The Invaders
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The Invaders was a science-fiction television program that ran in the United States for a season and a half between 1967 and 1968. Roy Thinnes starred as architect David Vincent, who learned of an alien invasion underway and thereafter travelled from place to place, trying to foil the aliens' plots and warn Earth of the danger.
The series was produced by Quinn Martin, who drew on two sources for the inspiration for the show. One was his previous series, the immensely popular The Fugitive, which had ended in 1967. The other was the wave of "alien dopplegänger" films which had come ten years before in the 1950s, typified by Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the British film, Quatermass 2, known in America as Enemy from Space. While these paranoid tales of extraterrestrials who posed as humans and lived among us while planning a takeover are usually linked with a Red Scare subtext, Martin simply wanted a premise that would keep the hero wandering from place to place and that would explain why he couldn't tackle the invaders by going to the authorities (not only had the aliens infiltrated human institutions already, but most humans would dismiss a claim of alien invasion as a paranoid delusion.)
The spaceship by which they reach the Earth is a flying saucer of a design derivative of that shown in the contestable photographs of George Adamski, but instead of having three spheres on the underside, the Invaders' craft has five shallower protrusions. It was a principle of the production crew to not show them with set and prop designs and control panels that were utterly alien from the conventional human ones (such as H.R. Giger would later present in Alien). The Invaders' favorite means of killing someone is by applying a disk with five glowing lights to the nape of the neck, which will cause a cerebral hemorrhage.
The Invaders were never given a name, nor was their planet. They were not even shown in their true, alien form; their human appearances were a disguise, and unless they received periodic treatments requiring equipment that consumed a great deal of electrical power, they would revert automatically to their alien forms. (One scene in the series showed an alien beginning to revert, filmed fuzzily and with flashing lights.) They had certain characteristics by which they could be discovered, such as their absence of a pulse. Nearly all were emotionless and had little fingers which could not bend, although there were many "deluxe models" who could manipulate this finger. There were also a number of mutant aliens, who unlike the majority of aliens had emotions similar to those of humans, and who opposed the alien takeover. One frustrating gimmick of the series was that their existence could not be documented by killing one, for their dead bodies would always glow red and disappear, along with their clothes and any items they were carrying at the time.
In 1995 the series was reprised as a three-hour TV miniseries also titled The Invaders. Scott Bakula starred as Nolan Wood, who discovered the alien conspiracy, and Roy Thinnes reprised his role from the series of David Vincent, now an old man handing the burden over to Wood. The miniseries has been released in some countries on home video, edited into a single movie.
Trivia
- Frank Black's "Bad, Wicked World", on Teenager of the Year, is about The Invaders
- Gold Key Comics published four issues of an Invaders comic book based upon the TV series in 1967-68, years before Marvel Comics published their own, unrelated Invaders superhero series.
External links
- -- the original series
- -- 1995 miniseries/movie
- [fanpage devoted to The Invaders]
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