The Invaders - TV Series ('67-8)

(There a thread on the show, but it's locked:
The Invaders - TV Series - Episode discussions )





I'd never seen the show until a week ago. I've watched 10 episodes so far. For a Fugitive fanatic like myself*, it's fun to see a completely different premise (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) grafted on to the Fugitive format.

The whole point of the show is to guess which of the guest stars will turn out to "Body Snatchers". The reveal usually happens around the 2/3 point.

Spoiler

In the pilot veteran heavy John Milford acts very suspiciously as a country sheriff but is actually a good guy, albeit antagonistic toward our hero. In a later episode sweetie pie Suzanne Pleshette is revealed to be one of the Invaders, though she is ultimately sympathetic.

My favorite episode so far is "The Innocent", in which alien Michael Rennie, ol' Klaatu himself, tries to convince David Vincent the aliens are benign and only want to help humanity.



I'm not a huge fan of Roy Thinnes as David Vincent -- his cold aryan eyes lack the vulnerability of David Janssen. Curiously this long interview with Thinnes from a few years ago shows him to have a lively (if deadpan) sense of humor. I've never seen him this warm in character:



Here in the aforementioned "The Innocent" Thinnes flashes a very rare smile as he goes for a country drive with his ex-girlfriend, gorgeous redhead Katharine Justice (a longtime crush of mine)



*Starring David Janssen as The Fugitive

 

(3) ABC Promos, a great show that should've stayed around longer:

 

Note that his height is listed as 5'9". But in the episode where this license is seen ("The Ivy Curtain") an alien initiates a search for Vincent and gives his height as 5'11".

 

I discovered this show a couple of years ago when I bought the DVD's. Fantastic series. Roy Thinnes is great as David Vincent. Lots of great guest stars. If this show lasted one or two more seasons it would have been a bigger hit in syndication, like Star Trek. I would love to see a revival of the series. It is a great concept for a show.

 

own the DVDs ...love the show... wish for a BD of the series.

 

One of the best 60s Saturday evening TV intros of all time.


Great family telly.

 

And, as a possible inspiration for the future Police Squad series, the show boasts that it's in color!

 

Funny trivia. Many years after The Invaders, Roy Thinnes pursued the role of Dr John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who believed in aliens, for a fictionalized but “based on a true story” film or miniseries. The rights ultimately went elsewhere, but it would have been a nice match - fun in a self-referential way.

 

Always wondered if subconsciously the dying alien scenes had been seen by the Floyds WYWH album cover designer and stayed in his memory bank.

 

Terrific little show, long been a favorite of mine... atmospheric as hell with an effectively unsettling soundtrack, a series ahead of it's time in some respects...

 

Forgot to mention the cars.
Some classics that would be worth a fortune today.

 

Loved this as a kid - very scary to me.

Is this available to stream anywhere?

 

The Invaders must be the king of untied loose ends. In "The Innocent" we never learn

Spoiler

what happened to the kidnapped wife and son,

while in "The Ivy Curtain" we don't see what happens to

Spoiler

the state policeman

and he is never mentioned again.

"The Ivy Curtain" deals with the aliens building a campus in New Mexico and using it to train new arrivals in how to act human

The students learn human emotions.



There is a classic scene of the aliens in their private discoteque, practicing how to agitate and inflame humans (by urging them to recognize Red China and demand less stringent drug laws)



Guest star is the great Jack Warden as a fly by night pilot who gets mixed up with the aliens. He's kinda wasted, though; the better role is his floozy wife played by Susan Oliver (if you haven't watched the documentary about her, The Green Girl, check it out ASAP)

 

Got the DVDs but still working toward the second set. You might also like some British shows from the same general era: Doomwatch and The Strange Report. No Susan Oliver in them though.

I tried to read the first Invaders paperback book once not having seen the show and it put me off of wanting to see the show for a long time.

 

I'm old enough to remember when this show was originally broadcast and I really enjoyed it.

Wasn't there an Invaders mini-series broadcast some years back...easily 10 years ago? If I'm remembering correctly, Roy Thinnes had a brief cameo in that mini-series. One of the things that stuck with me was a scene in which a large group of the aliens were in some roadside diner consuming massive amount of steak and eggs, washing it down with a lot of strong coffee, and they were all smoking like chimneys.

 

I didn't watch it much at the time because I felt frustrated because I wanted to see loads of scenes with aliens, UFOs and ray guns. Too much dialogue waiting to see an invader dissolve into light. I found it as draggy and tedious as The Fugitive.

 

Loved that show; watched all of the episodes back in the day.

 

Next!


A great series. I remember watching all of them as they aired on ABC-TV back in the day. The series premiered in January and always aired on Tuesday nights, as I recall. I seem to remember the initial season had Tuesday's ABC lineup of:

7:30 COMBAT!
8:30 THE INVADERS
9:30 PEYTON PLACE
10:00 THE FUGITIVE

I was very eager to grab the DVDs when they were first issued in season sets. I bought the S1 DVDs on release day, and while they were pretty good, they weren't perfect. The first thing I noticed was that there were two versions of the pilot episode "Beachhead". One was the broadcast version and the other was a longer version that was cut down for broadcast and slightly re-edited at the end. Ironically, the un-aired pilot looked and sounded great, but the broadcast version was a little grittier and was time-sped.

None of the other episodes were time-sped that I could ever determine, but they had their problems. One was a very over-saturated color picture, with red-orange faces (before an Invader died!). Another episode had a section that looked like it jumped from a 35mm print to a 16mm syndicated print in the middle of a scene.

In "The Leeches", Arthur Hill and Roy Thinnes are talking in a parking lot.


Moments later in the same scene, the film looks like this:


But I'm willing and able to overlook these flaws as the series holds a lot of memories for me.

In 1995, FOX-TV aired a mini-series of two, two-hour segments (with commercials of course), called THE INVADERS. It was an attempted update/reboot of the concept with Scott Bakula in the lead. It was rather misguided as mentioned above where the aliens are in need of the planet, but they need it to be quite dirty and unhealthy for humans, so they smoke and inhale exhaust fumes and eat steak and eggs constantly. So it was hard to reconcile the way the aliens are depicted in the old series versus this new attempt. As mentioned, Roy Thinnes makes some brief appearances in this version, playing David Vincent, a man who's been tracking these aliens for years. When I first watched the movie when it aired, I just didn't recognize his first appearance in the opening moments:



He later appears in a sort of background role, turning up in a hospital, in a diner, and his biggest scene is at the start of the second half, where he meets up with Scott Bakula on the road. His voiceovers accompany the discoveries of his life-long work as the modern characters uncover it.

The mini-series has never made it to DVD, but it was briefly available on LaserDisc and VHS.

 

You found The Fugitive, arguably the best drama in US TV history draggy and tedious. I would love to know what you consider good.

 

Every ABC show did that for several years. Actually, so did all of the networks.

 

Oh, The Fugitive was a very good series but I found it sluggish and Jansen's very one-dimensional "hurt guy" performance gets on my nerves. I think the writing was streeeeetched for the sake of filling the series out, rather than having a huge story to tell (a problem with a LOT of series). With each episode, the plot hardly advanced at all. Same with The Invaders.
A few of the series that I have enjoyed over the decades:

Star Trek
The Avengers
The Prisoner
Dr Who
Colditz
Kung Fu
Rockford Files
Boys From The Blacksuff
Hill Street Blues
Twin Peaks
Shameless (first series with James McAvoy)
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Ripper Street
Poldark
Vanity Fair
...

 

I fondly remember waiting each week for the next episode...

and they were blending...LOL.

 

The opening episode was good, but I soon tired of "The Fugitive" pacing.

 

Jansen was absolutely fabulous playing a man who was hunted, never really had peace of mind knowing he was being hunted, had to look over his shoulder constantly for Gerard and the general public, had to lie about his identity to everyone...yea, and was INNOCENT!
I'd his persona was perfect!

 

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OK but for how many episodes! It gets so tedious after a while, with no relief. Every episode basically the same. He meets someone, a family, a woman. He mopes about, looking over his shoulder, has a little punch-up now and again, gets a little clue about the one-armed man, then splits. Yawn.