Mars Attacks!

Unclear and Present Danger

On this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched Tim Burton’s 1996 sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks!, starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Martin Short Pam Grier, Rod Steiger, Jim Brown, Lukas Haas, Danny DeVito and Natalie Portman.

Mars Attacks! was based off of the 1960s-era trading card series by Topps. In the series, Earth is invaded by cruel, hideous Martians who hope to colonize the planet and enslave its population.

In the movie, Earth is invaded by cruel hideous Martians. But they don’t seem to want to colonize the planet as much as engage in wanton destruction for its own sake. To the extent that the film has a plot, it follows several groups of people. There is President James Dale, played by Nicholson, his wife and daughter. There is a young donut shop employee and his family in Nevada. There is an aging boxer turned casino employee, his ex-wife and their children. And there are a pair of talk show hosts.

The film shows first contact followed by the Martian war on Earth. Most of the characters are either weak and incompetent, like President Dale and the American military, vain and oblivious, like the various members of the media, or outright rubes, like some of the more ordinary people in the film.

The Martians rampage across the country, killing everyone they see including the president and the first lady. They are eventually stopped when two characters, the young donut shop employee and his grandmother, discover that the yodeling on Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” is enough to cause their heads to explode. They defeat the Martian invasion and are awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their exploits.

The taglines for Mars Attacks were “Nice planet. We’ll take it!” and “Yikes! They’ve landed!”

Mars Attacks is available for rent or purchase either Amazon or Apple TV.

Episodes come out every two weeks so we’ll see you then with an episode on Shadow Conspiracy, a 1997 conspiracy thriller directed by George P. Cosmatos and starring Charlie Sheen, Linda Hamilton, Stephen Lang and the great (and much-missed) Donald Sutherland.

You can find Shadow Conspiracy on Amazon Prime and Apple TV for rent or purchase.

And don’t forget our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents! For $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the entire back catalog — we’re almost two years deep at this point. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod.

The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on Rambo, the 2008 sequel written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

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