By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — I’m on the email line with Len Brown in Texas and he’s telling me about his work on the “Mars Attacks!” novelty card series for Topps back in the day.
It was the early 1960s and Brown was working a dream job that combined work and play.
“I wrote the copy of all the cards in the ‘Mars Attacks!’ card series,” the Brooklyn-born and Jewish Brown tells the San Diego Jewish World. “The fronts of the cards were co-created by creative director Woody Gelman and I at our offices at Topps trading card company. What we did was to brainstorm scenarios that would make good shocking scenes for kids. And Woody was as much the co-creator as I was. We loved working together on this card set.”
Picture that: Two Brooklyn guys having fun at work ajnd getting paid for it.
“We both loved science fiction,” Brown said.
Brown took his boyhood interests as boy growing up in Brooklyn and turned them into a career at Topps.
He worked there for 40 years, and now in his early 70s, lives in retirement with his wife Abby in Texas. On the side, he stays busy every day as a kind of historian of the nerd culture that has grown up around the iconic card company and his work on with baseball cards and the ”Mars Attacks!” series.
The “Mars Attacks!” card series from 1962 was later turned into a Hollywood movie in 1996, more than 30 years later, directed by Tim Burton and starring Jack Nicholson.
A New York publisher Abrams Books issued a collection of “Mars Attacks!” cards last year, with an introduction written by Brown.
“I still love everything I loved when I was a kid,” Brown said.
Born in 1941, Brown called the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn home. He was in love with comics, and science fiction, he said, and one thing led to another.
When he was just 14, he got his foot in the door at Topps as a kind of teenage advisor on current kid trends and was later hired after finishing high school in 1959, he told me in a series of email exchanges.
The head of product development at Topps, Woody Gelman, offered him a job, a sweet paying gig that lasted for 40 years. And he remembers almost everything and everyone he worked with there.
“It’s been a storied life,” he told me.
Now what on Earth is the movie ”Mars Attacks!” all about?
I’ve seen the movie a dozen times on late night TV in Taiwan, with Chinese subtitles, and I love the film. It’s a sci fi comedy. But I had never heard of the novelty card series that preceded it and was the basis for the Hollywood studio production.
Len Brown filled me in.
“Mars Attacks!” was originally a science fiction trading card series, Brown told me.
“The artwork stemmed first from Wally Wood (he designed the Martians from our instructions), but other than some rough sketches from Wally, the pencils were done by Bob Powell and then painting over on illustration board by the wonderfully-talented pulp magazine artist, Norm Saunders,” he said.
“The cards told the story of the invasion of Earth by strange-looking Martians, all under the command of a corrupt Martian government,” he added.
The cards were popular with kids at the time but some of the gory content became controversial and Topps halted production. However, the cards became collectors’ items, with certain cards getting over $3,500 at auctions. And then there was the movie in 1996.
I asked Brown how the movie came to be.
“In the 1980s, long after the public brouhaha over the cards had died down after the line had been discontinued, Topps began developing some merchandise based on the storyline, and then an expanded set of 100 cards was issued in 1994,” Brown said.
Director Tim Burton filmed Mars Attacks! in 1996 based on the series, but the movie never made a dime, he added.
“It cost an arm and a leg to make the film, and the producers just broke even,” Brown said.
I told him I loved the movie, and could not understand why the box office receipts were so humdrum. Sometimes what happens in Hollywood just does not make cents.
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer. Your comment may be posted in the box below or sent tot he author at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com
Short and sweet article. Thanks.
I have been into the trading cards since I was 9 years old in 1962.
My point is that awful movie. ” not understand why the box office receipts were so humdrum”
I saw it on opening day with a very open, welcoming mind set for it. The opening thru the Titles was great! Then Jack and the rest of the cast appears and it was all downhill drab talking and waist of actors talents from there.
1:) Dedicated Mars Attacks fans of the card series never appreciated the movie being a Comedy. It should have been Rated ‘R’ violence and destruction like a Quentin Tarantino movie is today. That’s how the cards read.
2:) Dedicated Mars Attacks fans never accepted the “Ack Ack BS also. Made them sound silly and stupid. Which they definitely never were.
3:) Tim Burton was not a fan, (He chose between 2 Topps card sets. Dinosaurs Attack and Mars Attacks. He chose the latter.), there for had no clue as to what to really do for a plot. He had Jonathan Jems come in and write a script. Time and Money were a problem on starting development.
I followed the pre-development of this movie thru a person who was the very 1st to have a Mars Attacks Website in 1994. I was so siked to know my fave. cards are finally getting recognition. and with a huge cast of A list actors too!
Then as I read the Daily’s for this, I find out that the reason Tim Burton had so many big actors was because, he was a big fan of the Irwin Allen Disaster Movie “The Towering Inferno”.
He liked the part where two A list actors get burned up in an Elevator. So he added Big names to the Movie. That is a fact! And Spent too much on them, not enough on effects. He saw a Dailey for “Independence Day”, that was filmed at the same time. Saw the Effects and how they handled a situation. Had Jems rewrite some script and add some more action . Raised finances over the limit of production budget.
The movie got a 2 star review or less. Rest is now history. I have tried to watch the movie on DVD now at least 4 times. Only the first time I watched the whole thing. Just can not accept the Ineptness it provokes.