The War of the Worlds

The estate of H.G. Wells was so pleased with the final production that it offered George Pal his choice of any other of Wells' properties. Pal chose The Time Machine (1960).

Modern viewers often complain that the wires used to suspend the Martian war machines are plainly visible throughout the film. The film was originally shot in three strip Technicolor, with prints made using a dye transfer process that resulted in very saturated colors, but with a slight reduction in overall resolution. This reduction in resolution "fuzzed out" the wires in original prints, making them effectively invisible. Later prints were made in Eastman Color, which uses a photographic process and yields sharper prints, but here had the side effect of making the support and electric wires plainly visible - the models had electrical wires as the side pods of the machines really lit up green and the "cobra heads" lit up as well. It is common practice in the film industry to take into account what details will be visible when a print is projected so as not to waste production time and money on details that will never actually be visible to a viewing audience, especially in the areas of effects and matte paintings. Thus, the filmmakers never thought the wires would be visible and in fact they weren't until the first Eastman Color prints of the film were struck in the late 1960s, and they had become even more visible on modern video releases as there is no dye sublimation resolution loss when making video masters from the original negatives. In the 2018 restoration this was resolved using digital technology.

For the 2018 restoration Ben Burtt created a new 5.1 surround sound mix with replacements for many of the film's original sound effects, with the jarring result that the sound effects have fidelity far above that of surrounding dialogue in the film. The 2020 Criterion Collection release features this new sound mix as well as the original mono track.

Edited from When Worlds Collide (1951)