War of the Coprophages cockroach infestation, the show used around three hundred cockroaches for the episode in addition to extremely detailed rubber cockroach props and "piles and piles" of faux-dung. The episode's title is a reference to the famous novel "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, as well as its 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles. The character Dr. Berenbaum is named for entomologist May Berenbaum. In Miller's Falls, Massachusetts, an exterminator inspects the basement of Dr. Jeff Eckerle, having been hired to eradicate a cockroach infestation. The exterminator sprays a roach, knocks it down to the ground, and attempts to crush
Black smoke (The War of the Worlds) narrator of what he "read of the destruction of Pompeii". The smoke is very dense, and can be avoided by climbing to higher places. Although Wells never explains the smoke's mechanism in the novel, he mentions that it may bind with argon to become toxic. In reality, argon cannot combine with other elements, with the marginal exception of fluorine, but chemical weapons were widely used in human warfare after Wells' novel was written, especially in World War I. Orson Welles' radio adaptation dramatizes the effects of the black smoke: The poison is depicted as being potent enough to render gas