Anyone catch this show on it's first run...? I do recall that the aliens absorbed a lot of hot chicks, and it was violent....and had some cheesy moments; and kind of left the audience hanging when it did a 180 after the first season. The show was first on Channel 13 in So. Cal (the same channel as ST:TNG). Of course, the show is now on DVD... I haven't seen the Spielberg version; but it was hoped that he would continue the ideas from the television show....
The only good part was when they broke out an original war machine complete with original sound effects. The rest was crap. I really felt it was cheap to make the Martians able to look like humans, just so they could use human actors instead of effects. It's a giant sci fi cliche.
^^ Yeah, I remember reading about that--Martians looking like humans to save money--before the show hit the airwaves...
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5tcn3Y2PM8[/yt] [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9byu-t-JkE8[/yt]
I don't recall this series, but in some respects it's kind of too bad. The premise sounds good, but it seems to have largely gotten ruined by executive meddling.
I remember it being too shite to air during the living hours and could only been at some godless midweek hour on ITV in the early 90s here in Blighty. I also remember being really intrigued to see more, but not intrigued enough to stay up all night.
I was a fan and watched it on KCOP 13 back in the day. The show was good until they killed off some of the cast and radically shifted the series with season 2.
I remember the series, but I rarely watched it. Although, I did catch all or part of the episode where they broke out the Alien Ship.
It's pure 80s low-budget action cheese, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.... The main thing that I could never get past was this notion that everybody seemed to have "forgotten" the 1953 invasion, and that there appeared to be no lasting damage/effects. That would be like forgetting...wait...what was that ruckus with Germany and Japan? Back in the 40s? Nah. Not ringing a bell....
As far as late 80s syndication goes, I thought this was actually a pretty decent series. Although I have to agree the main highlight was just getting to see the original war machines again.
I watched the first season, but since the show was syndicated, the second season in my area moved to Fox which back then you couldn't get without holding the antenna in one hand and tin foil in the other while upside down on your head. So I never saw it. The second season is on YouTube in really really really poor quality, but I skimmed through the first episode to see how a couple of the main characters died.
The first season of WOTW was a fairly good show. It was a good tribute and followup to the 1953 film, and even managed to fit the Orson Welles 1938 Halloween broadcast into its mythology. And it had a great cast and engaging characters, one of the best SFTV ensemble casts I've ever seen. Even when the writing was weak, which it often was, the characters and the actors made it worthwhile. You could tell that these four people really enjoyed working together, and that made it enjoyable to watch. The second-season retooling was abominable on multiple levels. For some reason, when Frank Mancuso, Jr. was brought in to revamp the show, he somehow believed that making the show relentlessly grim, depressing, and unpleasant would make more people want to watch it. He also broke up the superb chemistry of the cast, killing off half of them, including the most popular character on the show. And I'm convinced it's not coincidence that the two who got killed off were the Native American and the African-American in a wheelchair. Moreover, the charmingly eccentric Dr. Harrison Blackwood totally lost all his eccentricities and became an ordinary, dull person. Even the aliens lost their weirdness; the alien prosthetics and subtitled alien speech were gone and replaced with a bunch of good-looking white people. Unfortunately, they only got two of the four sound effects right -- the rattlesnake-like "scanning" sound and the sound of the heat ray. For the green energy bolts, they used the Trek photon torpedo sound effect, which is similar to the actual sound, created the same way (by striking a high-tension metal cable), but not identical. And they totally left out the sound of the levitation beams, which was the same sound as a TOS phaser but lower-pitched. (I think it was actually a recording of a swarm of locusts.) Still, my perfectionism aside, it was a good attempt and a loving tribute. Actually, the first season of WOTW had plenty of creature-FX shots; we often saw the aliens in their true form, which was a larger, more robust version of the creature from the movie, redesigned to allow an actor or stunt performer to fit inside. The legs were too humanlike, but the torso was nicely alien. No, the reason for giving the aliens the ability to enter and reanimate human corpses was to make it more of a horror show, the battle against an unseen enemy, and to allow the aliens to function in public without revealing their presence. It was in the second season that this was abandoned; the new wave of "Morthren" aliens transformed themselves to look permanently like humans, and the monster suits from the first season were never seen after the second-season premiere. Yeah, that was annoying. Too many genre shows insist on the tiresome conceit that they're "actually" in our world, so that everything alien or supernatural has to be a deep, dark secret. In this case, it was a particularly poor choice. It would've been far more interesting to embrace the alternate history, to portray a world still bearing the physical, political, and psychological scars of a global alien invasion 35 years before. It shouldn't have been "You expect me to believe there are aliens?" but "I refuse to believe the aliens have come back."
The first season aliens actually do show up later on in season 2; it involved a plot where one of the Mothren go back in time to release those Martians/Mortax-ians who were being held after the 50s invasion...(before they--the Mortax-ians--were put in barrels)...
Oh yeah, I remember that time-travel episode. It was the first episode written by Jim Trombetta, who came in as story editor midway through the season and made it moderately less awful than the first half of the season had been. I remember finding the time-travel episode refreshing because it was the first time all season that we'd seen daylight. In addition to all the other senseless changes, the second season retconned the ordinary world of the first season into a sort of postapocalyptic nightmare environment with constantly overcast skies. I think the idea was to start reflecting the damage the aliens should've done to the world in '53, but the fact that it just happened abruptly with no explanation after a season set in a more ordinary world just ruined it. My main problem with the time-travel episode was that the past segments were in black and white. That made no sense. It wasn't a flashback or a dream sequence or something caught on film, it was characters from the present day travelling back to 1953. It was a nonsensical gimmick to use black and white -- especially since the original film was in highly vivid Technicolor! But then, the second season never had as much respect for the '53 film as the first season did. The first season brought back Ann Robinson in a recurring role (a shame they never got Gene Barry even though he was alive and well at the time), but we never saw her in the second (her character was recast in the time travel episode, being 36 years younger). The second season made no more use of the movie-type Martian vehicles and weapons. And the series finale retconned everything from the movie onward in an extremely stupid way. Spoiler: WOTW series finale To force a happy ending, they revealed that the initial invasion had been a misunderstanding, a science mission tricked into conflict with Earth by the aliens' power-mad leader, and that this whole race that had been doing evil pretty consistently throughout the series was really a bunch of nice guys who were being duped by one nasty guy, so that killing him off was all it took to bring peace. Which, come to think of it, is a lot like what the modern Battlestar Galactica did in its final season. At least it wasn't so abrupt there, and didn't require ignoring so much past continuity. There's no way the events of the '53 WOTW movie were anything but a deliberate genocidal invasion on the aliens' part. The retcon was ridiculous. And it was bizarre that after a whole season of wallowing in darkness and despair, they'd throw aside the whole continuity and logic of the series solely to force a pat, happy ending.
Yeah, strange show. Definite horror element in the first season. The aliens being revealed as not being from Mars...LAME. Look, we know that Mars was uninhabited, shit, we knew that in 1953, but stick to the premise. Aliens being in comas was lame, too, but the show has to start with something. The black, handicapped, computer nerd was like the love child of 80's cliches. I recall missing the second season premeire and wondering where the other two characters went and why the aliens were different. Then eventually catching a rerun. Not a show I'd ever revisit.
I recorded it and I still have the tapes. Yes it certainly did. I remember the episode where an alien disguised as a human was playing goalie in a hockey game. The coach kept telling him to get aggressive or something so he rips the opposing players arm off. WNOL Channel 38 New Orleans for me. The second season sucked so I didn't watch past the premiere.
I proudly own a copy of J.M. Dillard's novelization of the premiere episode. I so wish that Pocket had done some original novels. My other fervent wish from the time? I so wanted a TNG/War of the Worlds crossover episode. Either the TNG crew traveled back in time to the 1980s, or the Enterprise-D visited Mortax in the 24th-century. Something. Anything. I'd have eaten that up like mint chocolate chip ice cream. Oh, yeah, I would have.