous chapter noted that examination of the Martian machines were quickly yielding scientific wonders, such as powered flight, the epilogue notes that the principles of the black smoke and heat ray remain impenetrable (and research on the latter seems to have fizzled out after an obliquely referenced disaster that sounds like a research lab blowing itself up), that indeed the Martians’ cause of death is only broad speculation. The jump is even stranger in Brown’s version, given the gruesomeness of the preceding scene.
Book two opens with the Curate and the narrator holed up in an abandoned house in Halliford, where they’d retreated to avoid the black smoke. This looks promising. House under siege is the number-one archetypal zombie horror story. And indeed, chapter one of book two starts right in with the dead breaching their defenses in the night, leading to a pitched fight scene with the narrator and the curate turning action-heroes temporarily. No explanation is given for how they’re able to defend themselves in the dark; Brown seems not to have accounted for the lack of artificial lighting. Even with the dead forced back and the door barricaded, cabin fever sets in quickly, with perhaps a bit more justification than in the original. Brown elevates the narrator’s despair to the point that he considers suicide a good fifty pages early. He is stayed by the thought that, “God was still present. The Father in Heaven watched over us or we would surely not have been alive now,” a somewhat more overtly religious sentiment than you’d expect in a Wells novel.
The dead disperse along with the black smoke — they are unaffected by the smoke, it seems, but are presumed to have moved on due to the scarcity of living humans in the area. They return to their usual status as an ominous, liminal presence in the narrative as the companions make their way toward Sheen: head wounds mentioned on the corpses they pass along the way, and the remains of a pyre where casualties of the Martians had been burnt by human survivors to prevent their reanimation.
Upon taking refuge in a well-stocked house in Sheen, we find the most hilarious addition Brown’s made so far:
As we gathered our bounty, a noise sounded from the house’s back room […] I reached the back room and cautiously peeked inside it. Something black leaped at me from within and I staggered backwards, swinging the hatchet’s blade through the air. My back made contact with the hallway wall, bringing my retreat to a halt as I looked down to see a black cat racing away through the house.
That’s right, folks. A legit, for-reals literal cat scare. With an actual literal cat. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one of those in prose before. Later, when the greater part of the house is demolished by a landing cylinder, the narrator inexplicably waxes philosophical for a paragraph, contemplating the forces which have reanimated the dead. He concludes that it could not be a deliberate act by the Martians, who view the zombies as a nuisance. He considers the possibility that it is divine judgment, but dismisses the notion as unbiblical, another odd example of Brown projecting far more specific (and, frankly, modern) religious inclinations onto the narrator than he ever displayed in the original. It comes up again when he considers murdering the curate, but his hand is stayed by thoughts of God, and he prays instead. All the same, where Wells merely has the narrator “resort to blows” to silence the curate during his reckless lamenting, Brown has him knock out several teeth.
We have not, so far, gotten a solid explanation for the dead. There’s a strong implication that the Martians caused it, not deliberately, but as a side-effect. The dominant theory, the narrator will later explain, is that the Martian cylinders gave off a form of radiation which caused the effect — this is clearly assumed in the early chapters. But the narrator goes on to note that this explanation does not account for the spread of the “plague”, which was more rapid and more global than the Martian invasion.
Not giving us an explanation would be fine in most zombie stories. Lots of them lack one. Romero’s zombies are never explained canonically, and lots of stories which do give an explanation do it terribly. I recall one particular story which asserted that if you mixed a whole bunch of non-biological toxins together, they would turn into a virus. But this is primarily an H. G. Wells novel, and it would be bizarre for the resurrection of the dead to go without long, boring passages of exposition to justify it. The bulk of chapter two of book two is spent with the narrator giving his observations about Martian technology and biology from his vantage point in the partially-collapsed house beside a newly-fallen cylinder. It’s here that he foreshadows the Martian weakness by describing what he observes of their biology, and takes time out to slam Warwick Goble for the illustrations he did for the original Pearsons serialization of the novel.
Brown uses this exposition-dump to present an explanation for the zombie menace. He nails the expository style, mimicking the way that Wells’s narrator doesn’t fully get the details, but manages to work out the basic gist of things, with a good bit of his own speculation. The revelation is a little more intimate than really fits, but it’s not too far off. The narrator witnesses an “argument” between two Martians, and watches as they review what’s essentially the flight recorder video from their capsule in the form of, “A small box that projected patterns of light.” I don’t know why, but the insertion of a hologram projector here feels somehow un-Wellsian. Given that Wells himself frequently described the heat rays as resembling cameras, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a Wells story including an advanced form of movie projector. The technology was cutting-edge when the story was written. Maybe it’s just Brown’s choice of words that puts me off: it’s written as if by someone who hasn’t heard of a zooipraxiscope or a magic lantern or a film projector, and so has a kind of steampunk air to it that feels not like a nineteenth century author speculating about something futuristic, but like a twenty-first century author describing something that exists in his own time, trying to sound like he doesn’t know what it is and has to re-derive vocabulary for it.
In any case, the narrator deduces from the flight recorder footage that the walking dead are linked to purple flakes, described as being similar to mold, which ablated from the Martian craft as they entered Earth’s atmosphere. He concludes that the contamination was accidental, caused by a space-borne “fungus” that had hitched a ride with the Martians. The dead are a serious problem for the Martians not as a threat to their invasion, but to their food supply. The handling machine which the Martians build as the narrator watches is armed against the dead, equipped with, “A beam of light brighter than the hottest fire,” that could cut, “With the sharpness of a surgeon’s blade.” That is, a laser. Described with the same steampunkish, “Audience, do you get that I’m describing a laser? Only I can’t say ‘laser’ because it would be an anachronism?” style as the hologram projector. Never mind that the Martians already had a heat ray. There are references earlier to the Martians being reluctant to use the heat ray at times, implying that it might be a limited resource, so I don’t have a problem with the idea that they’d use something different here, but you’d expect the narrator to at least draw a comparison — call it a “precision heat-ray” or something.
Holographic Liam Neeson punched a clergyman. It was exactly as awesome as it sounded.
Our expository sidebar ends abruptly with the reintroduction of the Artilleryman, who warns him off claiming the area as his “territory” before recognizing the Journalist from Maybury Hill. The scene plays out really awkwardly in the original stage show, with the Artilleryman addressing the audience as though they were the Journalist. It’s staged in a normal sort of way, like you see in lots of one-man-plays, with the audience standing in for a sort of abstract person-the-actor-is-conversing-with. Only this abstract person actually responds, and the response comes from that stupid CGI head floating off to stage-left. Because to a much greater extent than in the Spirit of Man segment, the narrator does interact with the on-stage character. They carry on a conversation. Thankfully, the Artilleryman does not address his conversation to the Big Giant Head, but to an imaginary on-stage character, but it’s incongruous.
Since Liam Neeson can appear in a virtual on-stage form, it’s less awkward in The New Generation, though none of the various recordings I’ve looked at of the scene were blocked very well. The new version adds a couple of minutes of additional dialogue at the beginning of the scene as well. It’s a normal, traditional conversation where the Journalist and the Artilleryman interact as normal fictional characters in a traditional narrative, and that’s really unusual for this show, and is one of the few concessions toward trying to reorient the performance into a proper stage show. That said, the content isn’t really interesting. They cover basically the same ground that the Artilleryman is about to cover in song, adding only the Artilleryman’s speculation that the next step for the Martians will be full-on colonization and a systematic rounding-up of the human survivors.
The biggest disappointment I’ve had with The New Generation, both the album and the show, is that the modest changes that have been made to create a more fleshed-out traditional narrative… Don’t really do that. Practically every addition is one of two things: Liam Neeson pretending he’s really part of the story, as in the “Distant Shores” interlude, or prose spoilers for something that’s about to be more effectively conveyed in song, as with the new characters in the prologue. The additions to the Artilleryman scene are both: Liam Neeson having a conversation with the Artilleryman in which we get to hear all about his grand plan… Right before the big show-stopping number about his grand plan.
It made it about three fourths of the way down before I realized that this was intentional and the lighting gantry hadn’t just come loose.
“I’ve got a plan,” he declares, and there’s another rare bit of stagecraft as a large bridge is lowered onto the set. I don’t know what specifically the bridge is supposed to represent, beyond the abstract notion of civil engineering. And maybe that the Paris Barricade in Les Miz was really cool. In the various staged versions, the Artilleryman dances around the stage as he sings about his plan to develop the system of tunnels and sewers beneath London into a living space, toying with shovels and surveyor’s tools. The bridge in the original stage show has a very realistically Victorian wrought-iron look to it, but in later productions, it becomes more steampunk, acquiring large metal gears that the Artilleryman can “work on”.
The song is high-power and lots of fun, but you don’t usually get too far from the unpleasant implications of what the Artilleryman proposes. And yet, you can start to see why his message would be compelling:
Look, man is born in freedom,[br]But he soon becomes a slave,[br]In cages of convention,[br]From the cradle to the grave.[br]The weak fall by the wayside,[br]But the strong will be saved,[br]In a brave new world,[br]With just a handful of men,[br]We’ll start all over again!
There’s a strong strain of populism there, which on paper sounds weird when juxtaposed with the imagery of “just a handful of men,” until you realize that populist movements always do this: try to appeal to “the masses” using language based around exclusion of everyone who doesn’t slot in neatly with the herrenvolk. There’s anti-elitist sentiments in there that become less subtle in The New Generation. In both, he’s dismissive toward the idea of teaching children, “poems and rubbish,” and the later version adds in more of the novel’s dialogue sneering specifically at the arts. This attitude seems at first to simply be a kind of stoicism that’s not unreasonable in the face of hardship, but he goes on to make an offhand reference to the individual enclaves in his proposed underground civilization having cricket leagues, and then later he proposes that seaside vacations would be part of his new world. So it’s not really about a life bereft of luxury, but rather one that eschews highbrow entertainment like the Royal Academy of the Arts, the opera, or fancy restaurants, but still permits the sort of amusements that would have been available to the hoi polloi. By the late 19th century, seaside resorts for the working class had become a “thing” in Britain, thanks to the growth of railways coupled with the industrial revolution that had introduced regular work schedules which now often included a week off every year when the factory closed down for maintenance. In the novel, the Artilleryman refers to, “A dislike of eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches,” as useless traits in his new world.
Unlike Parson Nathaniel, there is a lot of variation among the various singers who’ve played the Artilleryman. There’s an interplay of a whole bunch of aspects to his character, and different performers choose different ones to play up. It’s exemplified really well in the way they handle the middle eight, which, coincidentally, is my single favorite block of lines in the whole album:
I’m not trying to tell you what to be,[br] Oh no, oh no, not me.[br] But if mankind is to survive,[br] The people left alive,[br] We’re going to have to build this world anew,[br] And it’s going to have to start with me and you![br]
David Essex sings on the 1978 album, and his Artilleryman is a bit of a con man. You hear it all through the song, but most especially in his, “Oh no, oh no, not me…” It comes out like a snake-oil salesman setting you up for the hard sell that comes with a transparently fake reluctance in “But…” As if to say, “What? Me? Oh, no, I’d never try to make you do something you didn’t want to… Of course, if you don’t, it’s just the end of humanity. But it’s completely your choice…”
I love how he clearly conveys that he has no idea how to use it and then goes ahead and does it anyway.
In the 2006 tour, Alexis James’s Artilleryman, on the other hand, is completely on the level. That really took me by surprise, but it’s the first time I really got the “strange charisma” that the character is supposed to have. He’s an evangelist with a convert’s zeal. He’s not going to tell you what to be; he’s just going to tell you this awesome idea he had. He’s always smiling, especially when he’s selling, “Think of all the poverty / The hatred and the lies / Imagine the destruction of all that you despise.” His version is the one whose shtick I can most see the Journalist buying into.
For the 2010 tour, Jason Donovan played the Artilleryman. Remember, he’d go on to play Nathaniel in The New Generation. And the parson’s madness that he would convey so well a few years later is also the core of how he plays the Artilleryman. His version is twitchy and desperate, his, “I’m not going to tell you,” nervous and withdrawing, like he’s afraid you’re going to take a swing at him if he comes on too strong. He plays the character like the street-corner hobo holding up a sign that the end is nigh. Ironically, he’s the only performer who does the “All over again!” line in a falsetto rather than as a squeal. Both he and Alexis James salute the audience before leaving the stage, but while James’s exit is bold and indefatigable, Donovan slinks off the stage, defeated. In fact, he visibly deflates as the Journalist comes to see, “The gulf between his dreams and his power,” his last refrain coming off as a man desperately trying to cling to a fading dream.
Ricky Wilson took over the role for the first tour of The New Generation, and his Artilleryman is the most sinister. There’s a cynicism to his performance, but also a great deal of showmanship. He leans more heavily on the lines about destroying the decadent conventions of the past. His “Oh no, oh no, not me,” isn’t simply dismissive, it’s the same sort of manufactured offense a mid-level politician would display if you suggested that his white hooded robes might indicate he’s racist. He’s beating the drum to rally his audience, and rally them with the fantasy of taking their country back and giving the what-for to all the weak and undesirable and elite classes. Also, he’s going to build a wall around Mars and make the Martians pay for it (This joke was probably funnier when this post was originally scheduled to go out on Halloween).
For the Farewell Thunderchild tour, Shayne Ward plays the role, and… He’s fine. I haven’t found a complete recording of his rendition of Brave New World, but what I’ve heard seems to be technically fine, but lacks the distinctiveness of the other performers.
After leaving the Artilleryman to his brave new world, the Journalist finally makes it to Central London. The music takes on an ominous tone, but the “Ulla!” cries of the Martians become wailing and mournful. It has a profound effect on the narrator. “Why was I wandering along in this city of the dead?” he asks, “Why was I alive when London was lying in state in its black shroud?” As he approaches the wailing tripod, the cries and also the music cut off suddenly.
Abruptly, the sound ceased. Suddenly the desolation, the solitude, became unendurable. While that voice sounded London still seemed alive, now suddenly there was a change, the passing of something, and all that remained was this gaunt quiet.[br] …[br] An insane resolve possessed me: I would give my life to the Martians, here and now.
This past week, I’ve been flipping back and forth between “There must be something worth living for / There must be something worth fighting for / Even something worth dying for,” and “There is a curse on mankind / We may as well be resigned / To let the devil take the spirit of man,” so let’s go ahead and get back to this. I’d been holding off because I was trying to import a copy of the DVD of the New Generation tour, but it got lost in the mail and the seller gave me a refund. Because of this, several pictures in this and the next part of this essay were borrowed from Youtube instead.
As with the 1938 radio play, the second act of Jeff Wayne’s adaptation comes closer to a traditional narrative, if only a little. Disc 2 consists of seven tracks in the original, basically three major “scenes” with short connecting pieces. Rereleases in 1989, 1995 and 1996 add some remixes at the end of the disc. The New Generation version of Disc 2 has nine tracks, though it only runs about five minutes longer. There are more noticeable additions to the story in disc 2 from the original to the New Generation than there were in disc 1, but it’s still only a modest change.
The basic structure of the second act, just as in the novel, is roughly “Here are some interesting things that the Journalist happened upon as he walked back to London after the destruction of the Thunderchild.” This sort of travelogue kind of story can be really cool and it’s one of the elements of the original War of the Worlds story that I wish got played up more in adaptation. Offhand, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a musical structured that way, which is surprising. I wonder if the more episodic structure is a bridge too far when you’re already in a format that’s fighting an uphill battle to be a narrative rather than a concert.
The narrator of the novel wasn’t actually present for the Thunderchild scene: the account in the book is framed as the account of his brother. By this point in the story, the novel’s narrator was penned in by black smoke with the curate. As a result, there’s a point of sloppiness where the musical version has to bring itself back on course: the great throng of refugees who watched the battle along with the Journalist abruptly vanish with no explanation over the act break, so that when they switch on Giant Dead-Eyed Disembodied CGI Richard Burton, he’s alone again, wandering through a countryside choked by the red weed.
The blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of— wait, wait. Wrong musical.
The red weed is mentioned numerous times in the second half of the novel, it’s a recurring image, and it’s used to foreshadow the ending, since it’s already being killed off by a “cankering disease” by the time they reintroduce the artilleryman. But it’s never really addressed in detail. In fact, it’s not even the only Martian plant mentioned, just the one with the widest proliferation. The musical is much more prosaic about it. The red weed isn’t just a few spray-painted twigs, but has an active, ominous presence that is almost as threatening as the Martians themselves:
Wherever there was a stream the red weed clung and grew with frightening voraciousness, its claw-like fronds choking the movement of the water. And then it began to creep like a slimy red animal across the land covering field and ditch and tree and hedgerow with living scarlet feelers, crawling, crawling.
In the New Generation stage show, Liam Neeson is even shown on-screen struggling through a field choked with red CGI vegetation. It’s the red weed that serves to segue into the introduction of the musical’s equivalent of the Curate, here identified as Parson Nathaniel. The Journalist sees his apparently dead body about to be engulfed by the stuff and stops to give him a proper burial, only to discover him still alive, though injured and half-mad from an ordeal whose details we aren’t given.
The second of the new characters created for this version appears here: Nathaniel’s wife, Beth, who introduces herself with the delightfully expositiony line, “It’s me, Beth, your wife.” In his deluded state, he waffles on this, sometimes accepting her, but mostly believing her to be a demon that’s taken human form.
This whole segment is a little strange, because the Journalist seems in some ways to not actually be part of it. He does speak directly to the on-stage characters, but only a few times. They never respond, or really give any indication that they’re aware of him. Some of Nathaniel’s ravings might be addressed to him, but he might equally well be talking to himself. Beth doesn’t acknowledge the Journalist at all. In her defense, I would probably try real hard to pretend I didn’t notice the giant floating head off to stage left as well. The New Generation gives the Journalist a few more lines here for its holographic Liam Neeson, including a very nice one where he challenges the parson, “Pull yourself together, man. What good is religion if it fails you in a calamity?”, adapted from a similar exchange in the novel (Which goes on to add the wonderful line, “God is not an insurance agent.”). But the scene really is about Beth and Nathaniel, not the Journalist.
Three quarters of the speaking parts in this show and two of them are computer generated.
If “Forever Autumn” is the objectively best song and “Thunderchild” is my personal favorite song, “The Spirit of Man” is the most musical theater of the songs in the production. You could probably even expand it out to two or three separate songs if you wanted. The song is a sort of musical debate between the ranting Nathaniel and his wife. He wallows in despair, fatalism, and self-hatred:
Listen!
Do you hear them drawing near,
In their search for the sinners?
Feeding on the the power of our fear,
And the evil within us?
Incarnation of Satan’s creation
Of all that we dread,
When the demons arise,
those alive will be better off dead!
While Beth tries lovingly to break his fugue and inspire strength in him with a boldly rousing response as, in the stage show, she literally picks him up and brushes him off:
There must be something worth living for!
There must be something worth trying for!
Even some things worth dying for,
And if one man can stand tall,
There must be hope for us all,
Somewhere,
Somewhere in the spirit of man.
Powerful words and a powerful delivery, and my daughter seems to really dig it when I sing that refrain to her. Nathaniel is unconvinced, though, protesting that, “Once there was a time when I believed without hesitation,” but now, “How much protection is truth against all Satan’s might?”
Beth and Nathaniel were both recast several times during the original version tours, but the performance is largely the same in every version. Starting with the first stage show, and repeated for all the subsequent versions, a distorted echo is added whenever Nathaniel talks about the devil, which sets up a sort of auditory irony, as he speaks of humanity possessed and consumed by Satan, while suggesting that it is actually Nathaniel himself who is “possessed” by his madness. For The New Generation album, Joss Stone voices Beth, and she’s absolutely fantastic, which is a shame, because she’s paired with Irish rapper Maverick Sabre’s Nathaniel, and he’s terrible. He comes off as whiny and pusillanimous, simply scared rather than broken. Jason Donovan and Kerry Ellis take the parts for the stage version, with Carrie Hope Fletcher taking over as Beth for Farewell Thunderchild. Jason Donovan really plays up Nathaniel’s madness, making him at times almost gleeful as he shouts how he’d been right all along with his warnings of divine wrath, then falling apart as he acknowledges the scale of the destruction.
Ellis adds one really cool element. Beth’s line, “People loved you and trusted you, came to you for help,” delivered by everyone else as a reassurance instead comes out as an accusation. An attempt to shame him for a dereliction of duty. It’s the only time in any version that Beth shows anything other than complete faith and complete support in her husband — she even takes his cross away from him at this point.
Symbolism!
Beth’s part of “Spirit of Man” is really two parts; after this exchange, she switches from trying to rally him and restore his resolve to simply comforting him: “No, Nathaniel, no; there must be more to life,” she sings, “There has to be a way we can restore to life the love that we have lost.” (This is the point where Beth gives his cross back to him in the later stage versions.) Strains of this second melody appear right at the beginning of “Spirit of Man”, acting as curious foreshadowing in the album version. By The New Generation, they’ve added an extra “No, Nathaniel, no,” there, which I think reduces the effectiveness when the second melody is introduced in the middle of the song.
Throughout the song, in the staged versions, Nathaniel alternates between accepting Beth’s support and pushing her away, to the point that it confused Dylan when he watched part of it with me. “Doesn’t he think she’s a bad guy?” he asked. I explained that he was all mixed up. He most rejects her on the “Something worth living for” verses, and then is drawn to her on the “No Nathaniel” ones. When the last “Something worth living for” verse comes around, it’s done as a call-and-response:
I really like the decision to have Nathaniel join in on Beth’s last line; it hints that he’s starting to come around. But it’s at odds with its position in the song, as he goes on to do another verse about how he warned everyone to exorcise the devil and now it’s too late. The stage production seems to realize the incongruity here, since immediately after “Forget about goodness and mercy, they’re gone!”, he takes Beth’s hand, and the two walk together upstage and nearly off it, when he holds up his cross so that it casts a shadow on the back wall, then turns to the audience suddenly and bursts into verse, with the tone and charisma of a fire-and-brimstone revival preacher. Beth watches sadly from upstage, only returning to him with her last round of “No, Nathaniel”s.
The staged version definitely plays up the notion that she had, in fact, come close to bringing him around, only for him to slip back into despair at the last minute. The new version also seems like it’s making a point to indict Nathaniel’s faith. First, the Journalist challenges him on it, that it should be a source of strength for him but isn’t, and then the symbolism with the cross seems to indicate that his faith takes him to a dark place: he repeatedly waves it at Beth as a warding sign. When she returns it to him halfway through the song, in Jason Donovan’s rendering, he cradles it like a child, but also starts pulling at his hair in a way that’s very commonly used in stage and film to indicate an impulse control disorder. He seems to be restored when Beth takes it from him; it’s the sight of its shadow on the wall that prompts his final turn away from her. And after Beth’s last “No, Nathaniel,” she takes his cross again and leaves the stage.
And then she comes right back on again. Or rather, her stunt-double does, because at the end of the song, a Martian cylinder hits the house where they’ve been sheltering. In the most spectacular example of expository dialogue since… Okay, since a few minutes ago when Beth told her husband that she was his wife, Nathaniel announces, “A cylinder has landed on the house and we’re underneath it in the pit!” In yet another example of the New Generation telegraphing its reveals, we actually see her collapse in a spray of pyrotechnics in this version, even though it’s a few minutes before her death is revealed in the narrative.
The whole “Spider-Dalek” thing from the proposed Doctor Who reboot was a bad idea.
Instead, hologram Liam Neeson or Creepy CGI Richard Burton tell us all about how the Martians spend the night building a handling machine — a short-legged vehicle with claws and a cage which they use to hunt and capture humans. Yeah, this is a weird place in the narrative to break for exposition. This is one of the only adaptations to show the handling machine. Most adaptations limit themselves to the tripod fighting machines. Martian flying machines also appear in the CGI video, though they are not mentioned in the narrative. That 1998 video game gave them an ample supply of cheap 3D models to choose from. Though they don’t show up in the stage show, the video game version is the only adaptation I know of to include the “embankment machine”, a Martian craft used for excavating their landing sites. Even Timothy Hines’s slavishly faithful version doesn’t bother with them and Wells himself only mentions them in passing.
When Nathaniel finally does discover Beth’s body (and retrieves his cross), he loses it completely, demanding, “Satan! Why did you take one of your own?” and performing his own dark version of Beth’s verse:
There is a curse on mankind!
We may as well be resigned,
To let the devil,
The devil take the spirit of man!
Starting with the original 2006 stage show Beth’s disembodied voice offers another round of “No, Nathaniel!”s, this time altered with a haunting, ethereal effect. In the New Generation version, a cloaked version of Beth appears as well, then is lifted from the stage by wires.
Spooky!
The curate is often omitted in adaptations. The only ones we’ve seen to include him until now are the slavishly faithful Timothy Hines version and of all things, the Asylum version. One thing I notice is that the character’s final breakdown in both this version and the Asylum one are triggered by the same thing: the sight of the Martians feeding, which is described to us in detail by Giant Disembodied Richard Burton at this point in the story. This doesn’t occur in the novel, where they witness the feeding much earlier. There, it seems like the curate’s breakdown is largely due to hunger, as it’s immediately preceded by him pitching a fit over the narrator withholding food (this point is repeated in the Asylum adaptation, where, if you’ll recall, it’s leveraged to foreshadow the ultimate fate of the aliens when George gets to thinking about the dangers of eating spoiled food). No other version has an equivalent character to Beth, of course, so where the novel has the curate declare his intention to witness to the Martians and the Asylum film has him simply give up on his faith, it’s only the musical version where Parson Nathaniel is inspired to a crusade: he declares that he’s received a sign that he is to go out and smite the invaders — literallywith the power of his cross. Symbolism!
Depending on which version of the musical you’re experiencing, it’s ambiguous what exactly happens next. In the novel, the narrator clubs the curate in the head with the blunt end of a meat cleaver. It’s not clear if the blow is fatal, but we’re told it leaves a visible injury. In the original album, Burton doesn’t say what happens, but we hear a thwack and a thump. It seems obvious enough what happened, I think, assuming you don’t just miss it outright, as it lasts a fraction of a second and isn’t described. And I’m not sure if it even really “seems obvious” because it is, or just because I’ve read the book and know what’s coming. But in the original stage version, creepy CGI Burton has no hands or anything, and if the thwack is actually there, I couldn’t hear it over the music, so it seems more like Nathaniel just trips over something on his way out to confront the aliens. The thwack sound is more pronounced on The New Generation and sounds unambiguously like a punch. On stage, the result is, of course, amazing:
I am unspeakably happy this happened.
That’s right. Holographic Liam Neeson punches him in the face. Look, I’ve had my reservations about this kinda-sorta-halfway-conversion from a presentation designed for pure audio into a stage format, but it is all worth it to watch a hologram of Liam Neeson punch a live actor in the face.
The rest of Nathaniel’s fate is revealed by the dodgy CGI backdrop as a metal claw locates a CGI ragdoll and tosses it into a giant alien Cuisinart. Setting aside just how hard it is to buy that CG sequence as something we were meant to take seriously, I really really like the way that the Spirit of Man scene translates to the stage. From the album, to the first stage show, to the second album, to the second stage show, you can really feel this scene in particular trying to evolve toward being a proper theatrical presentation. It isn’t quite there yet, but it’s close. Close enough, in fact, that I’d say this is the one thing in the album that is outright better on stage. All the other stage numbers are basically neutral, but this one actually adds new layers of meaning to the groundwork that’s already laid by the song.
I’m pretty sure I saw this exact scene in a Star Trek fan film.
Once the aliens have buggered off about their own business, the journalist emerges from the pit and gets back on his way to London, finding the countryside completely abandoned.
He decides that this quiet interlude would be a good time for more exposition, and why not? The narration changes a bit from the original to The New Generation. Small but important changes in phrasing make it more intimate in the new version. In the original, CGI Richard Burton speaks abstractly about abandoned towns and the end of “Man’s empire.” Holographic Liam Neeson describes a sense of “dethronement” from the realization that he, a once-master of the Earth, now seemed to rank lower than even the encroaching red weed. There’s a reason for it, though. He explains that the Martians are effectively creatures “composed entirely of brain”, whose machines served as made-to-order task-specific artificial bodies rather than wasting energy lugging around complicated limbs and digestive systems. The point of the aside is foreshadowing: the Journalist explains that, “They never tired, never slept, and never suffered, having long since eliminated from their planet the bacteria that cause all fevers and morbidities.” Gee. I wonder if that will somehow become relevant later…
To Be Continued…
Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds is available via iTunes and Amazon.
Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: The New Generation is available via iTunes and Amazon
Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: Live on Stage and Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: The New Generation: Alive on Stage! are available on DVD in region 2 only.
By the time we get to chapter eleven and the first meeting of the narrator with the artilleryman, Brown’s additions have become shorter, but more frequent. A reference to checking his ammunition before setting out from his house. Mention of soldiers guarding refugees as they packed their belongings in Byfleet, and references to civilians arming themselves. Not all of the insertions directly relate to the zombie menace. When the narrator first meets the artilleryman and invites him into his house, he points out that hiding outside won’t work. At Shepperton Lock, where Wells notes that, “There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting,” Brown adds, “He joked about the end of the world in an odd kind of black humor [sic].”
These little additions work a lot better than the earlier ones. By being short and matter-of-fact, they don’t clash with Wells’s style, yet they add a bit of subtle shading around the edges of the whole section, a little tonal difference in what kind of panic has gripped those in the path of the advancing Martians and zombies.
The artilleryman’s account of his own survival sticks out as problematic in context — Brown presents it unmodified, despite the fact that it involves him, “lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses,” in a context where that would almost certainly get him bitten. Otherwise, though, Brown is largely consistent about adding explicit head wounds to corpses seen by Wells’s narrator, or specifying them as, “True dead burnt to a crisp or devoured to the point that they had not reanimated.”
The dead are suspiciously absent from the battle at Weybridge and Shepperton, but they reappear when the Martians retreat in chapter 13 to reevaluate their tactics after a cannon takes out a tripod. We return to the curious theme I mentioned last time. “The dead were still very much a threat and a terrible one,” Brown inserts into a paragraph about the positioning of human reinforcements, “But the Martians’ sheer capacity for destruction was appalling to the point that they, for the moment, outweighed the threat of the dead.” We retain the strange juxtaposition that, confronted with Martian invaders, even the walking dead seem like a manageable threat by comparison. Indeed, Brown goes on to interject that, along with the military preparations for their next fight against the tripods, teams are sent out into the streets to prevent the last round of casualties from rising up.
By this point, I’m surprised by the fact that we haven’t yet had any explicit reference to the zombies having an infectious bite. Sure, the victims of the zombies do rise up, but we haven’t yet had any mention of soldiers who survived a biting, only to turn later. For now, the military continues to keep things in order by dispatching teams to issue the coups de grace to their casualties. The clinical tone Brown adopts here is a better fit with Wells’s normal style. Particularly in context, the fact that the army is able to keep the dead at bay complements the general sense at this point in the story that things are still under control. We’re a few chapters away, at this point, from humanity at large admitting that the Martian threat is insurmountable rather than just serious — despite the casualties and destruction so far, the humans managed to destroy a tripod in the last chapter and they have as yet no reason to believe that, once they’re prepared, they won’t be able to continue to dispatch them.
That said, there’s a tension here, because it’s also at this point that the narrator, having only narrowly escaped the last battle and scalded from a heat ray hit to the river, flees in a panic. That tension exists in the original too, with no specific or imminent justification for the narrator’s renewed panic. The lengthening of the opening paragraphs of chapter thirteen by Brown exacerbates it, though. Maybe it’s a cultural thing for me as a modern reader, but the addition of the risen dead for me does help make the curate’s breakdown more believable when he is introduced in this chapter. As someone whose ballywick covers what happens to people after they die, it’s easier for me to imagine a zombie apocalypse having such an immediate impact on him than the Martians, who, at this point, are still behaving in a way that’s recognizable to anyone who’s familiar with a technologically advanced culture launching a military invasion. They might be alien cephalopods, but the tripods are essentially doing a cavalry charge. Brown adds a full page of action at the end of chapter thirteen, placing the narrator and the curate in a fight scene with some zombies. As has happened before, Brown’s gorier style clashes with that of Wells.
Now, I’ve pointed out a few popular zombie conventions that Brown has surprisingly omitted so far, in order to retain parsimony with the Wells story. In chapter fourteen, when the viewpoint switches to the narrator’s brother in London, things start to change. If this change in style is deliberate, that’s a clever place to do it. It has little relevance to the narrative in the original text that the brother is a medical student. Brown takes advantage of the lucky break here and has the brother witness the resurrection of the dead first-hand as medical cadavers manage to devour some of his classmates. The sense that the Martians are the real threat and the zombies just a sideshow continues here, but there’s a tonal difference: the government deliberately suppresses news of the dead to avoid panic, presenting the Martians as the primary threat, even as the press persists in emphasizing the sluggishness of the creatures in Earth gravity and insisting even after the battle at Weybridge that the invaders, despite their powerful weapons, will eventually succumb to the greater numbers and home-field advantage of the humans. An addition by Brown also informs us that the authorities were inspecting refugees for bite-marks as they fled to London from the countryside. If this means that the zombies do indeed have the traditionally infectious bite, the brother doesn’t know it yet.
Distrust of the authorities is a common trope in zombie fiction, of course, and Brown plays it up here. Where Wells notes with wonderful understatement, “At the time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the invaders without all this inconvenience,” Brown adds an entire paragraph expressing condemnation that, “The fools who made first contact with the aliens,” hadn’t simply dumped a mountain of explosives on them, “The second it was known the men from Mars were not men at all.” Aside from the overly Star Trek word choice at the beginning, the sentiment, “Okay, not shooting them on sight might have been justified if they’d turned out to be humanoid, but since they’re octopuses, we shoulda nuked them from orbit just to be sure,” is pretty pitch-perfect here. And the notion that the success of the Martian campaign was largely predicated on the slowness of the initial human response fits in very well with recurring themes in the original book.
The hope that greater preparation by the humans would be able to contain and defeat the Martians is, of course, dashed by the introduction of the deadly black smoke that can be deployed to depopulate an area before defenses can be set up — and adds to the ranks of the dead. The dead vanish from the narrative for a few pages but then return with an abrupt transition from the army “somehow” being able to hold them back to the army being completely overwhelmed by them. Chapter fifteen ends with the tale of General Alves, whose troops fought to the last man to buy the population time to flee from the dead.
The dead remain only a haunting flavor for the remainder of book one. As the narrator’s brother flees from London, there’s mention of a family of refugees, unable to face the facts, carrying their zombified daughter with them, carefully bound, a somewhat welcome bit of standard zombie cliche, honestly. Even in the original, the scene is heavy on human suffering, and Brown enhances it. Where in the original the brother observes that an injured man he passes is “lucky to have friends,” Brown has him wonder, “If his friends wouldn’t be unlucky to have him. If he died, they may find themselves in unexpected trouble.”
At this point, I was going to start plowing through the second half of the novel, but my neck has hurt for days and it turns out that Halloween is a comparatively busy time when you’re a parent, and I’ve already blown my schedule enough that I have to go take out all of the election jokes out of the the remaining parts of my review of the musical, so instead, I’ll just remind you that The War of the Worlds Plus Blood Guts and Zombies is available from Amazon.
God damned third-party seller on Amazon. The DVD I needed to finish my scheduled post was due to arrive no later than last Thursday. Yet here I wait without it. So instead, here’s the post I was going to put up on Halloween.
It’s like they took every stylistic element of every prior rendition of the tripod and slammed them together without any appreciation for how these things should go together.
It is April 30, 2009. Chrysler declares bankruptcy. South Korea has created transgenic fluorescent dogs. Tomorrow, Carol Ann Duffy will become the first woman, first Scot, and first openly gay person to be named Poet Laureate of the UK. X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens tomorrow as well. Navy cop drama NCIS launches its spin-off NCIS: Los Angeles. We continue to mourn Bea Arthur, who died last week. We’ll lose Dom Deluise in the coming one. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation this week is “The Gone Dead Train”, about a tattoo parlor that gives people rabies. Hugh Jackman is Jon’s guest on The Daily Show. Ethan Nadelmann is on Colbert. A few weeks ago, the BBC aired the first Doctor Who of the calendar year, “Planet of the Dead”. Saturday’s Power Rangers RPM is “Ranger Blue”, a focus episode for The Tribe alum Ari Boyland, which has the disappointing resolution that the solution to this week’s problem (he’s left unable to summon his spandex due to an overload) is to pull the battery out of his morpher and reinsert it backwards.
The Billboard charts are stable this week; “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas is number one for the third week in a row, and they’ll stay there until October because “I Got a Feeling” is coming out soon. There’s been no movement in the top three since they bumped Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” down a notch. Flo Rida follows them in number 3 with “Right Round”. Everyone else in the top ten has been jocking for position for weeks, aside from Eminem’s “We Made You” which enters the charts this week at number 9.
Ever since George Romero and Mike Russo invented the modern zombie horror genre in 1968, the popularity of tales of the risen dead has waxed and waned as they caught the zeitgeist of whichever assortment of cultural fears ruled the day. When their popularity started to peak again in 2007, things were different on the pop culture scene, though. The larger horror genre was, like all of geek culture, somewhat less marginalized and film storytelling had become more sophisticated. At the same time, the wider culture was becoming more polarized. There was a growing cultural angst, a sense of impending apocalypse. The Cold War had long-since ended, paradoxically making us feel less secure since we no longer had the comforting thought of sudden nuclear annihilation to stop us from worrying about things like the fact that there was a limited amount of oil and most of it was in a part of the world basically synonymous with violent political instability. There was a major housing crisis on the horizon, the catastrophic effects of global climate change were getting harder to ignore, international terrorism seemed — accurately or not — like a bigger threat than ever, and both Gilmore GirlsandThe West Wing had been canceled. The world didn’t feel especially sustainable, and we couldn’t really say why. The reason we couldn’t really say why was mostly because “Actually what it feels like is that white Christian heterosexual men are not going to have a monopoly on power much longer and ‘working-class white man’ isn’t going to be the cultural notion of ‘default human’, and as far as I’m concerned, that is the literal end of the world,” is not something it’s socially acceptable to cop to.
While geek culture was becoming more mainstream, another thing that was starting to become more normalized and less, “I’m already preparing my ‘He kept to himself and always seemed like a quiet, non-threatening man,’ speech for when the reporters interview me after he goes postal,” were the militia and doomsday prepper subcultures. People who were increasingly convinced that any day now, human civilization would collapse and their survival would rely on them having been prepared with a stockpile of canned goods, gold bullion purchased from an infomercial during Glenn Beck’s show, and many, many guns.
And I’ll confess here that I’ve got maybe just a touch of doomsday prepper mixed into my hoarder sensibilities. Mine’s a little different from most; I don’t expect the actual literal collapse of human civilization, nor do I presume that I could actually defend myself from it, since my diabetes meds aren’t shelf-stable. But the knowledge that I’ve got enough freeze-dried food to outlast a hurricane does a little to offset my general paranoia. Mostly I’m interested in it for the MacGyver aspect.
But I think there’s another aspect to the prepper/survivalist boom and the not unrelated zombie revival at around the same time that people don’t like to talk about, and it’s where I start to bring us back around to The War of the Worlds. There are exceptions, obviously, but earlier zombie fads seem to have focused more on running away, holing up somewhere, and shepherding resources to find a way to improvise around the absence of civilization. This isn’t absent in the more recent fad, but there’s something else: a much greater emphasis on the visceral thrill of zombie-killing. Where in earlier films, the survivors go on the offensive only rarely, usually just for a climactic scene that ends either in a tragic downer ending or at best a Pyrrhic victory, more recent films take considerable joy in showing their heroes hunt down and dispatch the undead.
I think that maybe in a culture that’s increasingly polarized, that anticipates the collapse of society with a kind of perverse eagerness, there’s a certain fascination in this one angle of zombie stories: that they are stories in which your neighbors, your coworkers, your countrymen have become something which it is morally acceptable to shoot in the head. It is a chance to live out your every dark fantasy about murdering hobos. It is exactly what David Essex was singing about: imagine the destruction of all that you despise. And even more the radio play version of the artilleryman: get a bunch of strong men together, no weak ones; that rubbish, out. Get yourself a heat ray and turn it on the Martians and the men. Bring everybody down to their knees.
So I was into the zombie thing for a while around this time, but I eventually lost interest, a little bit before the fad crested and zombies became the big hit pop cultural thing, which makes me sound like a hipster, but really I just kinda peaked too soon and had burned out before The Walking Dead happened.
I have wandered well away from my point, and you’re probably wondering what I’m doing way out here in the woods, assuming you did not read the title of this article, which gives the game away. The Literary Mashup is a recently popular fictional genre which, if it wasn’t created outright created by Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was certainly popularized by it. The genre varies considerably, from telling mostly original stories that introduce modern horror genre tropes into historical settings, such as Grahame-Smith’s 2010 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, adaptations of modern works into classical styles, like Adam Bertocci’s Shakespeare pastiche, The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, or adaptations which simply append a new subplot to an existing work. Jane Austin seems popular for this one, as Grahame-Smith’s seminal work was followed up a few months later by Ben H. Winter’s fantastically named Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Winters would go on to produce Android Karenina, which warms my heart.
Now, I am familiar with the works of Eric S. Brown from my own zombie-fanboy days. I generally found his short stories really good. So I’m not going to pass judgment on the fact that no one was really doing these mashups before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was published on April 1, 2009, and by April 30, 2009, he had his own literary mashup in print. War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It is the complete text of The War of the Worlds with fairly modest additions amounting to a side-plot in which a side-effect of the Martian invasion is that while the Martians are shooting up the south of England, the dead also start rising to feed on the living.
Don’t get me wrong. I bought this book because I dig War of the Worlds and I dig (or dug, at the time, I guess) zombies. But these are really two great tastes that do not taste great together. Like steak and ice cream. The Austen pastiches at least have going for them that the introduction of supernatural horror provides a sharp contrast to the tone and style of Georgian romance in revelatory ways. There’s a tension that arises from the fact that people are still acting like really uptight, proper eighteenth-century Englishmen in the face of the existential horror of dead people getting up and eating folks. Heck, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is largely based around an extended metaphor comparing the antebellum southern gentry to blood-sucking demons, which is apt because that is exactly what they were.
But adding zombies to War of the Worlds doesn’t have the same, if you’ll pardon me, bite. That new MTV show put me in mind of how much The War of the Worlds fits into the mold of a modern post-apocalyptic series, where an unstoppable, unknowable force tears down civilization, and the narrative centers around how people survive in the resulting world. Adding the undead to Austen changes everything. Adding them to War of the Worlds just doesn’t. War of the Worlds doesn’t need zombies: it’s pretty much already got them. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the presence of the zombies changes things. You can’t kill off characters in a character-driven romance and not have it change things. But none of the characters in War of the Worlds have any impact on the unfolding of the plot, so it doesn’t actually matter if the zombies eat them.
So it’s pointless, ill-conceived, and unnecessary. But is it bad? Well, no. Not really. It’s fine. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find the concept of The War of the Worlds far better than the actual execution of the original novel. I just don’t like H. G. Wells as a writer rather than an idea man. I don’t think you’re liable to worsen War of the Worlds by adding to it. It’d be nice if the additions amounted to an actual plot or characters which consistently served a purpose beyond being vessels for exposition.
But Brown’s additions to the text are modest. The content he adds boils down, in almost every case, to, “and also there were zombies.” But the pleasure in reading a book shouldn’t be down just to the content of the ideas. And Brown is very good at making these modest insertions carry a tone of powerful horror.
Ironically, though, this is kinda the project’s downfall. Because Eric S. Brown does a fine job of inserting little snippets of a modern zombie apocalypse being told in a style that can reasonably pass for nineteenth century horror. But H. G. Wells can’t. There are moments in The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies which evoke Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Also Zombies is probably way too obvious to be worth doing), or Shelley (Frankenstein, or the Modern Undead Prometheus might possibly work, but again, too obvious), or Stoker (Been there, done that), even at times Henry James (The Turn of The Screw Into The Brain of The Living Dead could probably work, now that I think of it), but his style never actually matches the style of the person he’s actually imitating.
I imagine that even they did not realize the full effect their war with us, the dwellers of this bright blue and green orb of light, would bring about, or the utter terror it would unleash. (Page 6)
It’s a really nice sentence all on its own. Spooky and foreshadowy, but stilted in a distinctively Victorian way. The sentence works. But when you look at the surrounding text, it just doesn’t fit. The rest of the chapter is clinical and dispassionate with no sense of terror. Besides, it jars rather badly with the paragraph which follows it. Because “Hey, sure it sucks for us, but before we judge them too harshly, remember that they invaded because it was their only chance to survive, whereas the British Empire committed genocide purely for profit,” seems a bit hollow when the other thing the aliens did was cause the dead to rise as cannibalistic revenants.
Later, even as Wells’s tone does start to include elements of horror, it doesn’t approach the horror in the same way. Worse, Brown’s zombie horror is in tension with Wells’s alien horror. Consider the narrator’s reaction to his first sight of a tripod:
It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.
To a modern audience, it’s an oddly abstract kind of horror. “Problematical” is just intensely weird adjective in context. The one I use to describe when some piece of media I like turns out to be steeped in sexism or something. He tells us it is “monstrous”, but Wells’s style remains largely clinical. I mean, he compares it to a milking stool. But there’s no ambiguity about it being intended as a moment of terror.
In which I desperately play for time because of shipping delays which threaten to screw up my posting schedule…
You may perhaps recall that back in 2012, when I was in the middle of spending far too many years getting through my analysis of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, I learned that Gary Goddard had gotten it into his head to produce a reboot of the series under the title Phoenix Rising. There’s a teaser trailer now. It… Okay, I don’t really know what people who make teaser trailers for in-development TV shows are shooting for because I haven’t seen one that actually looked good in a long time. I mean, Jesus, the CGI starship model in the Star Trek Discovery teaser looked awful. The Phoenix Rising teaser isn’t terrible, but it’s maybe a little over the top, and the Power Suit mockup has the same creepy “Textured to look like it’s made of sinew” thing that creeped me the fuck out in the Power Rangers trailer that came out last week. But yay! A concrete thing you can look at.
You might also remember that about a year ago, I wrote about Mystery Science Theater 3000, and then a week later Joel Hodgson started a kickstarter to revive the series. The kickstarter made its goal pretty much instantly and the new series is well into production.
Last July, I meandered over and wrote about Alien Nation, and at the time, there’d been various talks over the course of years about doing something with that franchise, but I guess that me blogging about it made things serious because a feature film reboot actually seems to be moving forward now.
So you can probably see where this is going: MTV is going to do a TV series based on The War of the Worlds. Because of course they are. I doubt many details have actually been decided at this stage, and fewer still made public, but early reports suggest that it’s based directly on the novel, rather than any particular adaptation. It’s being developed by the same creative team as the 2011 Teen Wolf TV series (Not to be confused with all the other Teen Wolf franchises), and among its executive producers is Jeff Barry, Gene Barry’s grandson.
A lot of the interwebs are alight with people hoping that this adaptation will be entirely faithful to the book, which I presume means that they never read the book, and certainly never saw Timothy Hines’s slavishly book-faithful adaptation. That said, I think that a TV series in particular is a format where you probably could make something out of the structure and style of the original novel without it becoming a straight-up slog. Because for a TV show, you don’t need one single story with a beginning, middle, and end, where the actions of the protagonists build toward a climax. You need a whole bunch of small stories about people getting on with their lives which build up to a larger story. And in this regard, an invasion of alien death machines from Mars can work exactly the same way as a zombie plague does for The Walking Dead or a disease did for The Last Ship, The Survivors, Jeremiah, The Tribe and The Stand, or angels did for Dominion: as primarily a background element that serves as a persistent side-threat for the characters as they go about the day-to-day business of trying to stay alive deprived of the support system of civilization. In that regard, The War of the Worlds is as promising a premise as anything, even if there’s nothing especially distinctive that they’d be bringing. Also, it’s MTV, so probably there’s going to be attractive young people in love triangles.
What’s strange, when I think about it, is that there hasn’t, far as I know, been very many British adaptations of War of the Worlds. The whole “A catastrophe wipes out most of mankind and the survivors limp along trying to sort out keeping a modest civilization still going,” is a fairly quintessential British Sci Fi trope. There’s been a recent fad for it in the US, as some of my examples above suggest, but the British were doing this at least as far back as the ’70s. The Tripods is pretty much the War of the Worlds adaptation I just sketched out with the serial numbers filed off. There’s even a British radio play spin-off of Independence Day. So why not go all-in?
Oh. Duh. Because The War of the Worlds was still under copyright in the UK, and the British television industry can not abide by paying the estates of people for rights to make adaptations of things. I wonder when H. G. Wells died…
Whaddya know. The 70th anniversary of his death was back in August. And since Disney does not control the copyright laws of the UK, British copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the author, rather than the US’s “X+1 years where X is the number of years since Steamboat Willie“. (Though for some reason, every source I can find says that the copyright actually runs out in December. The exact details of British copyright law are beyond me. The original serialized version of the novel finished its first run in December, 1897, so possibly copyright statuses change on the anniversary of publication?)
And this is why I confused the news about MTV’s War of the Worlds with something else. Because back in December, ITV announced that they too were working on a TV adaptation of The War of the Worlds, with production set to begin once the rights expired. Not a lot of details out on this one either, but it seems likely to be a period piece, and at the helm will be Peter Harness, showrunner for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, who also, for what it’s worth, wrote “The Zygon Invasion”/”The Zygon Inversion” for Doctor Who.
In a complete non-coincidence, the passing of the novel into British public domain will also be marked by a new sequel by Stephen Baxter, The Massacre of Mankind, slated to publish in January. I have no idea how copyright didn’t enter into this one, but some decades ago, Baxter published a sequel to The Time Machine called The Time Ships, which I found a pleasant read. Years later, I found out that The Time Ships hadn’t originally been written as a sequel to The Time Machine, though: he’s originally pitched it as a Doctor Who novel. I feel like the universe is imploding.
So, I don’t know whether or not I’m actually looking forward to the MTV series. The prospect of watching a new TV series tends to fill me with existential dread these days as the whole “One more damned thing to do,” burden becomes heavier and the return-on-investment for my time slips. But I’ll give it a shot, for you, dear reader.
Anything else you’d like me to resurrect? I’m seriously considering doing a series about Knight Rider once I wrap up War of the Worlds, but I’m starting to worry, because damn is that a franchise that needs to lay fallow for a few decades.
Didn’t I warn them?
Be on your guard, I said, Because the evil one never rests! — Gary Osborne, probably after a prophetic vision of a 3 AM Donald Trump tweetstorm.
Y’know what it kinda looks like? An early ’90s Saturn.
A full-sized prop tripod is lowered onto the stage and proceeds to rake the audience with its floodlamp “heat ray” to the “Ulla!”s of the band. It’s a sight to see. I wonder where it goes when they lift it off the stage. The physical tripod is a close approximation of the CGI ones which appear on-screen, themselves drawn from the cover art of the original 1978 album by Michael Trim. The design is lovely, evoking so many things all at once. The fundamental inspiration is clearly insectoid: they look rather a lot like a large, mechanical water strider, with a small, ovoid cockpit atop long, straight legs that turn sharply inward to attach at the sides of the cockpit, looking a bit like flying buttresses, but with a cross-brace extending from the cockpit halfway down the leg. Two large, green dome windows at the front resemble not only insect eyes, but evoke, deliberately, I think, the pulsating green dome at the front of Al Nozaki’s war machine design from the 1953 film version. The heat ray takes the form of a spotlight attached at the front of the cockpit, strangely, in direct contradiction to the narration, which, like the original novel describes the heat ray as funnel-shaped and held in the tripod’s “hand” (Most adaptations give the tripods three limbs in total, but the novel’s descriptions imply that in addition to the three legs used for locomotion, the fighting machines also have an unspecified number of tentacle-like manipulator arms). All at once, they have a steampunk look, while simultaneously evoking a sort of ’50s sci-fi monster movie feel, nodding to the iconic 1953 movie. And the design has a physicality to it that you rarely see in these CGI-heavy times: aside from the lousy reflections and bump mapping on the CGI models, the design, whether in static art, animation, or a giant metal prop, look and move like they are physical things that could be physically built and really exist. The prop reappears in the New Generation stage show with imrpoved pyrotechnics. The Farewell Thunderchild tour added goofy “pupils” to the dome windows.
Just in case you forgot about him.
The CGI backdrop movie features a very old-school 3D-movie style “hucking stuff at the audience” scene with debris of a tripod destroyed by cannon-fire, but the humans are eventually routed. There’s a musical theme that accompanies the battle, and the original version is the best use of an orchestra to represent a battle since Tchaikovsky, mixing in the ch-chews of the heat ray and the “Ulla!”s of the Martians as instruments. The New Generation version loses its sense of restraint and ends up sounding more like the music coming out of a video arcade, but, again, ass-kicking guitar riff added. The Journalist narrowly escapes both the heat ray and being stepped on by a tripod. One New Generation choice that is clever, even if it doesn’t actually make the music any better, is that when he jumps into a river in his escape, the music is muted, as though heard under water until he comes up for air. He eventually makes his way to London, only to find that his fiancée Carrie and her father have already evacuated, which sets the stage for the musical centerpiece of the album.
Due to the vagaries of time travel, we have, of course, heard “Forever Autumn” before. Luka Kuncevic’s version served as the opening theme to War of the Worlds: Goliath. It’s a haunting and melancholy tune that speaks to nostalgia and lost love and lost youth. Wayne had written the melody back in 1969, for of all things, a Lego radio commercial. It sounds like a strange fit, but I can kinda see how it would work as an appeal to the pastoral simplicity of youth or something. Gary Osborne and Paul Vigrass performed the jingle, then in 1972, they came up with some lyrics for it and released it on their debut album, Queues (Osborne also wrote the lyrics for the three other proper songs in War of the Worlds, and the duo sing backing vocals on the album). Vigrass and Osborne didn’t have much of an impact in the west, but “Forever Autumn” was released as the B-side of their single “Men of Learning”, and made it to number 2 on the Japanese charts. Gary Barlow’s interpretation is okay. The arrangement is closer to the Vigrass and Osborne version and feels retro, surprising given the misguided attempts at modernizing so much of the other music. Both he and Marti Pellow give the song a more mournful tone than Justin Hayward. Pellow especially, who slows it down a lot. His performance is the saddest of the three; it’s not bad, but I think he goes too far with it.
“Forever Autumn” is pretty much the reason Justin Hayward is in this. Jeff Wayne wanted a love song to go at this spot in the story, and he wanted it to sound like the Vigrass and Osborne song, and also to sound like “Nights in White Satin”, so he did the obvious thing and had the guy who sang “Nights in White Satin” sing the Vigrass and Osborne song. As a single, Hayward’s version of “Forever Autumn” made the UK top 5 and edged into the top 50 stateside. The Moody Blues would later put the single version on disc four of their box set Time Traveller, and as a result, it’s well enough known that you can find a karaoke version of it.
It really is quite a nice song. Very straightforward “fall is like a lost love” symbolism, a lovely flute bit in the middle, and Hayward’s performance is fantastic — the Vigrass and Osborne version puts the stress on the wrong part of the, “‘Cause you’re not here” refrain, and their version is a bit too mellow. Omitted from the version released as a single is an interruption for some more narration which is a bit poetic itself: “Fire suddenly leapt from house to house. The population panicked and ran, and I was swept along with them, aimless and lost without Carrie.” In fact, there’s an entire extra scene inserted before the last verse as the Journalist makes his way to the coast in hope of catching a boat out of England (As in the novel, there is no mention of aliens invading outside of England. The stage show prologue hints that the Martians were specifically targeting London as the world’s de facto commercial hub, assuming this would destabilize global economies to the point of collapse).
Through Autumn’s Golden Gown we used to levitate, apparently.
But “Forever Autumn” also demonstrates the extent to which Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds was composed as an album rather than a theatrical production. Because when you get right down to it, “Forever Autumn” fits the surrounding musical motifs perfectly, but it has balls-all to do with the story. The song is a lament for a long-lost love, reflecting back on the happy times. It’s really straightforward: “Through autumn’s golden gown, we used to kick our way / You always loved this time of year. / Those fallen leaves lie undisturbed now / ‘Cause you’re not here.” This is a song told from the point of view of someone revisiting a place that was once special to him and his lost lover. It’s… calm. A song about solitude and loneliness. But it’s inserted here in a scene of chaos: the Journalist isn’t walking through the still and lonely woods, and Carrie hasn’t died or left him. They’ve been separated in the chaos during a disaster. It’s a wonderful song, but for all its relevance to the plot here, they might as well have brought out Peter, Paul and Mary and had them sing “Leavin’ On a Jet Plane”.
Also, there’s nothing to earn the song here. The relationship between the Journalist and Carrie has been established by nothing more than one line of narration where the Journalist learns the Martians are heading for London and is all like, “London? Crap, that’s where my girlfriend lives! I’d better get there!” Compare that with the Asylum adaptation, where we establish George’s relationship with his family before we introduce the Martians, and he basically never shuts up about them for his whole trek to DC.
It is September 6, 1978. My parents are still living in Pennsylvania for a few more months, but in my future home state of Maryland, the Camp David accords have started, bringing the promise of peace in the middle east. John Paul I gives a speech to the Roman clergy. It’s his sixth major speech since becoming Pope in August. He’ll make three more speeches before his death on the 28th. The first genetically engineered synthetic human insulin is announced in California. Keith Moon will die tomorrow of a Hemineverin overdose. Friday, the Shah of Iran will declare martial law. The Iranian army will fire on protesters in Tehran. Violence between the army and supporters of Khomeini would earn the day the name “Black Friday”, and would generally end any chance of peaceful reconciliation between the Shah and the opposition. Also this week, Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov will be — I am not making this up — poisoned with ricin in London, delivered in the form of a pellet injected by an umbrella. This is just the sort of thing that happened during the Cold War.
The Yankees will spend the next few days thoroughly trouncing the Boston Red Sox. Saturday, the O’s will pull off a triple play against Toronto. Next week, Muhammad Ali will win his third World Heavyweight title. Not-unrelatedly, DC comics will publish Superman vs Muhammad Ali this month. AC/DC will appear on tonight’s The Midnight Special on ABC. The most recent season of Columbo, having ended back in May, aired its last repeat on NBC last week. It’ll live on only in syndication until ABC revives the series in 1989. NBC premieres the comedy-drama Grandpa Goes to Washington this week, and CBS will debut a TV series based on the 1973 film The Paper Chase.
Saturday will introduce the fall lineup of Saturday Morning Cartoons, including an animated adaptation of Godzilla, Yogi’s Space Race, and The New Adventures of the Fantastic Four, featuring the beloved Marvel team consisting of Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, the Thing, and HERBIE the robot (The Human Torch had been optioned by Universal). Also debuting is Jason of Star Command, a more action-oriented spin-off of last year’s Space Academy. Aesthetically, it’s about halfway between Star Trek and Blake’s 7; tonally, it’s about halfway between Lost in Space and Star Crash. Also, James Doohan is in it. Next week will see the debuts of Taxi and Mork & Mindy; the following one will add Battlestar Galactica and WKRP in Cincinatti.
Across the pond, Saturday brings us the second episode of Doctor Who‘s opening story for its fifteenth season, The Ribos Operation. The serial, part of the season long “Key to Time” arc, provides an oft-quoted self-description of a seer: “The past explained, the future foretold and the present…apologized for”. Less-often quoted is one of my personal favorite lines, the Doctor’s retort when Romana is suprised to learn that an honest-faced man is working an elaborate con: “Well, you could hardly be a successful criminal with a dishonest face.” Sunday, ITV will start airing Return of the Saint, a revival of the 1960s Roger Moore series The Saint.
The top of the billboard chart this week goes to A Taste of Honey with “Boogie Oogie Oogie”. They’ve bumped Frankie Valli’s funky disco theme song to Grease down to number six. Grease holds two other slots in the top ten with “Hopelessly Devoted To You” at number four and “Summer Nights” at eight. “Three Times a Lady” is in second place, while Foreigner, Exile, Andy Gibb, Evelyn Champagne King and Earth Wind and Fire fill out the rest of the chart. This week, Lynrd Skynyrd will put out Skynyrd’s First… And Last, their first “posthumous” album since the 1977 deaths of Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines in a plane crash. The surviving band members would reform the band in 1987, and the album would be rereleased as The Complete Muscle Shoals Album in 1998. David Bowie will release his second live album, Stage. And prolific advertising jingle writer Jeff Wayne releases a prog rock concept album based on H. G. Wells’s novel, The War of the Worlds.
Yes, I know with last week’s lead-in, you were probably expecting me to take a swing at Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. But let’s face it: what am I going to say about that movie that adds anything to our collective experience. Sure, it’s a hugely important movie in what it did to the Hollywood culture of summer blockbusters. And yes, it is quite clearly a… Let’s say “remix” of War of the Worlds. But I’ve already made the, “Slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest thing that God, in his wisdom, has put upon the Earth: Jeff Goldblum,” joke, probably more than once by now, and I just don’t have much to say about it, certainly nothing novel. Its flaws are well understood, deriving almost entirely from it being a “big dumb movie” whose bigness so completely overshadows its dumbness that no one really cares. I lament the way that the success of the Huge Summer Blockbuster basically destroyed “small” films as a viable mainstream thing, to the extent that movies which 20 years ago would have been considered perfectly acceptable are now thought worthy only of derision and mockery, but I can’t really draw a whole article out of it.
This may be the best conversion of a licensed game’s artwork from the entire 8-bit era.
So instead, I’m going to talk about Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. And I’m going to start by saying that Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds is a ridiculously cumbersome title. It is often known, of course, by less cumbersome titles, such as “Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds” or “War of the Worlds: The Musical”, but don’t be fooled. In case the title is not already sufficiently baroque, an abridged version was released in 1981 under the title Highlights from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds (This is the version I’m most familiar with, since I rarely have time to sit down and listen to the two-hour-long original). Then in 1984, CRL Group released a tie-in video game for the ZX Spectrum titled Jeff Wayne’s Video Game Version of The War of the Worlds. In 2000, a remix album was released under the title The War of the Worlds: ULLAdubULLA — The Remix Album and in 2006, a live tour of the album went out as Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds Live On Stage!. This was followed by an updated and recast version in 2011 called Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: The New Generation, which then went on tour as Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds – The New Generation: Alive on Stage!, and then later, possibly after someone explained to Jeff Wayne that marquee signs charge by the letter, as The Farewell Thunderchild Tour.
In the intervening time, Wayne’s version was also adapted two additional times as a video game: in 1998 as a PC strategy game, then in 1999 as a Playstation third-person shooter with a heavy vehicular combat element. This, of course, makes Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds the musical most adapted to the video game format, a title it will surely hold unless my Kickstarter for 1776: The Cover-Based Shooter makes its goal (Rejected jokes for this spot: Les Miserables: The Survival Horror, Repo: The Genetic Flappy Bird Clone, Candy Crush: Sweeney Todd Edition and Open-World Sandbox Evita).
The album has basically been adapted into every form you can think of except, ironically, a full-fledged stage musical. The closest it’s come is the most recent West End production earlier this year, which was broadly panned for… Not really being a proper musical. I mean, I could have told you up front that a story that has basically no plot or characters is going to be a rough conversion to the format of musical theater. But the concept album-to-musical conversion has worked in the past lots of times. Tommy started out as a concept album. So did Evita and Les Miserables. But, y’know, those have characters and stuff. Though Wayne has expressed a desire to flesh out the love story between The Journalist and his girlfriend, who are separated by the war, you’re talking about a far more substantial rewrite than has been undertaken. Also, he’d probably want to actually make the main character a person who appears on-stage in the show, rather than a holographic Liam Neeson.
This looks remarkably similar to a film they have of Robert Ripley at the Ocean City Ripley Museum.
