Mars Attacks
Animation for Topps Digital’s Mars Attacks 60th anniversary, bringing classic trading-card artwork to life as animated digital collectibles.
The NFT Invasion Begins
Mars Attacks debuted in 1962 with a trading-card series full of alien invasions, ray guns, burning cities, and the kind of gleefully excessive sci-fi violence that helped turn it into a cult favorite. For the property’s 60th anniversary, Topps Digital wanted to revisit that original artwork as a new collection of animated digital cards.
A few years earlier, I had made some Mars Attacks GIFs for fun and put them online. Topps found the work and brought me in to create animation for the official anniversary release. I worked from the original painted cards, adding movement, effects, depth, and timing while keeping the lurid hand-painted quality that made the artwork great in the first place.
CLIENT
Topps Digital
STUDIO
Weirdo Works
YEAR
2022
MY ROLE
Animation, Motion Design
ORIGINAL
ILLUSTRATION
Wallace Wood (1962)
Norman Saunders (1962)
DELIVERABLES
Animated Digital Trading Cards, Looping Animation
RESULTS
Official Mars Attacks 60th anniversary release
Personal fan work led directly to the Topps commission
Prize Captive
Illustrators: Wallace Wood and Norman Saunders | Animator: Justin Gammon
Robot Terror
Illustrators: Wallace Wood and Norman Saunders | Animator: Justin Gammon
Creating That B-Movie Magic
GIF Night at the Drive-In
The original cards already had everything I needed: impossible perspective, screaming victims, glowing ray guns, giant robots, fire, smoke, and aliens behaving badly. The challenge wasn’t coming up with more spectacle. It was figuring out which parts of each painting should move.
I treated the animation almost like a tiny B-movie shot, separating elements from the original artwork and adding movement, lighting effects, atmospheric motion, and camera depth. The goal was to make the card feel alive without making a 1962 painting suddenly look like modern digital art.
Animating Apathetic Aliens
Sci-Fi Savagery
Mars Attacks works because the imagery is so unapologetically over the top. People are running, aliens are firing death rays, dogs are getting vaporized, and entire cities seem to be having a very bad afternoon.
Animation gave those frozen moments another beat without changing the joke. A ray could flicker, flames could move, smoke could drift, or a character could react, but the original composition still had to remain the star. I wanted the motion to feel like something the paintings had been waiting 60 years to do.
Destroying a Dog
Illustrators: Wallace Wood and Norman Saunders | Animator: Justin Gammon
Burning Flesh
Illustrator: Wallace Wood and Norman Saunders | Animator: Justin Gammon
When Fan Art Gets Noticed
From Personal GIFs to an Official Release
This project started before there was a brief. I was already a fan of Mars Attacks and had made a handful of animated GIFs from the cards simply because I wanted to see what those paintings would look like in motion.
Those experiments eventually found their way to Topps and became the reason they contacted me for the anniversary collection. Going from making unofficial fan animations for fun to working directly with the company behind the property was a pretty satisfying full-circle moment.
A Digital Collectible Moment in Time
The Platform Changed. The Work Didn’t.
The original collection was released during Topps’ move into NFTs and digital collectibles. That platform eventually changed course, and the Mars Attacks NFTs themselves are no longer available in the same form.
The animation work still stands on its own. For me, the project was less about the technology behind the cards than the chance to work directly with one of my favorite properties and find a new way to add motion to artwork that had already survived for six decades.
Martians Approaching
Illustrators: Wallace Wood and Norman Saunders | Animator: Justin Gammon