About Those April Fool's Photos

Better late than never. My apologies that this post was a week late in coming but I just wanted to share with you some information about the photos I posted on this blog last April 1. Those two photos were part of a collection of pictures I took when I went on a Universal Studios Tour in California a few years ago.

The set on display was from the movie The War of the Worlds, that was released in 2005 and directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie had starred Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning. The story was about an ordinary guy who lived in New Jersey who found himself battling an army of destructive aliens who had come through his town as part of their overall mission to conquer and destroy all of humanity.

Seems to be a nice and exciting story line. But there's also a bit of history behind the movie's title.

The movie was based on a Herbert George ("H.G.") Wells book of the same title that was originally published back in 1898. The book was one of the first science fiction novels that depicted an alien invasion. In Mr. Wells' book, an army of Martians had landed in a suburb of London on board what were called "fighting machines". The book gained fame and a bit of notoriety back in 1938 when a young Orson Welles broadcasted a radio drama based on the book. Instead of London, he moved the setting to Grover's Mill, a town that actually existed in New Jersey at the time.

Now, please note that these were the days before television. Mr. Welles presented the landing of the aliens in the form of an emergency radio broadcast report. The broadcast was so realistic that it led many in his radio audience to believe that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. Inevitably, the broadcast terrified some people, drove quite a number of them into panic, and prompted a lot of calls to police stations reporting possible alien landings in the area.

Although the radio program generated a lot of controversy, it gained the young Mr. Welles both fame and national recognition. He eventually went on to showcase his genius by directing and starring in the movie Citizen Kane (1941), since ranked as one of the greatest 100 movies of all time by the American Film Institute.

Back to War of the Worlds. Mr. Welles' radio program left such a lasting impression on the American public consciousness that it spawned two movie versions, the first one was released in 1953 and the second one was Mr. Spielberg's version that was released in 2005.

As for Grover's Mill, the town used as the setting for the 1938 radio broadcast, it no longer exists as a separate township entity. It has since become part of the city of West Windsor in Mercer County, the same county where the city of Princeton and Princeton University are situated.