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

Sad news... apparently Jared Martin has passed away.

https://scifibulletin.com/2017/05/26/rip-fantastic-journeys-jared-martin/

 

That does suck. :/

Though I don't think I ever saw him in anything before or since, either.

 

I'm of the right age to have seen Fantastic Journey in its first run, so I knew him first from that. He did guest roles in various other '70s and '80s things I saw, like Wonder Woman.

 

Oh man, that's a bummer.

 

That's sad... I really loved what he brought to his character in season 1. I thought I read he basically retired form acting after WotW...

I really wish they did a sequel to season 1...like a SyFy movie of the week

 

After hearing of Jared Martin's death, I went and started binge-watching this show (I have both seasons on DVD, but have rarely revisited them).

I actually would recommend this to just about any sci-fi fan (this particular forum is inundated with "superhero" fans and discussions- wish there was a separate place for pure scifi discussion where topics like this wouldn't get buried under the 398th thread about Captain America or Green Lantern whatever...so not sure this is the right place for this). If for any reason, it's such a unique point of interest in the history of science-fiction television. I mean, really- this is a weird show with a weird production history. It's definitely worth exploring for that reason alone.

I think overall, my impressions are that the first season is so unbelievably uneven that it's almost head-spinning. There are elements about it that are absolutely, mind-numbingly stupid...but there are also some really great elements. It's also so painfully 1980's Canadian....you'd be hard pressed to find a more unattractive, pasty, fashion-faux-pas, bad hair group of extras / background / incidental characters anywhere (the main cast is fine). I find that the later episodes are far superior to the earlier ones. The characters have solidified somewhat, and the writing is much higher quality. There are beginning to be threads of continuity that you can latch on to...and a larger, less "contrived" scope to everything. I think the overall strength of the show is the direct connection to the 1953 movie and the character chemistry...particularly Blackwood and Ironhorse.

The second season is equally befuddling. It is, far and away, a superior season of television when viewed objectively. The look (lighting, cinematography, locations, visual fx, etc) are off-the-charts better than the bland, low-budget dreck of the first season. The stories take themselves much more seriously, and the writing is far more consistent. That said, the second season is, at the same time, far more of a slog to watch. I could never put my finger on why. I know a lot of things changed in the second season, and that has been debated and documented to death...but this was never really the "why" for me. I think now that I'm rewatching, I understand.

The fact is that the "main" characters of Blackwood and McCollough are pretty much destroyed in the transition from S1 to S2. Blackwood in particular almost literally has no personality whatsoever...which is a major departure from the quirky, shouty, opinionated, eccentric character we met and grew fond of in S1. In S2, he is literally just a guy with a beard who shoots aliens (even though before he would not use firearms). Suzanne is likewise stripped of most interesting character traits. Instead, the series focuses almost entirely on giving personalities to John Kincaid (who is a douche), Debbi (who is a kid) and the alien leaders (who are space nazis with horrific fashion sense and bad hairdos)... What this results in is a series that, while technically superior to the original season in virtually every way, has very little magic or charm. It's just a bleak, uninteresting slog.

It's funny, because I find (despite all that it represented and all that it "undid" about the first season) "The Second Wave" to be one of the most engaging and well-done episodes of the series...even though it is controversial on the edge of being "notorious" given the stark departure from everything in S1.

Overall, even though it is a frustrating, low-budget eye-roller at times...I still love Season 1 of this show. It is so bizarre and interesting, and the characters have this charm and magic to them that I adore. I really wanted to give Season 2 a chance...but it's so uninteresting, despite it's vastly improved production values, that I'm not sure I'll make it.

 

I've also noticed, strangely, that it must have been something of a running gag on the show to have aliens who have possessed bowling league members. I noted multiple times in S1 that there were alien bad guys with bowling league shirts on. They even carry this over into S2 during "The Second Wave" and execute an alien soldier with an embroidered bowling league shirt.

Again....WEIRD.

 

As I recall, there were some pretty dire episodes in the latter half of the season. But for what it's worth, the first part of the season was written and made during the '88 writers' strike, which I gather is the reason why so many of the scripts are pseudonymous (there's even one credited to "Sylvia Van Buren"). So depending on just who was writing those early scripts, and whether they were even professional writers at all, that might account for the writing being worse overall in the first part of the season.

I agree. The chemistry among the ensemble was the best part. And I found it interesting how much it maintained continuity with the '53 film despite retconning a ton of stuff about it and treating it as mostly forgotten by the world. Most TV series based on movies make fundamental changes to the facts of the movies in order to make the series possible. Starman retconned the events of the movie from the '80s to the '70s so that the returning title character could have a teenage son. Men in Black: The Series ignored Agent K's retirement at the end of the film. Stargate SG-1 changed the nature of the alien parasites and changed the spelling of the main character's name. And so on. But the retcons in WotW:TS were mostly changes that set in after the movie, like the world forgetting after the fact or the "dead" aliens turning out to be in suspended animation. The main change was that the aliens weren't from Mars, but outside of the film's prologue, that origin was never confirmed, just speculated about by a couple of characters. Also, the aliens in the show were bigger than the one we saw in the film, but maybe that one was some kind of helper animal.

That's not my recollection, but then, I haven't seen it since first run. I remember being turned off by the dismally bleak look and the perpetual darkness. And I found the writing to be consistently terrible in the first half, though it got a bit better in the second.

Yep, that about covers it. Aside from the fact that it systematically eradicated anyone non-white from the cast.

 

The fact that the second season took itself so much more seriously is a prime reason that it's inferior to the first.

 

Interesting...what do you mean?