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

[Vger23]

Thing that was frustrating about WOTW I said that, for back then, it was a halfway decent premise with a lot of potential. If the writing ahead been better and the showrunners actually cared about the product, it could have been a great show, with elements of X-Files and 24 combined into a cool, paranoid weekly sci-fi action/adventure. It had set up some really cool potential subplots like Quinn and Project 9. It had a relatively good chemistry between the cast. It had a lot of foundational things going for it.

Instead, the show was massively schizo. It couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a buddy show, a horror/gore fest, a slapstick/campy black comedy, etc. Many of the episodes were sloppy. The production values were poor. Then, they came in with S2 and destroyed all that. Yes, S2 has some good going for it. It had better production values, better acting, and took itself much more seriously...but it was also much to jarring a change for audiences, and it plummeted to its death from there.

When I rewatch, I generally do it from a perspective of watching episodes that expand upon the mythos of WOTW.

Here's my list of "essential" (?!) episodes:

Resurrection (re-introduces alien threat)
Thy Kingdom Come (re-introduces Sylvia)
Eye For Any Eye (integrates the Orson Wells radio broadcast into the mythos)
The Second Seal (explores a little of the alien technology and psychology)
Among the Phillistines (not a part of the mythos...but one of the better outings)
The Prodigal Son (introduces the Quinn subplot)
The Raising of Lazarus (introduces the Project 9 subplot, and gives us a little more alien history)
The Second Wave (sad because this is where everything took a turn...but still an essential episode)
Time to Reap (time travel back to the end of the 1953 invasion!)
The Obelisk (crappy finale in many ways...but the end of the saga and definitely interesting as such)

So, if you're just looking to get the feel for the show, and want to avoid the average or below-average episodes, this is what I'd watch.

 

[Vger23]

Thanks for posting that -- saves me the trouble. But it only covers the first season -- I couldn't bring myself to rewatch the second.




Yeah, the main title theme was a pretty cool Holst homage, but I liked the end title music even better. A different version of it was featured as in-story music in an episode about the aliens putting subliminal programming in music -- the composer they used was played by the show's actual composer, Billy Thorpe. Although I didn't care for any of Thorpe's incidental scoring of the show, which was mostly just ominous atmospherics and scare stings.




Actually, the Morthren were supposed to be another faction of the same species that was called Mor-Taxians in season 1, but using a different technology to disguise themselves as humans and having a different culture built around worship of a thing called "the Immortal."




One -- yes, it was just plain bad. The first half of the season was barely watchable -- so relentlessly grim and unpleasant and barely coherent. It got somewhat better in the latter half when Jim Trombetta took over as story editor, and actually managed to get one or two decent episodes in there (particularly one involving the birthday celebration of the leading lady's teen daughter, with some rather nice stuff about trying to build a positive experience within such a dark, despairing world). But the series finale was terrible, a total cop-out that forced a happy ending by nonsensically retconning everything about the aliens going back to the original movie.

Two -- the problem with the changes wasn't that they were drastic, it's that they were bad. The first season wasn't all that good, lord knows, but the second season tore apart and trampled over everything that was good about it. The best thing about the first season was the rapport among the four lead actors. It was always fun to watch them even when their material was bad (as it usually was), because they just had such great chemistry together. And then the second season killed off half of that ensemble and replaced them with the charisma void that is Adrian Paul. And they killed off the most popular character, Col. Ironhorse, in a way that was so wrong and callously destructive that I cried in rage and frustration when it happened -- not in the good way, like it really moved me, but out of anger at how wrong it was as a way for a TV show to treat a character.

It's also pretty clear that a lot of the changes were motivated by something rather ugly. Both the nonwhite cast members were killed off and the white ones were kept. All the new cast members were white. The Native American cast member was killed off despite being the most popular character -- and new producer Frank Mancuso Jr. claimed he didn't realize Ironhorse was so popular. How can you take over a show and not look into audience response? He also claimed that he'd killed off Norton because the team had lost their home base and would be on the run, so a man in a wheelchair couldn't manage -- but that was a flat-out lie, because he promptly moved the team into a new home base where they stayed for the rest of the season. Also, Harrison Blackwood, who had been charmingly eccentric and weird in season 1, was reduced to a bland cipher whose only personality trait was growing a beard. Meanwhile, the weird-looking aliens who spoke in subtitled noises were replaced with aliens who looked like attractive white humans and spoke English. Not only did they expunge everyone nonwhite, they expunged everything that was "different" in any way. That's not just bad television, it's morally repugnant.




Both of those sound plausible, so it might've been a little of both. The show had to go in one direction for the sake of budget (and also out of the bizarre need many TV shows have to pretend they're in "our world" even though we all know they aren't), but Dillard as a novelizer was certainly capable of filling in blanks when things didn't make sense to her. (In her Star Trek V novelization, she added some business about Sybok upgrading the Enterprise's shields to allow it to pass through the Great Barrier -- though she didn't explain how it got to the center of the galaxy in 20 minutes -- and in her ST VI novelization, she added backstory of Carol Marcus being injured in a recent Klingon attack to explain why Kirk was so uncharacteristically hateful toward the Klingons.)




There was a handwave in episode 2 about how alien abductions are associated with memory loss, so that aliens must have some weird amnesia-inducing effect on the human mind. Although that was in combination with the pilot's "People just couldn't handle the reality so they chose to forget" explanation. It didn't make any sense, of course, but at least they tried to justify it.

Wow- you know some background on the show...I'm impressed. Here I thought I was the only person on the face of the planet who even remembered this show!

 

[Christopher]

Wow- you know some background on the show...I'm impressed. Here I thought I was the only person on the face of the planet who even remembered this show!

Sometimes I wish I could forget it...

 

[Vger23]

Sometimes I wish I could forget it...

I've been enjoying your blog reviews!

 

[MacLeod]

Well I do recall watching the show,and it has been a long time since Ive seen it but from memory the first season was passible, the second season not so much.

 

[diankra]

new producer Frank Mancuso Jr. claimed he didn't realize Ironhorse was so popular.

I was in the States in summer 89, and went to a convention in July that was dominated by a Save Ironhorse petition ("The clone episode has been shot, but it hasn't been shown and can be tweaked"). If Mancuso didn't realise how popular Ironhorse was when they shot the episode, he definitely should have done by the time it was shown, and could have re-edited to allow the option of bringing him back mid-season.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I came to the show in the second half of the second season, and eventually worked my way around to get the whole thing. Sub-par entertainment overall, with a few shinier episodes in the mix. I actually did like the show's dark tone and chemistry, having the team as a de-facto resistance to a for-some-reason-never-public alien threat, in a dystopian future that wasn't the fault of either our heroes or the aliens. The last few episodes had some nice action sequences and a BIT of a plot arc as the aliens ran out of resources to mount an effective takeover and one of their leaders' internal treacheries was revealed. I was actually surprised by who actually killed that guy.

But yes, the transition between the two seasons was pointless and botched, I did like the chemistry of the first season team too, and IMO it was from ONE kind of sub-par to a whole other kind of sub-par. I can see why they wanted to make the show's universe more science-fictioney and less formulaic (oh, who have the aliens taken over THIS week, and what madhat sciencey thing will the team come up with before the military comes in and kills all the bad guys?), but again there was no believable reason for these changes.

This isn't the kind of show that gets huge audiences anyway, but the producers decided to take the basic premise of the show and re-interpret it completely, screwing over the existing fandom and failing to get any decent new audiences. It's an unfortunate reality in TV, and especially jarring when they do it in sci-fi, which is contingent in no small part on effective world building. Look at the exact same thing happening with Earth: Final Conflict or Andromeda, also smaller-budget shows which massively shook things up between seasons(ish).

Mark

PS - And sometimes it does work well: I cite "Highlander: The Series" as a good example of significantly shaking things up between freshman and sophmore seasons of a genre show, to that show's benefit.

 

[Vorpal_Blade]

I vaguely remember it.

 

[Morpheus 02]

I really liked the first season -- thought it was a lot of fun...I think horror shows were big in syndication then... in between Tales from the Darkside and Friday the 13th (chronologocially I believe)

As with everyone, the first John COlicos episode was the best.... and one of the worst, in some ways, was the alien robot who just jerked around in a silly way...though the idea of a carnivorous race that could come into lay next season was exciting to consider.

Now, the show came out pre-web, so I didn't know that Ironhorse was most popular. For me, it was Drake, Harrison, then Ironhorse and then the doctor.

I am not sure if it was racially motivated as much as wanted a YOUNGER action hero as one of the stars, and also saving money (Adrian Paul was cheaper back then, right?).

The only two things that were cool about season 2 was the glowing death scenes and the name Morthrai/Morthren..oh, and I think Denis Christopher made a good menacing villain.



As for the whole amnesia thing..first off, aren't we also Trek fans? Are we not good at rationalizing?

A few things:

ANyone under 35 (at that time) never saw the War of the Worlds, so they are going by what people said
Anyone 35-45 might have thought it was a dream.
It was 45 and up or so that might have wanted to forget...and certainly NOT mention it in day-to-day lives.

Also, some people who were 45-55 were in Vietnam or hippies, so those guys could have excused their lack of memory.

In addition, since this was an ALIEN invasion, as opposed to manmade like the Holocaust, I think there was NOT a need to remember. The invasion happened, and there was nOTHING man could do. It was only the common cold that did it. Nothing man actually did. And after 20 years, it might have felt like the aliens were never coming back.

Mankind is often in denial of the bad things they have done, even just a generation ago. My dad suffered as an occupied territory (Indonesia by Japan) in WW2....but he did NOT share much of the experience...and I understand WW2 vets also did NOT share many details.

In terms of societal denial -- I mean, in Chicago, people apparently forgot all the bad things Mayor Richard J Daley did, so they elected his son about15 years after the elder's death . ANd longer term, how little are we affected by Jim Crow deaths, Native MAerican maasacres, etc.

And the farther away something has happened, the more we can forget. Hence why we need Holocaust memorials, and why mass deaths like the

 

[Star Wolf]

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?

Hard to say the tonal shift was so jarring when I tuned into the second season it took awhile to get over the WTF factor. It was like a precursor to what happened on Earth: Final Conflict

I think that may be the case because I recall the characters stating in the first season that the Martian Invasion DID happen (IE they basically said the events depicted in the 1953 film version ACTUALLY HAPPENED in their world); but somehow 30+ years later, the entire world - except for the main characters - somehow forgot about it.

That was hard to get over but if you accepted it well the series did flow. I remember not only was the 1953 movie real in the universe but so was the 1938 radio play said to be the initial recon fought by New Jersey National Guardsmen.

 

[Christopher]

I remember not only was the 1953 movie real in the universe but so was the 1938 radio play said to be the initial recon fought by New Jersey National Guardsmen.

Which was cool, because that episode actually aired on, and took place on, the 50th-anniversary week of the Orson Welles broadcast. (It was syndicated, so it didn't show on a specific day of the week.) It was also one of the few episodes that showed anyone remembering the aliens from the past.

At first, I thought that episode was stretching credibility a bit -- how could it be that H.G. Wells's novel existed in that universe to be adapted by Orson Welles as a coverup, if a similar set of events actually happened in 1953? Isn't that too great a coincidence? But then I realized that the movie changes so much from the book that it's practically a completely different story. If you go with the show's premise that the aliens are from Mor-Tax rather than Mars (and really, the introductory narration aside, there's nothing in the '53 movie to confirm where the invaders come from, just speculation), then the only real similarities are that the aliens came down in meteoric projectiles, some people got trapped in a building near a crash site at one point, and the aliens were eventually brought down by lack of immunity to Earth diseases. So it could be that, in the movie/show universe, Wells just made a few lucky guesses.

 

[Blamo]

Overall I enjoyed the first season. It wasn't great TV, but it was tolerable with a few bad and a few good stories. The Resurrection though I still think think is the best.

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?

The second season was bad, but it was certainly made worse by junking pretty much everything prior to it. I'm surprised they even bothered with the time travel story, since season 2 has nothing to do with the original movie.

The alien's motivation changed, the alien's ethics changed, the alien's quirks changed (the obsession with 3) and the alien's technology changed (from mechanical to organic). Even the setting sort of changed, from a "here and now" to a "few minutes into the future".

 

[Christopher]

I'm surprised they even bothered with the time travel story, since season 2 has nothing to do with the original movie.

And why did they do it in black and white when the original movie was in Technicolor???? That made no sense. It also made no sense because it wasn't a flashback; the present-day characters actually went to the past and the scenes were their own current experience. So it made no narrative sense to put them in black and white. It was just lazy, cliched filmmaking, using a gimmick (past = black and white) without any thought put into whether it was appropriate for this instance.

The alien's motivation changed, the alien's ethics changed, the alien's quirks changed (the obsession with 3) and the alien's technology changed (from mechanical to organic). Even the setting sort of changed, from a "here and now" to a "few minutes into the future".

The idea that there were two rival factions among the aliens wasn't intrinsically bad; it could've worked if they hadn't just used it as an excuse to retcon out any reference to the season-1 version of the aliens, and if the series finale hadn't ludicrously retconned everything back to the original movie to contrive a nonsensical happy ending.

And in a way, the dystopian setting made more sense as an aftermath of the '53 invasion than the first season's normal world did. That was the idea behind the change, but it was clumsy just to impose it without explanation.

And there was a way they could've explained it. The first season established that there was a second wave of invaders on its way, due to arrive in four years. The show could've jumped forward four years between seasons and established that the aliens had managed to inflict a lot of damage on the world in the interim, explaining why things were so bad now. Indeed, I initially believed that was what they'd done, or at least rationalized it that way; but it didn't work, because Suzanne's daughter Debi was still a preteen.

 

[TalonCard]

It was just lazy, cliched filmmaking, using a gimmick (past = black and white) without any thought put into whether it was appropriate for this instance.

You know, for someone whose main activities are A. Watch Television and B. Post in Forums, you're awfully quick to call other people lazy in their execution of artistic endeavors. And you might try putting some thought in about what is and isn't appropriate yourself before calling out the creative team behind some decades old TV show.

TC

 

[DonIago]

You do realize that one of Christopher's main activities, likely moreso than A or B, is Write Books?

 

[Greysun]

Yeah, the first season wasn't too bad. It's unfortunate they had to ruin it towards the end.

 

[Qonundrum]

Season 1 was pretty good as I remember and had a great season finale. They even brought in actors from the 1953 movie and also tied into the 1938 (?) radio show to make something larger.

The horror aspects were pretty grizzly and the cast of characters was well-balanced.

There were individual episode teasers in the episodes as well, which got cut out of the DVD release for no reason...

Season 2-- isn't it great when there's a huge shift in premise for no reason except to claw for more ratings and you give it a chance only to find that the new direction taken has absolutely no direction at all? Especially when the season 1 finale brought in a new breath of life (apart form the amount of hairspray one could smell from the other side of the TV set) that they should have build upon instead of glorious season 2 episodes such as "the quest for chocolate cake for little Debi" or whatever they called it... The season opener tries to rush the change to the new format and kills off decent characters and changing personalities of the rest. It didn't really work... to the point that the 1985 "V" weekly series looked like epic Shakespeare by comparison (and I have a soft spot for some of those episodes).

 

[Qonundrum]

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."

LOL, that reminds me of the Doctor in "The Invisible Enemy" where he says the same thing - "Some of my best friends are humans. But in large groups others tend to suffer". Okay, he didn't go on to get all Bender on them to say "Kill all humans"...

John Colicos was a great villain actor. Did some fantastic stuff over the decades, like Baltar. Lovely to see him again in DS9 reprising his role as Kor as well...

 

[Christopher]

Season 1 was pretty good as I remember and had a great season finale. They even brought in actors from the 1953 movie and also tied into the 1938 (?) radio show to make something larger.

Well, they brought in one actress from the movie, Ann Robinson as Sylvia Van Buren, and pretty much treated her character horribly by reducing her to a babbling mental patient most of the time. And they established that Clayton Forrester was dead for some reason, even though Gene Barry was alive and well and still a working actor.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

John Colicos was a great villain actor. Did some fantastic stuff over the decades, like Baltar. Lovely to see him again in DS9 reprising his role as Kor as well...

He was on my favorite TV cop show (Night Heat) once. Played a Hungarian mobster/loanshark.

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