The Invaders - TV Series ('67-8)

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by JozefK, Sep 26, 2018.

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  1. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    LOL, all I can say is I waited or each weeks episode and enjoyed every one. : )
     
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  2. albert_m

    albert_m Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atl., Ga, USA
    I had commented... maybe here on another thread, but I just discovered this show this summer. I saw the complete series set at Wal Mart, was curious, looked it up on my phone to read about it, and thought, yeah, this looks cool.

    It's fun and has some good stuff and I'm sure at the time was particularly cool to watch. I just wished it had more progression rather than being largely a repurposed Fugitive formula.

    But again it's fun and a creepy in a way.
     
  3. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    This is a common complaint among younger viewers who weren't around in the 60s and maybe the 70s. They find a show like THE FUGITIVE or THE INVADERS tedious and too slow-moving, not getting to a pay-off quickly enough. What they cannot understand is that television shows were structured differently in those days. Each show was designed around a series premise, but the individual episodes were all intended to be one hour's worth of entertainment - to keep you interested in THAT hour only, with the idea that next week's episode would be similarly as good, but unrelated to this week's episode - unless it was a two-parter.

    Shows were designed to self-contained and anything that happened in that episode didn't really matter in the big scheme of things. Kimble or Vincent would get involved with someone, and the individual things that happened in that episode wouldn't drive or scar our heroes - mostly. Very occasionally, an event would happen that would change the premise slightly - Kimble spotting the one-armed man or learning something about him, Vincent finding his "believers" group - but these were more designed to alter the series a bit - to shake things up. This is the same phenomenon that STAR TREK fans call the "reset button". This is the way TV existed back then.

    Quinn Martin always structured his shows that way. Essentially they are often anthology stories centered around the "guest stars in tonight's story", with the show's star wandering into their lives, perhaps helping them out in some way.

    Today's younger viewers grew up in the era of grand-sweeping tales told in 45-minute increments, where every ending is a cliffhanger, so they cannot relate to the way things were in the past.
     
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  4. albert_m

    albert_m Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atl., Ga, USA
    I'm not sure if that is in reference to my comments or not, but my context is not the pace of an episode, but that it's an interesting concept, but would be more interesting if the overall story arch progressed over some period of time.
     
  5. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    Remember, these shows were made at a time when TV viewers were at the total mercy of program schedulers. THE INVADERS were on at 8:30 on Tuesday nights. If you weren't in front of your TV and tuned to ABC, you didn't see it. People's lives were cluttered then as now, and it wasn't always possible to see an episode of your favorite show. If the show were serialized, like say LOST, then you might be missing an all-important episode that "progressed a story arc" and lose the thread. Shows were made to fill an hour of time and to be somewhat comfortable and predictable. You knew that David Vincent, know matter what happened in the episode, would be back to normal the next week, once again trying to foil the aliens. THE INVADERS was actually one show that DID have a development when David found his group of "believers". It changed the whole dynamic of the show, and that was by design as the ratings were beginning to slip.
     
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  6. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    I like this post for two reasons:

    1. It's a great post.

    2. It saved me the effort of having to say it myself
     
  7. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    :)
     
  8. albert_m

    albert_m Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atl., Ga, USA
    I would argue that there is an in between.
     
  9. vegafleet

    vegafleet Forum Resident

    How did the series end plot-wise? I don't remember.
     
  10. kwadguy

    kwadguy Senior Member

    Location:
    Cambridge, MA
    Unquestionably my favorite show for the two seasons that it aired. I watched it religiously every week. To an 8 year old kid it was scary.
     
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  11. leemelone

    leemelone Forum Resident

    Location:
    ATL
    It didn't really come to a conclusion. The last episode left the story open in case there was a third season.
     
  12. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    There were no VCRs or DVRs or On Demand or DVDs. If you missed an episode, you might get a chance to see it if it reran. Another concept that the younger, ***** crowd doesn't understand. Every show wasn't a soap opera with continuing story lines. Every episode was self contained and you didn't have to watch every week or be lost. And back in the days when they made over 30 episodes a season, all of them weren't rerun. So, if you missed one, you might have to wait until it went into syndication to see it, that is if the show made enough episodes to go into syndication.
     
  13. Otlset

    Otlset I think I am I think

    Location:
    Temecula, CA
    Third season you say? David Vincent (and his TV son and grandson, heh) hasn't given up yet, and has continued his efforts unheralded to this day! Revival!

    [​IMG]
     
  14. albert_m

    albert_m Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atl., Ga, USA
    I love the references to the "younger" crowd as if this forum has much a "younger" crowd.
     
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  15. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    Somebody come up with the idea of aliens glowing then disappearing when they die. Superficially this seems like a good idea, giving visual interest and getting rid of alien bodies so they can't be examined and give Vincent evidence of the invaders.

    But it turns out this device has a serious dramatic shortcoming -- it doesn't allow for death scenes. Two great stars,
    Burgess Meredith and Ralph Bellamy,
    are zapped by aliens and simply disappear, which is very unsatisfying to the audience.

    In the episode set in
    the Texas oilfields, Vincent's GF is killed by radiation or something, which permits her to die in his arms.
    I think it's the only death scene in the entire first season.
     
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  16. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    A long but very good piece on 'The Invaders':

    Invaders Behind the Scenes

    Even if you don't care about the show, this section on Quinn Martin is interesting:

    ---

    By 1966, Martin had given ABC three big hits in as many years: The Fugitive in 1963, The F.B.I. in 1965, and in between them the already declining Twelve O’Clock High (which would bow out in the same week that The Invaders debuted). His production company was the hottest in town, and it continued to spawn massive ratings successes (of steadily decreasing creative merit) well into the seventies, among them Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones.

    Quinn Martin was a notorious obsessive. On most sixties TV series, one or two producers oversaw the entire process of production, from the pitching of stories to the final dubbing of the music on each episode. But Martin compartmentalized his company, dividing the responsibilities for every series among four or five departments that rarely interacted with each other. “Every area on all of Quinn’s shows was carefully delineated,” said The Invaders’ post-production supervisor, John Elizalde. Added writer George Eckstein, “Unlike anybody else, Quinn had a production setup in which he had a preproduction operation and a post-production operation, and a producer very rarely saw a cut of the picture, [and] did not participate in the dubbing or the scoring.”

    At QM, the department heads held the same responsibilities on all of Martin’s series simultaneously, including The Invaders. Adrian Samish supervised preproduction, approving budgets and art direction and occasionally getting involved with the scripting process. John Conwell was QM’s casting director, and Martin himself hired the directors. Arthur Fellows oversaw the editing of the film, while John Elizalde handled the scoring of music and dubbing of sound effects. Only the producer on each show was different, and, relieved of all other considerations, he was able to spend virtually all his time working with the series’ writers. “All he did was develop scripts,” said Eckstein. “All the producers were really just writers.”

    The result of QM’s system was that it left Martin with virtually total control of all his shows. “Quinn was a benevolent despot, with the accent on the benevolent,” recalled John Elizalde. “If you knew what you were doing, he gave you very free reign.”

    By contrast, said QM producer Anthony Spinner, “If it was a hit, may he rest in peace, it was Quinn Martin’s hit. If it was a failure, it was everybody else’s. And you were not to get your name too prominently mentioned in the trades or the newspapers. [QM] was sort of like a factory. There was only one person there who had autonomy, and it was Quinn Martin. He was a great friend and a terrible enemy, and you never knew which one he was going to be on any given day.”
     
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  17. I liked this series as a teenager but at that age and with only one TV in the house, I didn't get to watch many episodes. I was doing other things or the TV was unavailable, things are different now and I would like to watch it start to finish.
     
  18. rikki nadir

    rikki nadir Gentleman Thug

    Location:
    London, UK
    I love this series and always have, since I watched it in syndication in the early 1970s. I now watch the DVD boxed set repeatedly.

    I was astonished to learn that cult writer/director Larry Cohen created The Invaders for Quinn Martin, after Cohen had a hand in several episodes of The Fugitive. Larry Cohen's career spans five decades, and it would be hard even to state what he is best known for, but other career highpoints include the films Q - The Winged Serpent, the It's Alive trilogy, Maniac Cop, and his script for Phone Booth, as well as his contributions to the TV show Columbo.

    Apparently Cohen created the show and then had little to do with the broadcast results, at least according to this article:

    Larry Cohen Knows: Interpreting The Invaders (1967-1968) for Our Troubled Modern Times
     
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  19. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    Alan Armer moved over as producer after doing the first 3 seasons of The Fugitive. That was good for the Invaders but also resulted in a big drop in quality for the last season of The Fugitive. They also then began having the one-armed man popping up way too much. After appearing only once per season in the first 3 years, he's in more shows the last season than he was in the first 3 combined.
     
  20. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
     
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  21. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    will we get this on BD?
     
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  22. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member


    My gut feeling is "no". If any QM show were to be attempted in Blu-ray, it might be THE FUGITIVE, but the fact is, those DVDs look so good, I don't think Blu is necessary.

    The mastering of THE INVADERS on DVD was a notch below THE FUGITIVE, with varying degrees of color intensity from episode to episode.
     
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  23. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    Thanks Harry. : )
     
  24. team2

    team2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    TN (By Way of NY)
    I got the new DVD set of this for Christmas. Looking forward to watching it. Great to know it's by the same producers as The Fugitive -- one of my all-time favorites...
     
  25. averica

    averica infinite rider on the big dogma

    ive never seen this (heard of it obviously) and Amazon has the complete series for like 23 bucks...might have to check it out
     
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