Did You Know?

Reportedly, George Pal wanted to do the final third of the movie in 3-D, starting with the sequence in which the atomic bomb is used unsuccessfully against the Martians.

Cecil B. DeMille was due to direct the film when the rights were originally purchased in 1925, and Alfred Hitchcock was to direct a proposed version in the 1930s.

Orson Welles, who rose to prominence with his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast of Halloween 1938, was pressured into making this his first feature film, but he wanted no part of it.

Originally, the Martian war machines were supposed to walk on visible electronic beams. This was attempted by having electrical sparks emanate from the three holes at the bottom of the machine. This was quickly abandoned for fear of it becoming a major fire hazard. The first two shots of the first war machine emerging from the gully has this effect. During filming, the actors were under the impression that they were dealing with the walking tripod machines of the book. This explains the farmhouse scene when Gene Barry says, "There's a machine standing right next to us." However, the results of the walking can be seen wherever the Martian machines fly throughout the film even though the sparking effect was no longer used.

The Flying Wing depicted in the movie is the Northrop YB-49. Two were built and both crashed. Stock footage was used in the movie.

This film had a budget of $2,000,000. Of that sum, $600,000 was spent on the live action scenes while $1,400,000 was spent on the extensive and elaborate special effects.

The estate of H.G. Wells was so pleased with the final production that they offered George Pal his choice of any other Wells' property. Pal chose The Time Machine.

The two Martian machines that crash in Los Angeles are really the same machine from a different angle with the film image reversed.

The Martian war machines were originally going to be walking tripods as they were depicted in Wells's novel, but Pal didn't know how a tripod would walk and instead went with the flying machines.

The sound effects of the Martian war machines were created from three electric guitars played backwards. The sound of the Martian screaming after Forrester hit it was a mixture of a microphone scraping along dry ice and a woman's scream played backwards. The former set of sound effects became widely used stock sound effects after the film was released and were used to this day. They are still in use.

The disintegration of Col. Heffner took 144 individual mattes. Earlier in the scene, the stuntman that portrayed the soldier catching on fire was badly burned from the flames getting out of control.

A figure of Walter Lantz's character Woody Woodpecker can be glimpsed in the branches of the tree the initial Martian cylinder/meteor flies over. Lantz and George Pal were close friends and Pal always worked a Woody Woodpecker into each of his films.

During the scene in the farmhouse when the Martian fled from Clayton and Sylvia, Charles Gemora, who had to control the Martian by kneeling in the costume, almost fell out of the back of the suit when one of the workers pulled the platform on which the Martian was kneeling out of the shot too fast. If you look closely at the scene, you can see the Martian is tipping over slightly.

None of the original Martian war machines exist today. They were made out of copper, and after production, they were reportedly donated to a Boy Scout copper drive.

In the theatrical trailer, when the first Martian meteor hits the Earth, there is a large explosion and a cloud of smoke. In the film itself, the same shot contains only a flash when the meteor hits.

Lee Marvin was offered the male lead.

Gene Barry was also the star of the hit TV Western Bat Masterson.

Paramount Pictures had always wanted to put out a stereo version of The War of the Worlds on home video, but couldn't do so because the only archival sound elements they did not have from the film were the ones for the Martian ships. Luckily, the makers of the 1988-90 television series had to recreate the sounds of the Martian warships from scratch for the series, which Paramount used to finally create their stereo version of the science fiction classic.

In one of the montages of destruction in the film, Martian fighting machines were superimposed over black and white footage of a lava flow destroying buildings in and around Naples, Italy, during the 1944 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

The scripture Pastor Matthew recites before he is disintegrated by the Martians is Psalms 23 from the King James version of the Bible.