The 20 Greatest Martians That Aren’t Matt Damon (Part Deux)

5. Nyah

If I had to vote for the sexiest of all movie Martians, I wouldn’t have to think very hard: Nyah, the title character in Devil Girl From Mars, the priceless British saga from 1954. Clad in dominatrix drag, the DGFM, played by poised and chic Patricia Laffan, lands her flying saucer on the Scottish moors near an inn full of stiff-upper-lip Brits who don’t like the sound of her talk of world domination. She’s come for male breeding stock; in this movie Mars Needs Men.

Nyah is served by a big rectangular robot called Chani. She insists he’s a terrifying weapon, but he looks like an old-fashioned gas pump with legs, and he plods along like an old guy who has thrown out his back.

4. Martian Attackers

Long before it was an uneven but pretty funny 1996 movie by Tim Burton, Mars Attacks was a genuinely lurid 1962 series of trading cards from Topps, with artwork by Wally Wood and Norman Saunders. The brainy-headed, skull-faced Martian invaders slaughtered humanity (and even a dog!) with merciless, gory abandon, and they seemed to have a lewd interest in Earth ladies, as well. Parents griped, the cards were yanked, a collector’s market was born.

Various reissues, new card series and other adaptations, including Burton’s film, have been attempted over the years, but none has quite the nasty feel of the originals. By the way, the blaring background music in the cleverly-presented clip above is “Mars, the Bringer of War” from The Planets suite by Gustav Holst.

3. Uncle Martin (aka Exigius 12 ½)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOAj-DfJpRg

From the year after the Mars Attacks cards came a much more pleasant visitor from Mars. The title character of the 1963 sitcom My Favorite Martian, marooned in L.A. after his spaceship crashes, moves in with a young newspaper reporter (Bill Bixby). This was not, alas, the favorite role of Ray Walston. The great and versatile veteran of stage and screen was said to have so resented his association with the part that he was delighted when he became better known for Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

The antenna-endowed Uncle Martin’s telekinetic powers were so remarkable that it raised a mystery similar to that of the Professor on Gilligan’s Island: If he was that resourceful, why was it so hard for him to repair his spaceship?

For all his supposed contempt for the show, near the end of his life Walston appeared, briefly, in the 1999 Disney feature version of My Favorite Martian, in which Christopher Lloyd played Uncle Martin and Jeff Daniels (now costarring in The Martian) played the reporter. There was also an animated version of the show in 1973, called My Favorite Martians. Walston did take a pass on that one; Uncle Martin was voiced by Jonathan Harris, better known as Dr. Smith from Lost in Space.

2. Marvin

Maybe the most beloved and iconic pop-culture Martian of the last half-century or is Marvin, the milquetoast little fellow from the Looney Tunes who wears a Roman helmet and peplum and expresses his anger by self-consciously hyperventilating. Marvin is the inventor of the “Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator,” which resembles a firecracker, but which is ostensibly powerful enough to destroy the Earth, desirable for Marvin because it obstructs his view of Venus. Bugs, though sympathetic to Marvin’s problem, doesn’t agree with his solution.

First introduced in 1948 in Haredevil Hare, in which Mel Blanc gave him a slightly different voice than the more familiar one he had later, Marvin (not referred to by that name in the original-vintage cartoons) gradually grew into a favorite in the Warner repertory company. Almost as fondly remembered are Marvin’s henchmen, the beaked “Instant Martians” he got from a vending machine and grew by adding water, not to mention his loyal and put upon dog companion K-9

1. God

No, seriously. According to Red Planet Mars, God hangs out on Mars.

I don’t mean God as in Mars, the Roman war-god, nor do I mean one of the Gods of Mars in the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter stories. No, I mean the Big Guy, the Man Upstairs, God the Father. He’s on Mars. Or he was in the ‘50s, anyway.

In this 1952 drama, almost certainly the strangest of all McCarthy-era propaganda films, scientist Peter Graves receives radio messages which he believes to be Martian, describing a world of such technological and agricultural advancements that their implications for our society rather weirdly send Earth’s economy into an immediate tailspin. Eventually it’s revealed that these messages are an anti-capitalist hoax engineered by a Communist ex-Nazi (Herbert Berghof) from his secret hideout in the Andes.

But there’s another twist: real messages start arriving from Mars, calling for a spiritual awakening, and transmitted by none other than God Himself, proving that while Mars may be a red planet, it’s not a “red” planet, if you see what I mean. Earthlings promptly pour back into churches, synagogues and mosques. Theocracies spring up everywhere, even in Russia, and all’s right with the world.

No, I’m not making this up. Watch the flick if you don’t believe me; it’s pretty entertaining.

Previously by M.V. Moorhead:

The 12 Nerdiest Manifestations of Russell Johnson

18 Fictional Bunnies That Haunt the Dreams of Nerds