Ray Harryhausen is widely known as the master of stop motion, and his “Dynamation” brought to life such classic genre films as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen had many projects that did not see the light of day, though, and one of those was a movie based on H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds which he shopped around several years before the George Pal version hit the screens in 1953, and some test footage of that endeavor still exists.
War of the Worlds had been a favorite book of Harryhausen’s and early in his career, just after working on Mighty Joe Young, he drafted an outline for a film adaptation. Like Pal’s 1953 movie, Harryhausen decided to set the movie in contemporary America (inspired in part by Orson Wells’ infamous radio version). He planned to have the action of the film center mostly around the New York/New Jersey area and it would involve the destruction of several well-known landmarks, with the obliteration of the Statue of Liberty “symbolically heralding the end of man’s freedom”. (Harryhausen later got the chance to destroy several iconic landmarks in 1956’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.)
He sketched several key scenes for his proposed movie (if you have never seen his artwork Harryhausen is a fantastic artist, as the drawings above and below prove) and then began work on test footage to prove the concept. He produced a short clip (which you can see below) of a Martian emerging from its cylinder and succumbing to Earth’s atmosphere. He took his proposal, drawings, and test reel to several studios and even tried to contact Orson Wells to get his support, but nothing came of it. He then talked with legendary director Frank Capra whom he had met through his early work in film, and Capra pointed him to George Pal. Harryhausen presented his work to Pal, who as it turns out had already taken initial steps towards producing a War of the Worlds movie of his own. Ultimately, Pal went in a different direction with his film, but we can only wonder at this point how it would have looked with Harryhausen animating the Martians and their fighting machines. The clip below at least gives us a glimpse of how the Martians would look, though Harryhausen later decided they appeared too cartoonish and he feared audiences would have laughed at them.
As an additional note, Harryhausen considered adapting two other H.G. Wells books during his career. He and his mentor Willis O’Brien (King Kong) toyed with a movie version of Food of the Gods shortly after completing Mighty Joe Young and Harryhausen continued to try and revive the project over the years with no success. One sketch that he did with giant chickens menacing a village still survives. He also considered adapting The Island of Dr. Moreau, figuring that the creations of the titular scientist would be a perfect fit for his “Dynamation”, but nothing ever came of this one either.
Source Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (pgs. 45-47, 287, 289)
Original are by Ray Harryhausen for a proposed War of the Worlds movie:
