In 1877, astronomer Giovanni Sciaparelli observed what he considered to be "canali" or channels criss-crossing the surface of Mars. Subsequent observation showed that lines on the Red Planet's face weren't artificially created, but it was too late -- the martian invasion of our psyche had begun.

From early on, we presumed that the inhabitants of Mars would be smarter and more technologically advanced than humans, but would suffer the strongly anti-social urge to invade our planet and kill us.

This stood to reason: since the planet took its name from the Roman god of war and masculinity, the Martians we imagined were primarily male and undoubtedly aggressive.

Rocketship X-M (1950) landed on Mars to find that the locals, once highly advanced, had regressed into a savage state.

As the 1950s wore on, the Martians got subtler and more insidious. In The Red Planet Mars (1952), seemingly Christian aliens delivered a benign message to Earth, obliterating Communism in the process, while the Martians began to infiltrate our way of life in Invaders from Mars (1953).

Meanwhile, Abbot and Costello tried to reach Mars -- in Abbot and Costello Go To Mars (1953) -- only to be sidetracked by Venus.

In It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), humans first set their silver cigar-shaped spaceship down on Mars in 1973, an ambitious date even then.

During the four-month voyage back, members of the rescue crew disappeared, only to be found later stuffed in the air ducts with "every ounce of edible fluid" in their bodies gone. There's a hungry Martian aboard the ship, and the really bad news is that conventional weapons and nuclear blasts alike had no effect.

Fortunately, in one of those alarmingly convenient coincidences, the Martian had acquired a taste for oxygen, enabling the last four crewmembers to kill it by popping open the ship's airlock and asphyxiating it.

Bangs and whimpers
Martians, this time spidery and batlike, obliterated human crews once again in The Angry Red Planet (1959), and a somewhat different genotype managed to conquer the humans in The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1962).

Since revenge is a dish best served cold, the people of Earth waited two years before retaliating, sending Santa Claus over to terrorize Martian tyke Pia Zadora in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).

Why were the Martians so aggressive? It wasn't for lack of air, as the stranded Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) conveniently discovered when he found oxygen-bearing rocks on the planet allowed him to survive.

Perhaps the Martians had other needs, best summed up by Mars Needs Women (1966), where the aliens took special carnal interest in Earth's own Yvonne Craig, better known as Batgirl.

After that, the flood of green men slowed substantially, limited to the occasional assault on human astronauts.

Just a short decade later, Elliot Gould and O.J. Simpson were busier fighting humans than aliens after a faked trip to Mars in Capricorn One (1978) started up the conspiracy engines.

Mars was dead, or maybe only digesting Yvonne Craig. Significantly, Ray Bradbury's popular 1951 book The Martian Chronicles finally reached television as a three-part miniseries in 1979.

Here, the Martians were more like ghosts than anything else, more likeable than the humans who exceed the worst excesses ordinarily blamed on the aliens.

For Bradbury, we -- not the Martians -- were the invading children of the war god, and we brought very little but war and death with us to Mars.

Martians, '90s style
"It's dry, it's ugly, it's boring," Sharon Stone said in Total Recall (1990). She wasn't talking about her pseudo-husband, Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), she was talking about Mars.

And she had justifiable reason to complain. With the bright lights of the 1980s dimming, Mars had become a squalid place full of hookers, disfigured mutants and "terminium" ore-miners, ruled by power-hungry, oxygen-stingy tyrants.

However, the long-dead ghosts of the green men of Mars returned to save the day for the plucky, sleazy inhabitants. Eons ago, the self-sacrificing Martians -- presumably with far too much time and technology on their hands -- built a core reactor to replace their own natural atmosphere with a more earthly climate. Blue skies came at last to Mars.

On an opposing but similarly elemental note, Mars Attacks! (1996) reconfirmed everything horrible that decades of cinematic invasions from Mars had taught us about the little green men.

Here, the Martians were just plain evil, muttering "we come in peace" mere seconds before vaporizing us and destroying our national monuments.

Worse still, they seemed to have a lot of fun doing it. Only Slim Whitman's yodeling averted our total destruction at Martian hands this time.

Beyond the movie screen, the cinematic obsession with Martians has undoubtedly fueled interest in the possibility that such structures as the pyramidal mountains in the Elysium high plateau or the infamous "Great Stone Face" on the Cydonia plain were built by "intelligent life on Mars."

Encircled by its twin moons Fear and Terror as it is, Mars may still be our best (and closest) interplanetary hope for uncovering our own origins. And that's an intriguing prospect.