The Man Who Saw Tomorrow

Welles' view

Welles, though he agreed to host the film, was not a believer in the subject matter presented. Welles' main objection to the generally accepted translations of Nostradamus' quatrains (so called because Nostradamus organized all his works into a series of four lined prose, which were then collected into "centuries", or groups of 100 such works) relates in part to the translation efforts. While many skilled linguists have worked on the problem of translating the works of Nostradamus, all have struggled with the format the author used.

Nostradamus lived and wrote during a period of political and religious censorship. Because of this it is said he disguised his writings not only with somewhat cryptic language, but in four different languages (Latin, French, Italian and Greek). Not content with such obfuscation, Nostradamus is also said to have used anagrams to further confuse potential inquisitors (particularly with respect to names and places).

Welles himself completely rejected the central theme of the film after having made it. It is not known if Welles was contractually obligated to narrate the film, or if he simply grew disenchanted with its subject matter and presentation after completing it. Perhaps Welles' most public detraction from the subject matter of the film occurred during a guest appearance on an early 1980s episode of The Merv Griffin Show; "One might as well make predictions based on random passages from the phone book", he offered when asked about the film, before moving on to discuss other projects more interesting to him personally.

Alleged Nostradamus predictions in The Man Who Saw Tomorrow

1991 remake

On February 20, 1991, during the Gulf War, NBC aired a remake of this film, hosted and narrated by Charlton Heston. Much of the same footage, voice acting, and musical score was retained from the original movie. Much of Heston's narration constituted a verbatim reprise of Welles' original presentation. There were, however, some significant differences between the 1991 remake and the original film:

The nature of the overall changes served the purpose of brevity, reducing an eighty-eight-minute film to a one-hour television broadcast with commercial interruptions. Moreover, the predictions relating to the third tyrant were adapted to serve U.S. propaganda purposes during the then-ongoing Gulf War. The severity of the natural disasters preceding the tyrant's emergence was reduced, as a worldwide famine leading to cannibalism, and earthquakes and flooding in various European cities, had clearly not taken place. Similarly, the severity of the third tyrant's war was diminished, omitting references to the conquest of Europe, nuclear war, and the destruction of New York City, as well as the prediction that the war would begin in 1994. Significantly, negative references to Islam, and references to the religious nature of the tyrant (calling him an Antichrist and a "strong master of Mohammedan law") and his war were eliminated, avoiding offense to Muslims, as well as the portrayal of the then-current conflict as a religious war.

Although David L. Wolper was the executive producer of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow and arranged for the film to be re-edited into the 1991 television special, he was quoted as saying before the broadcast, "If you`re asking me if I believe any of this ... the answer is a most definite 'no.'"