August 4: When Mars first showed its true face

On August 4, 1969, NASA's Mariner 7 probe made its close flyby over Mars's southern hemisphere, returning the first detailed images and finally debunking the myth of Martian canals. Tonight's film: Ma

On August 4, 1969, barely three weeks after a human first walked on the Moon, NASA’s Mariner 7 probe reached Mars. Five days earlier its twin, Mariner 6, had already photographed the equator. Now Mariner 7 swept over the southern hemisphere, and what it saw there finally killed the old dream that the surface of Mars was crosshatched with artificial canals.

Try to picture that moment. For decades astronomers had only a blurry smudge of Mars in their telescopes, and somehow everyone read a civilization into it. Canals, cities, a dying people, maybe getting ready to come wage war on us. Then a probe arrives and sends back the truth in roughly 126 frames: a cratered, rocky, apparently dead world. No canals, no little green men. Just dust and silence.

And that realization did something strange to our imagination. If reality wouldn’t give us Martians, science fiction would, and it gave generously. That is exactly why tonight’s film is Mars Attacks! (1996). Tim Burton sat in the director’s chair, Jonathan Gems wrote the screenplay, and the source material wasn’t a serious novel but a 1962 Topps trading-card series that was nearly banned at the time for its excessive gore. Burton didn’t want to make another tense Independence Day-style invasion blockbuster. He wanted to summon the bad-taste, gleeful, cartoonish carnage of the old B-movies, and the cast shows it: Jack Nicholson in two roles (President Dale and Vegas mogul Art Land), Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Annette Bening, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, and Tom Jones as himself.