War of the Worlds

Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth® · Dec 8, 2022 · 11m

Science fiction movies proliferated in the 1950s, all with dire threats for earth, and probably accidental or deliberate metaphors for the nuclear age ushered in during 1945. The aliens were tough, but we usually won, though not always (e.g., “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”). In 1938 Orson Welles, on his Mercury Theater radio show which was extremely popular in the New York area, broke in with a fake news story about Martians landing in the New Jersey meadowlands, which were then impenetrable swamps (and now the home of football stadiums and malls and, perhaps, Jimmy Hoffa). It created an…