Doctor Clayton Forrester (The War of the Worlds) in Steven Spielberg's 2005 remake, as an homage to the original George Pal 1953 film. The "War of the Worlds" TV series (developed as a direct sequel to the film, not the original H. G. Wells novel) makes a number of references to Dr. Clayton Forrester, but does not actually feature the character. The show's back-story establishes that Forrester adopted a young boy, Harrison Blackwood, who was orphaned during the Martian invasion in the film. (Blackwood's parents were Forrester's colleagues at Pacific Tech). Forrester's discovery that the aliens, believed to have been killed by common bacteria and viruses, were still
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) because "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", an unsponsored CBS cultural program with a relatively small audience, ran at the same time as the NBC Red Network's popular "Chase and Sanborn Hour" featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. At the time, many Americans assumed that a significant number of "Chase and Sanborn" listeners changed stations when the first comic sketch ended and a musical number by Nelson Eddy began and then tuned in "The War of the Worlds" after the opening announcements, but historian A. Brad Schwartz, after studying hundreds of letters from people who heard "The War of the Worlds", as