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MY FAVORITE MARTIAN

"There's an old Martian saying, 'If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad can go to the mountain.'"

Ray Walston played the Martian professor of anthropology specializing in "the primitive, backward planet Earth" in the TV series, 'My Favorite Martian' first shown in 1963. The premiere episode went on air on a Sunday night attracted a rating of 20.3% of the households with TV sets and a 33% share of the audience. 

On Earth, the Martian was known as Martin, the uncle of human reporter Tim O'Hara played by Bill Bixby of 'The Incredible Hulk'. The Martian had visited Earth many times in the 150 years between 1813 and 1963. He had the ability to become invisible, read people's mind, perform telepathy and levitation and talk to the animals. 

When the TV series went on air, the Martian was 450-year-old. In one scene, the Martian told Tim, "Your atmosphere is rich in oxygen. It’s like breathing in a thick chocolate malted milk. I weighted so much more because of Earth gravity." As the "greatest living authority on your planet", the Martian made the observation, "You know, you Earth people are handicapped. You only use a small portion of your brain. We Martians use all of ours. The trouble is, you are too intelligent to believe it. You people baffle me - so illogical, so emotional. Earth is all right for a visit but I wouldn't want to live here." 

On August 1, 1932, the first Mars bar went on sale. American candy maker Frank C Mars' son, Forrest Mars Sr. was reportedly given $50,000 and the formula for Milky Way (first distributed in 1923), to go over to the United Kingdom where he rented a factory in Slough to develop arguably the best-known chocolate in the U.K. 

With a staff of 12 people at the time, the Mars bar which contained a nougat center with almonds, topped with caramel and coated with milk chocolate were said "sweeter and more solid than the American-made Milky Way, and with a chocolate coating rather different to that used on Milky Way." Mars bars were manufactured and distributed to the Armed Forces during World War II. It was understood Mars bars were allocated to troops in Britain and to prisoners of war in Germany. 

In conversations with reporter Jane Ardmore of the 'TV Picture Life' magazine in 1964, Bill Bixby remarked, "I've learned more in one season about acting, from watching Ray, than from everything else I’ve ever done. I work with him every day - I watch - gradually, I come to know what he’s going to do, why he picks out certain things to work on. He works and studies with much depth. He does a lot of probing and searching during rehearsal. When he gets up before the cameras, all the burden is gone."

Ray Walston added, "A TV series is like repertory theater, like a family, a great deal depends on the relationship, the chemical reaction between the actors. I’d never laid eyes on Bill before, but the minute we started working, everything just seemed to fall into place. We never had a problem of adjusting. We had different ways of working, but we never even spoke of them. It's a marvelous thing to work instinctively together this way, without having to say a word about it."

The Martian told Tim, "It's when your people don't try that you're at your best."

The most watched episodes were 'Now You See It, Now You Don't' (set in a museum) and 'My Nephew the Artist' (set in an art gallery). 'My Favorite Martian' reportedly attracted a rating of 31.6% of the total households with TV sets. "The road to Pluto was paved with good intention," the Martian enthused in one scene. Tim countered, "Well down here that road lead somewhere else."

In those episodes, the Martian could sketch like Rembrandt and painted like van Gogh. "Voices from the past have lessons for us if we have ears to listen," the Martian explained. "Culture is like spinach, once you forget that it's good for you you can relax and enjoy it." And finally, "It's going to be very difficult for me to write check on the Mars National Bank."

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