Though Martians are unlikely to invade Earth in flying saucers, the surprising results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election make anything seem possible. And Mars Attacks! already knew Donald Trump would be elected back in … 1989.
In September of this year, Ryan Lambie on Den of Geek! noticed an early draft of the script for Mars Attacks! back when the movie was being developed by Alex Cox. In that version of the script, Donald Trump was presented as a former President of the United States of America. As Lambie points out, by the time the script got to Tim Burton, any mentions of a world in which Trump had already been President were gone.
Mars Attacks! was based on a series of popular Topps trading cards released in 1962, which told the story of a complete alien invasion of Earth. Aimed at children, the cards created a good amount of controversy because of the gory and sometimes sexual content. (Some of this controversy was slightly fictionalized in the Jim Shepard 2004 short story “Mars Attacks” in his book Love and Hydrogen)
Though the 1996 film version didn’t end-up depicting Donald Trump as the president, the images of these tongue-in-cheek demonic retro-futuristic aliens was fully intact. And because all bets about future-predictions seem to be off at the moment, we can only wildly speculate as to how President Trump will handle a Mars Attacks! situation in IRL.
