George Pal’s proposed television reboot of The War of the Worlds had plenty of potential and could still be turned into an excellent sci fi television series.
[Updated]
What Is It?
This planned series would have been a reboot of George Pal’s classic 1953 film that would have taken place on an Earth where the many nations have finally overcome their differences and are working together to achieve peace and a stabilized ecology across the planet. But invaders from space arrive and a decades-long war follows that nearly wipes out the human race. The people of Earth are saved, though, when the aliens succumb to the planet’s bacteria which proves fatal to them. But the War of the Worlds has just begun because the threat from outer space still exists, and the remaining humans come together to build six starships to travel to space and confront the aliens.
The starship Pegasus, commanded by Colonel James Anderson, heads to Alpha Centauri but loses contact with Earth. On the planet Mega they find the remnants of a previous exploratory mission from Earth as well as the aliens that had attacked humanity. Anderson and his crew learn that these humans and aliens are under the control of beings from Endor who want to conquer other planets because their own world is dying. Anderson makes the decision to continue on to Endor to face the aliens so that they are no longer a threat to the galaxy.
Aired: Never Aired
Created By: George Pal
Why Didn’t it Fly?
An actual pilot was never produced for this proposed series, but a proof-of-concept film was put together in 1975 to help pitch it. This included re-used footage from Pal’s 1953 The War of the Worlds film along with storyboard artwork and one live-action sequence that demonstrated the use of Magicam to composite actors with miniature sets. A voice-over narration explains the premise and the story that would unfold throughout the series.
George Pal continued to work on developing the series up to the time that he died of a heart attack in 1980. It was scrapped at that time, but it seems like a long shot that the show would have ever received the greenlight from one of the broadcast networks in anycase. It would certainly have been expensive to produce, and after the failures of high budget shows like Battlestar: Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, networks were shying away from sci fi TV (more on that at this link). The series also likely would have followed a serialized format which was not common on Prime Time in those days. A War of the Worlds series did eventually arrive in 1988 which acted as a sequel of sorts to the Pal’s 1953 film (you can read more about that at this link), but it did not use any of the concepts he planned for his television adaptation.
Should It Be Rebooted?
George Pal set up an excellent premise for his television version of The War of the Worlds, with a good back story and plenty of potential to carry on over multiple seasons. Sadly, because the technical limitations of sfx at that time and the fact that the networks were not too enthused about spending money on a sci fi TV series, it never went forward. But this is definitely a concept that had potential and should be revisited. With modern CGI, the ambitions of the original story could certainly be brought to life, and there is plenty of name recognition from having H.G. Wells in the title. It is true that another War of the Worlds series currently exists with the British/French production that ran for three seasons from 2019-2022. But that modern reworking of the story has very little connection to the original tale by Wells. And while George Pal’s version takes plenty of liberties with the source material and goes far beyond the original novel, I believe it would deliver a much better sci fi TV series. The War of the Worlds is in the public domain, so anybody can make a series using that title. And this is definitely a property that one of the streaming services should take a flyer on.
Where Can You Watch It?
The forty-five minute proof-of-concept film is available on YouTube (see above). Only about the first fifteen minutes relate to the proposed television series with the rest of the film consisting of outtakes and production info on the 1953 film. But it is definitely worth a watch, and you will likely find yourself wanting to see more from the story set up in the film.
Read about more Sci Fi TV pilots that did not fly at this link.
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Both BSG and Buck Rogers happened some years after the George Pal series proposal so they wouldn’t really have factored into the decision…1975 was prior to Star Wars so it would have fallen victim to the studio attitudes of the time – before that mega hit changed the landscape
The pilot was still being pitched up to 1980, so by then those shows had convinced network execs that high-dollar sci fi was not the way to go.
Ah gotcha
It’s kind of a shame, but it seems even George Pal had trouble selling this TV series between the mid-’70s and 1980s, even through that would have been an era when movies like ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘The Forbidden Planet’, and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ had been helping sci-fi look fairly respectable at the time, followed up by dystopian proto-cyberpunk movies like ‘Soylent Green’, ‘The Stepford Wives’, ‘Westworld’ and ‘Futureworld’..
In that era, ‘Star Trek’ had had to prove itself over and over again, and still lost traction to the studios. In addition to ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and ‘Buck Rogers’, the ‘Planet of the Apes’ films were making decent enough money to build an entire franchise from and launch a TV series, with ‘Logan’s Run’ managing to run a couple seasons with a special-effects-heavy premise.
The things that shows like ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Lost in Space’ were able to do in that era on shoe-string budgets helped demonstrate how much mileage a show like this might have gotten with even a modest budget. Sid and Marty Krofft somehow brought ‘Land of the Lost’ to brilliant, psychedelic life full of stop-motion dinosaur puppets and alien crystals on a budget that wouldn’t have been much higher than those shows, and still managed to make sci-fi/fantasy that could engage with adults of the era as well as the kids. Something similar might be said for ‘Space: 1999’ and ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’.
Even the (now) well-respected ‘Outer Limits’ and ‘Twilight Zone’ had to struggle against dodgy TV special effects budgets.
You had the ‘Martian Chronicles’ miniseries by 1980, which made classic science fiction from Ray Bradbury look absolutely gorgeous on TV, also while appealing to a sophisticated adult audience.
Yet, movies like ‘Alien’, ‘The Black Hole’, and ‘Conan the Barbarian’, though remembered fondly today, struggled against a sort of “science fiction and fantasy are suitable only for children and simpletons, and impossible to make money from” attitude from executives.
He might have made this work around the era of shows like ‘The Invaders’, ‘UFO’, ‘Land of the Giants’, ‘Star Trek’, and the rest had somehow worked, but I really think poor George Pal was about a decade ahead of his time with this show pitch, and could have really benefited from the way that the entertainment industry finally warmed to science fiction by the mid-’80s after ‘Star Wars’ finally changed some minds, in time for shows like ‘V’ and ‘Alien Nation’ and so on to be taken seriously by critics and The Business.
Sadly, by then, George Pal was gone, and what we got instead was the low-budget (and very gory for its time) ‘War of the Worlds’ TV series, which I’m rather fond of, but which really could have benefited a bit from George Pal’s storytelling and vision.
Sounds good! I wish they would have made it!