In an interview with Digital Spy, Hazeldine explains the movie's current progress, and it sounds like it's still in the development stages, but actually moving forward. Plus I like where their mind is comparing it to District 9 budget-wise — since that film proved you don't need $200 million today in order to make a film about aliens.

[Digital Spy via Quiet Earth]

Taylor also does a terrific job with this image of War of the Worlds' red weed - the hideous plants that the invading aliens set loose to grow all over our planet. The Skiffy blog points out that Taylor's illustrations are just two of many by a number of artists available on a site devoted to the best concept art dealing with War of the Worlds.

UPDATE: For all the complainers in comments below (you know who you are), I will reiterate: This album is from the 1970s. That means Steve Jobs looked at it while on acid, and decided years later to create a musical device that looks like a horrendous robot trying to destroy the Earth. Make of that what you will.

Proyas told Digital Spy that the script for the first movie (adapting The White Mountains, the first novel in John Christopher's trilogy) is currently being written by himself and Knowing writer Stuart Hazeldine, both big fans of the books (and the 1980s BBC TV adaptation), but that they're not going to be 100% faithful to what's on the page:

There are some additions to the books that we've made. For example, there is a kind of religious cult that revolves around the Tripods. They have priests in every village and their place of worship is a church with a triangle on its peak, because that's the symbol of the Tripods. So there are a few surreal oddities at first, but until you see the first Tripod and the first capping - very much as it was in the TV series - you don't really know where you are. You're in some weird mythical place and then suddenly you realise you're in a science fiction hybrid and throughout he course of the story you realise it's set in the future and they took over the Earth at some point and subjugated humanity... [Also,] we've actually changed Beanpole [one of the novels' three male leads] to a girl. That was a pretty significant change, because I really just didn't get the notion that there'd be these three boys travelling around the countryside and they just really wanted to have a girl in the mix. Eloise is still there, the red tower is still there, all the beats from the book are still there, but I hope we've added a layer of character development that the books don't In all honesty, as big a fan as I am, the characters are pretty sketchy in the books. So we've tried to give them a level of depth that will hopefully sustain three movies.

According to the director, although he hopes to make adapt all three original novels, the first movie will be produced as a stand-alone story in case it's not successful enough for a sequel:

Well I can't promise to make all three because it's really about the first one! But 'The White Mountains' holds up really, really well as a single story and we've made the script obviously so that it works as a single story. But what I can guarantee is that if I get to make two, then I will absolutely make three. It's just getting to number two, because you just never know.

As someone who loved the TV series and was distraught when they cancelled it without any resolution, I'm keeping fingers crossed that this comes to pass.

The Tripods Are Back [Digital Spy]

In an interview with Sci Fi Wire, Alex Proyas revealed a few juicy bits about his alien overlord movie.

We've done a draft; we're basically at the first-draft stage of Tripods, and we're about to go into our second draft... Pretty happy with the script; I think it's come a long way. ... We're only doing the first book, The White Mountains, and the notion is, obviously, that it will hopefully be a trilogy. But we'll probably just be shooting the first movie independently.

Let's hope that the first book is a success, so he can make the other two (The City of Gold And Lead and The Pool of Fire) along the way, and I can make a fortune marketing my silver-hats-of-Tripod-submission fashion line.

Knowing director Alex Proyas, told Shock Til You Drop that he's involved with two new projects. One being a retelling of Dracula which we're semi-stoked about, but the other, way more exciting, development is Tripods.

"I'm working on a bunch of different things and the two projects I'm excited about are an adaptation of John Christopher's The Tripod stories that I've co-written with Stuart Hazeldine, who is one of our writers on 'Knowing', and the Dracula project," the Australian filmmaker told Shock Til you Drop. "Both are very exciting projects but at this stage, we're still in the budgeting process for both, so I can't really tell you much more than that."

Hooray, who doesn't love a movie about an already dominated and docile human race that is being controlled by mind caps? Even though there was a Tripods series on the BBC the first book, at least, deserves its own special movie.

Automan.

I don't even know if I need to explain this one. It's another Glen Larson show, along the lines of the original Battlestar Galactica, except it's about a guy who's a holographic computer game image come to life. And he goes out and fights crime! — but only when the city's electricity usage is at low levels. If too many people plug in their electric blankets, he vanishes. He's like Tron, only in the real world. And he has a sidekick named Cursor.

Blake's 7

This one is an even bigger WTF, given what a cult following this show has in the U.S. Yes, there are U.K. DVDs, so if you're willing to pay import prices and have a region-free player, you're all set. There were rumors of American DVDs of this show, about a freedom fighter who teams up with criminals to fight an evil galactic federation, several years ago when a TV revival was first floated. But they never materialized, maybe due to rights issues. Also not on U.S. DVD: Blake's 7 creator Terry Nation's series The Survivors.

M.A.N.T.I.S.

Still no DVD, but ooh! Looks like it's available as a video on demand! Still, I am disgruntled. This was announced as coming out on DVD back in 2003. WTF? For those who missed it, this was an early Fox show about a paralyzed scientist (the awesome Carl Lumbly from Alias) who puts on a super exoskeleton/armor suit, and goes out to fight evil. It also boasted an early appearance by our ruler, Gina Torres (I shouldn't need to put anything in parentheses after her name.)

Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future

We posted a couple clips from this one a while back — it's an early show from Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. It's like a post-apocalyptic saga, with evil cyborgs and laser gun fights. It's pretty much the perfect TV show.

Journeyman

I'm actually kind of shocked about this one. I would have thought this show would do really well on DVD, since it's like a novel in episodes, about a guy who finds himself zIpping between the past and the present, while trying to save his marriage and job and stuff. It's like a metaphor for our modern dislocation. Also available as a video on demand though.

Alienated

Okay, I know almost nothing about this show, but I need to see it on DVD after reading the description: "The plot centers on the Blundells, a typical suburban family living in Victoria who undergo strange (often sexual) changes after being abducted by space aliens (who remain unseen throughout the series)." Plus it's Canadian,which means it's automatically really sophisticated.

Cosmic Slop

This was an African American Twilight Zone-esque anthology show that aired on HBO back in the 1990s. I have been seeking it on DVD for many years. It was co-produced by Reginald Hudlin, and took its name from the famous Funkadelic song. In the first segment, aliens turn up and promise to make America fantastically wealthy forever — if we'll let them take all of our black people away. Another segment is based on a Chester Himes story about a poor squabbling couple who have a rifle mysteriously delivered to their door.

Space Island One

I loved this show when my local PBS station showed it, and we included it on our list of great unsung TV shows. Here's what I said then: The crew of a corporate-funded space station mostly deals with scientifically plausible problems (with a couple of exceptions) and the stories focus on the ethical problems that come with profit-focused science. I should add that the characters get deeper and richer the more you watch this show, until you suddenly discover that the nicest guy on the show is deeply fucked up in a way you never expected. I would maim for DVDs of this show.

The Clangers

Okay, I have no clue if this show would hold up today; I've only seen a few tiny clips since I was a little kid and I watched it religiously. It's a stop-motion claymation show about little aliens living in peace and eating blue-string pudding. You know it's a great show because it's the favorite entertainment of The Master, the evil time traveler from Doctor Who. It's like acid induced proto-Teletubbies in space. I freely admit I may have rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to this show. Here's a clip.

Max Headroom

This one is really a no-brainer. This show influenced so much of today's television and was such a seminal cyberpunk masterpiece. Its brain-exploding superfast adverts, "blipverts," are like a warning of how ADD-focused advertising is becoming. We need a box set that includes his early appearances as a music video show host, his short-lived TV series as an investigative reporter, and his various TV commercial and music video appearances.

RoboCop

Okay, I mostly want to see this because it sounds incredibly cheesy and hilarious. I included it on my list of the worst TV shows based on movies, but it also sounds pretty amazing. RoboCop doesn't actually kill anyone because it's kid-friendly viewing, and villains include Dr. Cray Z. Mallardo and Boppo The Clown. Also not on DVD: the TV series of Logan's Run, Starman and Timecop.

Mann And Machine

I found out about this show when I was doing our round-up of human-A.I. buddy comedy chemistry. And now I can't believe there are no DVDs! It sounds so awesome. It's about a human cop who hates androids, but he has to team up with a hot gynoid partner. And then he sends her on dates with serial killers, and they end up living together. Come on? Why isn't this on your shelf right now?

The Middleman

It is definitely not too soon to start demanding our DVDs of this awesome show's first season. This could turn into one of those big-selling DVD items that converts tons of new fans and indoctrinates them in time for the inevitable second season. (Inevitable, I tell you!) Seriously, in case you're new to io9 and our obsession with this show, this Avengers-esque story of a young artist who goes for a temp gig and becomes the sidekick to a nameless man who fights alien monsters is one of our fave recent TV series, and the real reason DVDs exist is so we can proselytize about shows like this.

Life On Mars (British version)

This head-injury time-travel cop show was a hit on BBC America, and now there's an American remake with name actors in it like Harvey Keitel and Gretchen Moll. So why are there no DVDs on the horizon? After the American remake totally fails to recapture the British magic, we'll need to see the real thing. (I'm still watching the Brit episodes, thanks to the magic of TiVo.)

Space Cases

This Nickelodeon series featured a young Jewel Staite as Catalina, the super-cool space kid with the yelling powers. It was written by Peter David and Lost In Space's Bill Mumy, and featured weird plots and joyously silly acting from guest stars like George Takei (playing the stentorian Warlord Shank.) It was one of the few kids' shows that you'd want to watch with your kid the requisite 20 times. Your kids demand these DVDs!

Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends

For some reason I've been hearing about this show a lot lately. It's the seminal Spider-Man cartoon where he teams up with Ice-Man from the X-Men and Firestar, plus a super-dog. Graeme recently suggested Spider-Man 5 should be based on this awesome cartoon. So why can't we watch it and judge for ourselves?

Time Trax

Okay, you're going to start questioning my sanity now. But I loved this show when it was on the short-lived PTEN syndicated network back in the early 1990s, because it was so goofy. Dale Midkiff is a cop from a dystopian future (where white people are a persecuted minority) and he has to go back to our time to chase down time-traveling criminals. In every episode, a boxer from the future uses his future-boxing powers to win boxing matches. Or a future car mechanic uses future car mechanic powers or whatever. And the future cop has a holographic sexy librarian helping him! It's so awesome. Why is there no DVD?

Tripods

And finally, the BBC TV adaptation of this classic book series about teenagers fighting War Of The Worlds-esque alien invaders was brilliant and arresting. It featured then-cutting edge special effects and a cool alien-fighting coming-of-age storyline. I haven't seen it in 20 years, and I'm dying to see it again.

Runners up: Jake 2.0 never really won our hearts, because we were waiting for Jake Panther. Also: Animorphs; Charlie Jade; Century City; Century Falls; Dark Skies; Doctor Who: the TV movie; the Star Wars Holiday special (does someone really want that on DVD?), Exosquad; First Wave; The Man From Atlantis; Future Cop; Hard Time On Planet Earth; Manimal; Men Into Space; The Night Man; Now And Again; Out Of The Unknown; Probe — when you search for this on Amazon, you get lube!; and Project UFO.

Every other one of the Doctor's cunning plans, in Doctor Who. The Doctor is always hatching plans that fall completely flat. This is especially true in the original series, where stories had to last 90 minutes or longer. In "The Ark In Space," the Doctor plans to attack the Wirrn while they sleep — but they left a guard behind. And then he plots to stop them by electrifying the bulkheads — but they attack the electricity supply. In "Pyramids Of Mars," he builds a fancy anti-mummy machine, which the mummies wreck. Then he plants explosives on the mummies' spaceship, which fail to explode. In "Parting Of The Ways," he builds fancy Dalek-brain-busting machine... which he doesn't have the gumption to use. The Doctor has a clever scheme to get hold of the Master's laser screwdriver in "Last Of The Time Lords"... and it won't work for him. And so on.

The last battle against the Tripods, in The Pool Of Fire by John Christopher. The humans have a clever plan for attacking the domed cities of the alien Masters: sneak in and pour alcohol into the water supply, incapacitating the Masters so the humans can crack their protective domes. This works most places, but totally fails in the Panama Canal dome. There's a backup plan, which involves primitive airplanes and bombs. This fails too. And then there's a third backup plan, involving hot-air balloons and bombs. This almost fails as well, because the balloons just bounce off the dome — except that Henry lands his balloon on the dome and cradles his bomb against the dome's surface, sacrificing his life to make it blow up.

Pretty much every plan ever on Firefly. Let's rob a train — even though it turns out to be full of Alliance troops. Let's take on some passengers, what could go wrong? Let's crash a fancy society ball. Or better yet, let's team up with Saffron, the woman who double-crossed us last time. It'll be fine this time!

Whenever Sisko tries to get sneaky on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Captain Benjamin Sisko has many fine qualities, but subterfuge is not one of them. When he tries to trick the Romulans into joining the war against the evil Dominion by giving them a fake holo-recording of a meeting where the Dominion discusses invading the Romulans, it totally blows up in his face because Romulan senator Vreenak sees the fake for what it is. (But luckily for Sisko, Garak the "simple tailor" from Cardassia has a back-up plan, that blows up in Vreenak's face: literally. The resulting debris looks like the result of a Dominion attack, and the fake holo-recording looks much more genuine after it's been damaged in the explosion. Similarly, Janeway is always coming up with plans that fail on Star Trek: Voyager, including trying to shut down the evil clown in "The Thaw" and tricking the sentient missile into thinking they're in a minefield so they can shut it down in "Warhead."

In Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe Of Heaven, pretty much every well-intentioned attempt to use George Orr's reality-altering dreams for good purposes fails. Like when Heather tries to fix the problems George's dreams have already caused by inducing more world-warping dreams:

Heather begins to believe his story and seeks him out at his hideaway. Finding him in a state of exhaustion and desperation she says she will hypnotize him ( she learned it in college) and suggests that he dreams that the aliens are not on the moon and that Haber is really a good man who will cure George, not use him. This spontaneous plan backfires when George dreams that the aliens are no longer on the moon. You guessed it. George dreams that they came to the earth itself. Portland is nearly destroyed and civilians are killed by friendly fire as the military overreacts but it turns out that the aliens are peaceful beings without weapons, who are psychic and whose native element is the dream state itself.

Pretty much every escape attempt in The Prisoner. In the 1960s spy-village drama, the man known only as Number Six tries a whole variety of gambits to get away, from stealing a helicopter to getting elected Number Two to smuggling himself in crates to building a boat. He's the Wile E. Coyote of superspy escapees, and he meets with similar luck to Wile E.

That whole plan of sending soldiers into a nuclear reactor and not letting them fire their weapons when they're surrounded by alien monsters, in Aliens. Not to mention blocking off the bulkheads but not paying attention to the ceilings.

The whole trap-the-Predator idea in Predator 2. The feds have been tracking encounters with the Predator2 ever since the first movie, and they have a plan to capture a live specimen using a slaughterhouse that the Predator has been raiding for food. They think they can blind the Predator by blocking out the infrared spectrum of light — but the Predator just switches its helmet over to ultraviolet and wastes them all.

All of Horza's best-laid plans in Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. Infiltrating the pirates? Abandoning one of them to die (but leaving him the detonator of a nuclear weapon)? Impersonating the pirates' leader? Assuming the injured Idiran soldier who got away won't cause any more trouble? It all works out spectacularly badly.

Altering history turns out to be a flawed plan in the 2002 movie of The Time Machine. Our hero, Alex Hartdegen, wants to save his girlfriend from getting killed by a mugger by going back in time and changing history. But after he finally builds his time machine, he goes back and can't change the past. No matter how many times he changes things, Emma still gets killed.

The dinosaur trap in Planet Of The Dinosaurs. In this fine, wonderful movie, a group of space travelers are at the mercy of a vicious Tyrranosaurus Rex. First, they try to poison the creature by leaving some Allosaur meat outside its lair, laced with poison berries. The plan goes south because the creature attacks from the rear. Their second plan, to coat wooden stakes with the poison and impale the creature on them, fails... until it finally works.

The Iluminati and friends come up with a whole host of plans to stop the Hulk when he comes back from outer space to trash everything, in the comic series World War Hulk. Iron Man comes up with some incredibly fancy battle armor that lasts about five minutes. Mr. Fantastic creates a huge machine that simulates the feeling the Hulk gets from being pacified by the all-powerful Sentry... and the Hulk smashes it right away. Dr. Strange tries to reach the Hulk's friendly alter-ego Bruce... and the Hulk smushes his hands. Oh well.

Lili's gambit on Earth: The Final Conflict: Lili Marquette is among the Taelons, who are attacking Earth, and tries to sabotage the engines on their ship. She sort of succeeds, but Zo'or deals with it by expunging the extra energy out into space.

Stargate is full of failed gambits: Sheppard tries to distract the Super-Wraith with a flare and run to a puddle-jumper in the Atlantis episode "The Defiant One," but the Super-Wraith left the puddle-jumper's shields on. When that fails, he challenges the Super-Wraith to a pointless knife fight and early gets slaughtered. In the SG-1 episode "The Serpent's Lair," the SG-1 crew plants C-4 explosives around a Goa'uld ship, but then Apophis himself shows up and captures them. Meanwhile, Colonel Samuels has a plan to attack Apophis using special warheads... which totally bounce off. Oops.

There are like three attempts to stop the comet in Deep Impact. First, the spaceship Messiah is launched to drill into the comet's surface and plant bombs, which only split it into two still-destructive comet pieces. Then Earth tries to launch a ton of missiles, which only make the comet more pissed off and splodey. The smaller piece of comet hits and creates a mega-tsunami. Just as the much larger piece of comet is about to hit, the Messiah flies into a fissure in the comet piece and blow it up.

Every Terry Gilliam hero ever pretty much makes screwy plans that don't work out that great. Like Sam Lowry in Brazil, who has a plan to erase Jill from the records so they can escape — which doesn't work out that great, because Jill gets erased for real. And James Cole in Twelve Monkeys thinks he can avert the future plague by tracking down Jeffrey Goines and the Army Of The Twelve Monkeys, but they turn out to be a total red herring.

Thanks to Lauren Davis, John Kim and Liz Henry for research help.