The Martians of Mars Attacks!: The 1962 Topps Cards, Ack Ack and Death by Yodelling

The Martians were born as bubble-gum cards. In 1962 the Topps company, which had sold Civil War cards the year before, issued a set of 55 depicting an invasion from Mars in the style of the pulp magazines: giant insects released on cities, a dog burned in front of its owner, the Martians' ray guns reducing soldiers to skeletons, a card called "Destroying a Dog" that became notorious. The concept came from Len Brown and Woody Gelman at Topps, the pencils from Wally Wood and Bob Powell, and the paintings from Norman Saunders, a pulp-cover artist, who gave the Martians the face the film kept: a skull with enormous eyes and a brain, ridged and exposed, filling a transparent helmet. Parents and a district attorney in Connecticut complained, Topps stopped shipping, and the set, sold for a few months, became one of the most valuable of its kind.

The story on the cards was already the story of the film. The Martians land, deceive, destroy, are driven off by human ingenuity and are pursued to their planet, which the final cards show being blown apart, and the Martian design, a small body, a big head, a brain you can see and eyes with no expression, was the pulp Martian of the 1950s taken to the edge of what a children's product could be. Its cruelty is why it lasted; the cards were passed around schoolyards for thirty years as contraband.

Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, released on December 13, 1996, built its Martians from the cards with computer animation, and gave them a physiology the cards had only implied. They are about four feet tall, green-skinned, with skull-like faces, red uniforms and a brain that sits exposed in a glass dome; they chatter in a duck-like language, need their helmets to breathe our air, are killed by a single gunshot if the dome is broken, and are destroyed en masse by a recording of Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call," whose yodel makes their brains explode. They lie for pleasure. Their translator delivers promises of peace while they burn Congress, they shoot the dove released to greet them, and their scientists experiment on humans for fun, grafting a woman's head onto a chihuahua and a chihuahua's head onto a television presenter.

The cast was the largest Burton had assembled: Jack Nicholson as both the president and a Las Vegas developer, Glenn Close as the first lady, Pierce Brosnan as a scientist who is certain the Martians are peaceful, Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Natalie Portman, Jack Black, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Lukas Haas as the teenager with the record, and Tom Jones as himself, singing "It's Not Unusual" over the ruins. Lisa Marie played the Martian spy who walks into the White House in a beehive wig, the film's one Martian disguise, and a bad one.

The film is a parody of the 1950s invasion picture that keeps every beat of the original. A radar station detects the fleet; the president addresses the nation; the scientists counsel patience; the Martians land in the Nevada desert and are welcomed; the welcome ends in a massacre; the military fails; and salvation comes from a boy in a basement with an unlikely weapon, which in The War of the Worlds was bacteria and here is a country-and-western record. Burton had grown up on the films and on the cards, and his Martians are the pulp invader without any of the allegory the 1950s films attached: they are not communism, not the bomb, not conformity, only cruelty that finds us funny.

It was received as a mess in 1996, opening against Independence Day's afterglow with a fraction of its audience, and it has been rehabilitated since as one of the few films to treat the invasion as pure comedy. The Martians have outlived the reviews. They are on T-shirts, in games and in a language of chatter that anyone born after 1990 can imitate, and the best alien movies list places the film among the works that fixed what an invasion looks like on screen.

The cards came out in the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and the Martians were the bomb with a face. Their big-brained, small-bodied design was the last generation of Lowell's Martians, the dying planet's intellectuals as invaders, and it descends directly from Wells's tripod pilots, all brain and appetite; three years after the cards, Mariner 4 photographed a Mars with no canals and no cities, and the Martian invader became a nostalgic object, which is what Burton made of it. The film's Washington, with a president who trusts the translator and a general who wants to nuke first, is the Washington flap of 1952 replayed as farce: saucers over the capital, jets scrambled, the government insisting on calm.

The Martians' one weakness ties them to the music the lore has always attracted. Slim Whitman's 1952 recording, a yodelled version of a 1924 operetta song, was a real hit, and the film's use of it belongs with the flying-saucer novelty records of the same decade, which the songs about aliens and UFOs article collects; Burton's joke is that the sounds of the 1950s destroy the Martians of the 1950s. The lying translator is the other borrowing. Every contactee of the era brought back a message of peace, and the film's aliens deliver the same message while they kill, which is the invasion narrative and the Space Brothers' sermon played at once.