Movies joined in with the 1913 silent A Message from Mars. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon leaped from comics to the screen. In 1954 the Devil Girl from Mars came to kidnap Earth men; a decade later moviemakers decided Mars Needs Women.
In 1965, the Mariner 4 spacecraft flew close to Mars and sent back the first photos -- no crystal cities or flowing canals, just rust-colored wasteland.
By the time man walked on the moon, in 1969, Mars was mostly for laughs. Hollywood subjected Martians to the indignity of visits by Abbott and Costello and Santa Claus. Bugs Bunny battled Marvin the Martian; My Favorite Martian was a 1960s sitcom.
In the 1970s, Mariner 9 and the Viking landers sent back tens of thousands of pictures of craters and boulders and barren soil, robbing Mars of some of its mystery.
The search for intelligent life moved farther afield, and the popular image of Mars turned from a source of hostile invaders to a pristine frontier to be colonized and conquered, as in author Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990s trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars.
Which is pretty much where things stand, with mankind plotting its giant leap onto Martian soil.
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