The Invaders, a
Quinn Martin ProductionQuinn Martin , born Irwin Martin Cohn, was one of the most successful American television producers. He had at least one series running in prime time for 21 straight years , an industry record....
(season one was produced in association with the
ABC Television NetworkThe American Broadcasting Company is an American television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. It first broadcast on television in 1948...
- or as it was listed in the end credits, "The American Broadcasting Company Television Network"), is an
ABCThe American Broadcasting Company is an American television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. It first broadcast on television in 1948...
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature...
television program created by
Larry Cohen- Biography :Cohen was born in Kingston, New York, USA. Cohen moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx at an early age, eventually majoring in film at the City College of New York. He started his career in television, writing on many shows and creating the cult classics Branded and The Invaders....
that ran in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
for two seasons, from January 10, 1967 to March 26, 1968.
Dominic FrontiereDominic Frontiere is an American composer, arranger, and jazz accordionist. He is known for composing the theme and much of the music for the first season of the television series The Outer Limits.-Early years:...
, who had provided scores for
Twelve O'Clock High,
The Outer LimitsThe Outer Limits is an American television series that aired on ABC from 1963 to 1965. Similar in style to the earlier The Twilight Zone with more science fiction than fantasy stories, The Outer Limits is an anthology of discrete story episodes, sometimes with a plot twist at the end.The series was...
, provided scores for
The Invaders as well.
The opening narration (by
Bill WoodsonWilliam "Bill" T. Woodson is an American voice artist. He has a small onscreen appearance in the 50s scifi film "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" as a newscaster. He can be heard in the opening narrative of the 1970s television series The Odd Couple, explaining how it is that Felix and Oscar ending...
) reads as follows:
- The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet.
The Invaders, a
Quinn Martin ProductionQuinn Martin , born Irwin Martin Cohn, was one of the most successful American television producers. He had at least one series running in prime time for 21 straight years , an industry record....
(season one was produced in association with the
ABC Television NetworkThe American Broadcasting Company is an American television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. It first broadcast on television in 1948...
- or as it was listed in the end credits, "The American Broadcasting Company Television Network"), is an
ABCThe American Broadcasting Company is an American television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. It first broadcast on television in 1948...
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature...
television program created by
Larry Cohen- Biography :Cohen was born in Kingston, New York, USA. Cohen moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx at an early age, eventually majoring in film at the City College of New York. He started his career in television, writing on many shows and creating the cult classics Branded and The Invaders....
that ran in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
for two seasons, from January 10, 1967 to March 26, 1968.
Dominic FrontiereDominic Frontiere is an American composer, arranger, and jazz accordionist. He is known for composing the theme and much of the music for the first season of the television series The Outer Limits.-Early years:...
, who had provided scores for
Twelve O'Clock High,
The Outer LimitsThe Outer Limits is an American television series that aired on ABC from 1963 to 1965. Similar in style to the earlier The Twilight Zone with more science fiction than fantasy stories, The Outer Limits is an anthology of discrete story episodes, sometimes with a plot twist at the end.The series was...
, provided scores for
The Invaders as well.
Narration
The opening narration (by
Bill WoodsonWilliam "Bill" T. Woodson is an American voice artist. He has a small onscreen appearance in the 50s scifi film "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" as a newscaster. He can be heard in the opening narrative of the 1970s television series The Odd Couple, explaining how it is that Felix and Oscar ending...
) reads as follows:
- The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.
Premise
The series was produced by
Quinn MartinQuinn Martin , born Irwin Martin Cohn, was one of the most successful American television producers. He had at least one series running in prime time for 21 straight years , an industry record....
, who was looking for a show to replace the immensely popular
The FugitiveThe Fugitive is an American television series produced by QM Productions and United Artists Television that aired on ABC from 1963 to 1967. David Janssen starred as Richard Kimble, a doctor from the fictional town of Stafford, Indiana, who is falsely convicted of his wife's murder and given the...
, which was ending its run in 1967.
Larry Cohen- Biography :Cohen was born in Kingston, New York, USA. Cohen moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx at an early age, eventually majoring in film at the City College of New York. He started his career in television, writing on many shows and creating the cult classics Branded and The Invaders....
, the show's creator, had conceived two earlier series with similarities to
The Invaders. Chuck Connors starred in
BrandedBranded is a Western series which aired on NBC from 1965 through 1966 and starred Chuck Connors as Jason McCord, a United States Army Cavalry captain who had been drummed out of the service following an unjust accusation of cowardice.-Production:...
(1965) as a soldier court-martialled for cowardice, who traveled the West searching for witnesses and proof that he acted valiantly, and
Coronet BlueCoronet Blue was an American TV series that ran on CBS from May 29, 1967, to September 4, 1967.It starred Frank Converse as Michael Alden, an amnesiac in search of his identity. Brian Bedford costarred...
(1967) about Michael Alden, a man suffering from amnesia who was being pursued by a powerful group of people. All he could remember were the words "Coronet Blue."
Another inspiration was the wave of "alien dopplegänger" films which had come ten years before in the 1950s, typified by
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the British film,
Quatermass 2Quatermass 2 is a 1957 British science fiction horror film. Made by Hammer Film Productions, it is a sequel to an earlier Hammer film The Quatermass Xperiment. Like its predecessor, it is based on a BBC Television serial – Quatermass II – written by Nigel Kneale...
(1957), 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 moving around and that would explain why he could not go 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).
Roy ThinnesRoy Thinnes is an American television actor.-Biography:Born in Chicago, Illinois, educated at Los Angeles City College, Thinnes is best known for his portrayal of lonely hero David Vincent in the ABC 1967-68 television series The Invaders. He also played Alfred Wentworth, in the pilot episode of...
starred as architect David Vincent, who accidentally learns of an
alien invasionThe alien invasion is a common theme in science fiction stories and film, in which an extraterrestrial society invades Earth with the intent to exterminate and replace human life , enslave it under a colonial system , to harvest humans for food , or sometimes to destroy the earth altogether .The...
already underway and thereafter travels from place to place, trying to foil the aliens' plots and warn a skeptical populace of the danger. As the series progresses, Vincent is able to convince a small number of people to help him fight the aliens, most significantly millionaire industrialist Edgar Scoville (
Kent SmithKent Smith was an American actor who had a lengthy career in film, theater, and television.Born Frank Kent Smith in New York, New York, Smith made his acting debut on Broadway in 1932 in ] and, after spending a few years there, moved to Hollywood, California, where he made his film debut in The...
) who became a semi-regular character as of December, 1967.
The Invaders were never given a name, nor was their dying planet. They were not even shown in their true, alien form; their human appearance was a disguise. 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 pulsating red light.
They had certain characteristics by which they could be detected, such as the absence of a pulse and the inability to bleed. Nearly all were emotionless and had "mutated" fourth fingers which could not move and were bent at an unnatural angle, 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 even opposed the alien takeover. The existence of the invaders could not be documented by killing one and examining the body: When they died (at least while in human form), their bodies would glow red and evaporate — along with their clothes, any items they were carrying at the time and anything they touched when dying. On several occasions a dying alien would grab or otherwise make deliberate contact with a piece of their technology, to prevent its being taken by the humans as evidence. Also, in a number of episodes, the aliens would also employ powerful laser weapons whose radiation would disintegrate witnesses, vehicles and - in the case of one episode - a sick member of their own race whose infection's side effects was causing dangerous notoriety.
The type of spaceship by which they reach the Earth is a
flying saucerFlying saucer is the name given to a type of unidentified flying object with a disc- or saucer-shaped body, usually described as silver or metallic, occasionally reported as covered with running lights or surrounded with a glowing light, hovering or moving rapidly either alone or in tight...
of a design derivative of that shown in the contestable early-1950s photographs of self-proclaimed UFO "contactee"
George AdamskiGeorge Adamski was a Polish-born American citizen who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he claimed to have photographed ships from other planets, met with friendly Nordic alien "Space Brothers", and to have taken flights with them...
, 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
AlienAlien is a 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto...
). The Invaders' preferred means of killing someone was by applying a disk with five glowing lights to the nape of the neck, which would cause an apparent cerebral hemorrhage.
Since the 1960s, recurring public interest in UFO lore may have helped to revive interest in the television series, and commentary on the DVD collections acknowledges that, in private life, Thinnes has kept up a strong interest in UFO-related information.
For many viewers, the theme of paranoia infusing
The Invaders often appeared to reflect
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
fears of Communist infiltration that had lingered from the McCarthy period a decade earlier. Series creator
Larry Cohen- Biography :Cohen was born in Kingston, New York, USA. Cohen moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx at an early age, eventually majoring in film at the City College of New York. He started his career in television, writing on many shows and creating the cult classics Branded and The Invaders....
has acknowledged that this was intended, along with a political theme for the series as a whole. In audio commentary for the episode "The Innocent," included in the first-season DVD collection, Cohen said his experience of the blacklisting of Hollywood screenwriters for alleged Communist connections inspired him to make "a mockery" of the fear of insidious infiltration of society, by substituting space aliens for Communists.
Cohen also acknowledged he was not the first to turn Cold War fears into science-fiction drama. As noted above, such fears had influenced such films as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cohen also stated in his commentary that the political intent inherent in some of his creations, including
The Invaders, was not always appreciated or shared by producers and actors.
The Invaders after the first series
In 1995 the series was reprised as a three-hour television
miniseriesA miniseries , in a serial storytelling medium, is a production which tells a story in a pre-planned limited number of episodes. The exact number is open to interpretation; however, they are usually limited to fewer than a whole season. The term "miniseries" is generally a North American term...
also titled
The Invaders.
Scott BakulaScott Stewart Bakula is an American actor. His most prominent roles have been as Sam Beckett in the science fiction television series Quantum Leap, and as Captain Jonathan Archer in Star Trek: Enterprise. He also co-starred with Maria Bello in the short-lived CBS television series Mr. & Mrs...
(of
Quantum Leap and
Star Trek: EnterpriseEnterprise is a science fiction television program created by Brannon Braga and Rick Berman and set in the fictional Star Trek universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the 1960s...
) 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.
The pilot episode of the series, "Beachhead", was remade years later in 1977 for another Quinn Martin series,
Tales of the Unexpected, where it was retitled "The Nomads".
Frank BlackBlack Francis is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as the frontman of the influential alternative rock band Pixies, with whom he performs under the stage name Black Francis. Following the band's breakup in 1993, he embarked on a solo career under the name Frank Black...
's "Bad, Wicked World", on
Teenager of the YearReleased in 1994, Teenager of the Year was Frank Black’s second solo album, produced by Eric Drew Feldman. Notable songs include " Abstract Plain" and "Headache"...
, is about
The Invaders. The Irish Punk Band
Stiff Little FingersStiff Little Fingers are a punk band from Belfast, Northern Ireland, formed in 1977. They started out as a schoolboy band called Highway Star , doing rock covers, until they discovered punk. They split up after six years and four albums, although they reformed five years later, in 1987...
were named after the condition attributed to the aliens in The Invaders.
Books & Literature
There were a total of seven paperbacks and two hardback books published based on the television series:
- by Pyramid Books
Pyramid Books was a paperback publishing company, founded in 1949 by William Jovanovich with Almat Magazine Publishers . The company was sold to the Walter Reade Organization in the late 1960s...
in the U.S., all in 1967 : Invaders and Enemies from Beyond, both by Keith LaumerJohn Keith Laumer was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the United States Air Force and a U.S. diplomat...
; Army of the Undead by Rafe Bernard.
- by Corgi (a Transworld
Transworld Publishers is a British publishing division of Random House and belongs to Bertelsmann, one of the world's largest media groups. It publishes fiction and non fiction titles by various best-selling authors under several different imprints...
imprintIn the publishing industry, an imprint can refer to two different things:* It can mean a brand name under which a work is published. One single publishing company may have multiple imprints; the different imprints are used by the publisher to market the work to different demographic consumer segments...
) in the UK : Halo Highway by Keith Laumer (1967), Meteor Man, by Keith Laumer under the pen name "Anthony Le Baron" (1967), The Autumn Accelerator by Peter Leslie (1967), Night of the Trilobites by Peter Leslie (1969).
- by Whitman (a subsidiary of Western Publishing
Western Publishing, also known as "Western Printing and Lithographing Co." was a publishing firm based in Racine, Wisconsin, that was responsible for Little Golden Books.-History:...
) in the U.S. in hardback : Dam of Death by Jack Pearl (1967).
- The Invaders: Alien Missile Threat, by Paul S. Newman
Paul S. Newman was an American writer of comic books, comic strips, and books, whose career spanned the 1940s to the 1990s...
, A Big Little Book, Whitman Publishing Company, 248 pages, hardcover, 1967.
Note that
Army of the Undead by Pyramid and
Halo Highway by Corgi are the same story.
- Gold Key Comics
Gold Key Comics was an imprint of Western Publishing created for comic books distributed to newsstands.-History:Gold Key Comics was created in 1962, when Western switched to in-house publishing rather than packaging content for branding and distribution by its business partner, Dell Comics...
published four issues of an Invaders comic book based upon the television series in 1967-1968, years before Marvel ComicsMarvel Publishing, Inc., a company doing business as Marvel Comics, produces American comic books and related media. It forms a subsidiary of Marvel Entertainment, Inc....
published their own, unrelated InvadersThe Invaders is the name of two fictional superhero teams in the Marvel Comics universe. The original team was created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Sal Buscema in The Avengers vol. 1, #71 . A present-day incarnation was introduced by writer Chuck Austen and artist Scott Kolins in The Avengers...
superhero series.
- Starlog
Starlog is a monthly science-fiction film magazine published by Starlog Group Inc. The magazine was created by publishers Kerry O'Quinn and Norman Jacobs. O'Quinn was the magazine's editor while Jacobs ran the business side of things, dealing with typesetters, engravers and printers. They got their...
published an episode guide, in an issue in the 1980s.
Syndication outside the US
"The Invaders" was aired in Brazil in the sixties and in the eighties, with its title translated to Portuguese, "Os Invasores".
"The Invaders" was also aired in the UK in the 60's and 70's, and more recently on BBC2 in the early 90's, and then the complete series on channel "Five" in 2004 (at around 5am on a Sunday morning). It has seen occasional repeats on the Sci-Fi channel.
Season one (1967)
- Beachhead
- The Experiment
- The Mutation
- The Leeches
- Genesis
- Vikor
- Nightmare
- Doomsday Minus One
- Quantity: Unknown
- The Innocent
- The Ivy Curtain
- The Betrayed
- Storm
- Panic
- Moonshot
- Wall of Crystal
- The Condemned
Season two (1967-1968)
- Condition: Red
- The Saucer
- The Watchers
- Valley of the Shadow
- The Enemy
- The Trial
- The Spores
- Dark Outpost
- Summit Meeting — Part 1
- Summit Meeting — Part 2
- The Prophet
- Labyrinth
- The Captive
- The Believers
- The Ransom
- Task Force
- The Possessed
- Counterattack
- The Pit
- The Organization
- The Peacemaker
- The Vise
- The Miracle
- The Life Seekers
- The Pursued
- Inquisition
DVD release
Season one was released on DVD in the United States on May 27, 2008,
and Season Two was released on January 27, 2009. Season One has been released in the United Kingdom - without the extras present on the American set.
External links