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Does anyone recall the 80' "War of Worlds" tv show?

Jayson1

Jayson1

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I use to like this show when I was a kid and this was back before I even got hooked on Trek and became a sci-fi fan. It's been so long now that I hardly recall anything about it in great detail. I know the main characters was a scientist,sexy female,army guy and black guy in wheelchair. This being the 80's I think those descriptions might have also been the characters names.

For me the fun thing was always seing aliens taking over human bodies. I loved seeing the alien hand come out and into another human being and then you would cut to the alien in his new human body. I also recall the alien leaders who stood around in protective suits every week. I don't think they ever left their base or the room they were in or even moved from their marks. I think they even had one episode were they had captured humans in cages and were experimenting on them by shooting a laser into a guys head. It seem they kept both the human slave cage and ray gun all in the same room were the alien leaders stood around in.

Also in he second season they ruied the show. In a single episode both army guy and black guy in wheelchair get killed off and the aliens were changed into something less intresting. PLus the world went from being normal to some blade Runner,Robocop style future were everything kind of sucks in the world.

Jason
 
I watched it in college. It was stupid as HELL but I liked some elements of it (although I can't for the life of me remember what those elements were). Then they killed off Ironhorse (the only really interesting character) in an incredibly stupid way and I was done. Never watched it again after that.
 
Also didn't the second season have a actor who went on to have a more high profile show? I'm thinking it might have been "Highlander" the tv show but I never watched that show so i'm not sure.

Jason
 
I enjoyed the first season. The show was syndicated and we didn't have cable TV, so when season 2 moved to our Fox affiliate, that was the end for me because back then Fox was horrible to get over the air. Even Married With Children made jokes about it.
 
The only thing I liked about it was the moment the original movie War Machine showed up (I think that was in the pilot). The rest was a hot mess. Even back then, making the aliens able to assume human form to save money was a cliché cop-out.
 
John Colicos had all the best lines.

"To life immortal...SUCKER!"

"I have nothing really against humans. Some of my best friends are humans. But as a group, they stink, and you know it. I say, kill them all."
 
Last edited:
Here's what I stated at Deviant Art when a friend and I compared notes.

That series was muddled in so many ways. But my chief objection was the worldwide, collective amnesia/denial that anything unusual took place in 1953. I mean, the closing shots of the movie showed Paris razed to the ground far more thoroughly than the Nazis managed with the Eiffel Tower crumpled as though by Godzilla! The Taj Mahal's central dome was cracked open like an eggshell! Consider the time and resources needed to have rebuilt all those major cities. Some place would still be rebuilding by the time 1988 rolled around, the time of the series. There would have been too many records (photographs, motion picture film footage, kine-scope recorded broadcasts, military transcripts, personal letters) noting what actually to simply "bury" and blaming it upon things like termites or swamp gas.

To make it even more confusing, when the second season started, we suddenly have the dystopian, post war environment and society we should have seen from the beginning, still recovering from the 1953 invasion. But because some of the characters carry into that second year and events from the first second are referenced, the audience can't simply "write off" the first year as though it never happened. Plus, the series killed off two of the more interesting characters, Norton Drake, the computer guru, and Paul Ironhorse, their military expert.

When one stops to consider the concept of the first season, the aliens (Martians/Mor-Tax/whatever) taking over humans to infiltrate society and disrupt it, with few people beyond Blackwood's team believing Harrison's claims, you'll realize it's much closer to an updating of Quinn Martin's production, "The Invaders". I'd like to know what really took place during those development meetings. Did the notion of a "follow-up" to George Pal's "War of the Worlds" come first? We know George Pal himself explored this notion in the mid 70s, but that concept would have been a "space opera" with the idea that humans travel into space to strike back at the aliens, discovering that Mars was really just a staging site for the final assault; the aliens coming from another solar system. But what did Greg Strangis propose? Did he try to sell the backers on the idea of a "post war" Earth? If so, did the bean counters deem that too expensive? Is it possible that after much compromise, Strangis "relented" to a concept that could be filmed with contemporary sets, wardrobes and backdrops, the "alien" aspect usually limited to radiation burns on "human hosts", melting effects and the occasional 3 fingered Martian arm. Or, did Strangis propose a "clandestine invasion" theme, one involving "original" aliens? Did Paramount marketing experts think it might have better odds of selling if a known property, one which the studio already owned, were "tagged" onto it? The whole thing just reeks of "studio interference" resulting in a jumbled mess.

The one thing I liked about the series was the opening credits score from season one, preferably without Jared Martin's narration. It just "fit" the war machine sequences so well, sounding a bit like an homage to Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War", but still its own thing.
 
On the one hand I'd really love a chance to revisit this series. On the other, given what I'm hearing from others, I have a feeling it would suffer from a rewatch. :/
 
I found the first season very interesting- loved seeing the original George Pal Manta ships rising up out of the wrecked warehouse- we even got a glimpse inside one of the machines when they were planting the explosives.
Just the cobra-head death ray made an appearance later- I remember the big plot point was trying to make a reflector to send the beam directly back to the source- all the computer simulations with panels was interesting but apparently everyone forgot all you needed to do is make a three sided corner cube (one is still on the moon, we shoot it with a laser every so often to measure distance).

What killed the show for me was the second season. It was like somebody wanted to make a totally different show and just spliced it into the series so they could get it on the air. Killed off the best characters, changed the premise and went overboard with the dystopian world. They even added a new evil alien species who was supposed to be controlling the first ones

I have the series on DVD and pull it out every so often
 
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Season one
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Season two
 
I preferred the second season to the first. The first just felt like shock horror, while the second season felt like it actually attempted science-fiction.
 
So was the second season bad, or was it just the fact that it was such a drastic change from the first that turns people off?
 
I liked it for what it was: a low-budget, syndicated show. I would watch it along with ROBOCOP THE SERIES, KUNG FU THE LEGEND CONTINUES, FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, LIGHTNING FORCE, TIME TRAX and, of course, BABYLON 5. During that time, it was the heyday for syndicated programming. Of course, production values were low, but I was entertained.
 
JD said:
So was the second season bad, or was it just the fact that it was such a drastic change from the first that turns people off?
Click to expand...

Again, I'm talking from old memories, but I think I'm going to go with...both? Even if it hadn't opened by killing two of my favorite characters, I remember it being pretty unremittingly dark and depressing, but I don't remember anyone ever providing an explanation as to how the world had gotten to that point, even disregarding that it was an abrupt departure from S1's portrayal.
 
dswynne1 said:
I liked it for what it was: a low-budget, syndicated show. I would watch it along with ROBOCOP THE SERIES, KUNG FU THE LEGEND CONTINUES, FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, LIGHTNING FORCE, TIME TRAX and, of course, BABYLON 5. During that time, it was the heyday for syndicated programming. Of course, production values were low, but I was entertained.
Click to expand...

Syndication!!!! Those were the days.

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