Must have been nine, maybe eight, when first I learned about those Martians. Relying upon the primitive television devised by humans, my cousin Tamara and I were witness to the frightening arrivals of their deadly saucer ships, and we gaped at the destruction they wreaked, with their murderous heat beams. We drank in the scenes of global annihilation: Homo sapiens, defeated by ugly alien invaders with stick-like limbs and three-colored lenses for eyesight.
The aliens laid waste to Los Angeles, so this film depicted, in a handful of days. We were a pair of ’tweens — Tam was eleven that year — so we should have been traumatized; driven mad, perhaps, by the freakish spectacle of extraterrestrial mayhem. You can guess how we innocent tykes responded to this horror —
We loved every minute of it; it was just glorious. She and I were born to eat this stuff up. Science fiction was our playground! We never wanted recess to end!
We revisited the George Pal movie of The War of the Worlds at least twice more on Channel Whatever (I can’t recall what it was numbered), and of course, we didn’t care that it was over twenty years old, when we first watched it. It was a thrilling experience for us, that’s all that mattered. At our elementary school, I recruited my even nerdier classmates to crew the quite real jungle gym that became the quite imaginary Earth-to-Mars spaceship in which we would take the fight to our creepy neighbors in space. All we lacked was a specific bit of excitement to make it unique to…
