Marvin the Martian: The Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, K-9 and the Roman Helmet

Marvin the Martian entered the Warner Bros. cartoons on July 24, 1948, in Haredevil Hare, as an obstacle for Bugs Bunny. Bugs, launched to the Moon as the first rabbit in space, meets a small figure in a Roman helmet and a green skirt who has come to demolish the Earth with an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, a stick of dynamite with a ceremonial name, because the planet obstructs his view of Venus. Bugs steals the modulator, the Martian's dog K-9 retrieves it, and the short ends with the Moon blown to a sliver and Bugs hanging from the edge. Chuck Jones directed and Mel Blanc supplied the voice, a soft, precise, faintly disappointed tenor unlike anything else in the studio's stable; the character never shouts, and his most quoted line is a mild complaint that the Earth-shattering explosion he was expecting has failed to occur.

Jones designed him as a joke about the god he was named for. Mars is the Roman god of war, so the Martian wears the helmet of a Roman legionary, its crest a brush, and a skirt that suggests the kilt of a centurion; the face inside the helmet is nothing but two eyes, and the body is a black ovoid on white sneakers. The design was, Jones said, a deliberate reversal of the ferocious Martian of the pulps: an invader with no expression, no volume and no doubt.

The five classic shorts gave the Martian a complete arsenal. The Explosive Space Modulator returns in several forms; his saucer, the X-2, is a red disc with a dome that Bugs steals in The Hasty Hare (1952); in Hare-Way to the Stars (1958) he deploys Instant Martians, small green bird-like soldiers that grow from pellets when water is added, a gag that the studio reused for decades; and in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), the finest of the group, he and Daffy Duck fight over Planet X, the only remaining source of the shaving-cream atom, with disintegrating pistols that disintegrate the user and an escalation that ends with the planet reduced to a rock the size of a kitchen table. That short, a parody of the space operas of the early 1950s, was the one George Lucas asked to have screened before Star Wars at its 1977 premiere.

The Martian's home world is never shown in the classic shorts, which keep him on the Moon, on Planet X or in his saucer, and his species is never described beyond himself and K-9, a green dog with a similar helmet and considerably more sense. The later cartoons and the 2003 Duck Dodgers series filled in a Martian army, a Martian queen and a bureaucracy of centurions, all in the same helmet, but the original conception was of a lone, courteous, utterly determined agent of a planet that had decided on our destruction for a trivial reason and was not going to be argued out of it.

The character's fame came after his shorts ended. Unnamed for three decades and used in only five cartoons, he was given the name Marvin around 1979 for television and, in the 1990s, became one of the most licensed figures the studio had, on T-shirts, watches, and the tail fins of aircraft, the helmet and the blank face making a logo that needed no caption. He refereed the basketball game in Space Jam (1996), fought the Looney Tunes across the solar system in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), was the villain of the 2003–2005 Duck Dodgers series and returned in Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021). A feature film built around him was announced more than once and never made.

He also went to Mars, after a fashion. When NASA's Spirit rover landed in January 2004, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had spent years passing around the character as a mascot, and the studio's Martian was the first thing many news broadcasts reached for when the mission's images arrived, a measure of how completely a 1948 cartoon had come to stand for the planet. The Mars that the real rovers found, a cold desert with old riverbeds and no legionaries, is covered in the life on Mars article.

The Martian was drawn in the first summer of the flying saucer. Haredevil Hare was released thirteen months after Kenneth Arnold's June 1947 sighting over Mount Rainier gave the country the phrase, and a year after the Roswell press release; Jones was working while the newspapers were full of discs, and his Martian's saucer, when it appeared in 1952, was the standard domed disc of the reports. The Kenneth Arnold case explains how a description of motion became a shape, and the cartoon Martian was among the first to fly the result.

The Mars behind him was Lowell's. Percival Lowell's canals had been dismissed by most astronomers by the 1920s, but the popular Mars of 1948 was still a dying world of engineers and warlords, the planet of Wells's invaders, of Burroughs's Barsoom and of the 1938 broadcast panic, and the Martian's ambition to remove the Earth is that Mars in miniature, the war planet with a grievance. Sixteen years after his debut, Mariner 4 flew past in July 1965 and sent back craters, and the warlike Martian became a period piece the same month; Uncle Martin of My Favorite Martian, a gentle telepath stranded in Los Angeles, had already shown in 1963 what the friendlier Mars looked like. The glossary's entry on the flying saucer follows the disc from Arnold to the cartoons.