UK Sci-Fi site does a major piece on WITHOUT WARNING; a new take on WAR OF THE WORLDS written nearly 30 years ago for CBS that’s become a cult hit on YouTube

By Peter Lance. June 27th, 2023 On Halloween night, 1994, CBS aired WITHOUT WARNING; a contemporary take on H.G. Wells classic “War Of The Worlds.” Produced by Mark Wolper and directed by Robert Iscove, I wrote the two-hour Teleplay from a Story by Jeremy Thorn & Walon Green. Legendary ex-NBC News White House correspondent Sander Vanocur and a series of real-life TV news reporters presented the piece as a live newscast, in the same way Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio broadcast, broke into regularly scheduled programming.

Delivering the script in late August, in time for the Halloween airdate, turned into a crash “page one” rewrite for me and the man who helped me “Grok” the science was Don Yeomans, the “Asteroid Whisperer” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, cited in a recent NYT piece on Jesuit astronomers.

Now, celebrated Sci-Fi film critic Ben Falk has written a major piece on the movie’s history for The Companion, a UK based site, noting that WITHOUT WARNING has since become a cult classic with more than 80,000 views on YouTube  It’s now available in an enhanced digitized format  you can download from imbpro.com. 

In this case, the live broadcast begins with a CBS Movie of The Week, that’s interrupted by breaking news reports of a giant asteroid that’s broken apart over The North Pole and impacted earth on three continents.

In this updated variation on the Mercury Theater radio cast, reporters soon learn that the giant “near earth” asteroid has created massive craters in Thunder Basin, Wyoming, Lourdes, France and The Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

While a lead researcher for SETI (Search of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) suspects that the asteroid fragments represent a “close encounter,” officials at The Pentagon decide that the “visitors” have a hostile intent and respond with catastrophic consequences.

Without Warning was the first in a series of films underscoring the very real threat from these “killer rocks.” It was followed 4 years later in 1998 by ARMAGEDDON and DEEP IMPACT and more recently by the dystopian “comet” films GREENLAND  (2020) and in 2021 by DON’T LOOK UP.

For a compelling 90 minutes of retro television, based on the real and ongoing threat from these “killer rocks,” fire up the biggest screen you can find and watch WITHOUT WARNING.