My fondness for Mars Attacks is a bit random. I never owned any of the cards as a kid, and my interest in the franchise came about solely due to the hype around Tim Burton film – which, it turned out, I hated. I’m not going to get into whether it’s actually a bad film or not – for all I know it’s got some sort of cult following now – but when I saw it, I strongly disliked the goofy, humor-based approach Burton took. From the cards and comics I got the impression Mars Attacks was all about over-the-top gore, black humor (not just dark, but black like a charred heart in a smoldering fire), sadism, and military-style action.
Burton’s film had goofy gore, dark but not black humor, and silly action. He made a film that was a homage to the science fiction B-movies of the 1950s. But the 1962 Mars Attacks card set was all about taking the the clichés of those films – aliens shooting ray guns at humans, giant insects, attempted interspecies rape – to a realistic extreme that is merely suggested in the films themselves.
