<\/p>\n
Flashback: 1988.\u00a0 I The book rocked.\u00a0 All Then , one fine day in 1988, Turns out that the nuclear waste has destroyed the germs Using another clever trick, they are also able to crawl Headed by a triumvirate called “The Advocacy,” the In the series, they’re all just standard bad guy aliens who Representing the Human race is Clayton Forrester, played by Forrester, living with this broken past, is a top astrophysicist Inexplicably, the populace has forgotten that the cities Season two.\u00a0 Let’s So while I was sitting there thinking, oh, god I just missed Space: 1999<\/em> did the same thing.\u00a0 Season two: The Advocacy walked around in these wild radiation suits, The second season aliens killed them all within about 90 The show was what we call a “gateway drug.”\u00a0 I think it’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have Then there was Forever Knight<\/em>.\u00a0 Any young teenager watching Catherine Disher With season one due on DVD in November, I can brush off my Wait, says the Morthern Deity.\u00a0 We leveled the cities in 1953.\u00a0 What’s the matter?\u00a0 Do we need to have an all-staff meeting and ———-
\nthink it was Alan Dean Foster who wrote this terrific comeback novel for the War of the Worlds<\/em> Martians, under orders
\nof the wicked television producers of course.
\nIn the lonely sci-fi world of the 80’s, before fat people and ugly women
\neverywhere fully embraced The Next Generation, there was quite a buzz about
\nsomething…new.\u00a0 TNG hit in 87 and, much
\nto everyone’s surprise, it was a success.
\nThe cyclical world of TV sci-fi was coming into a new phase.\u00a0 How much more daring can you get than to produce
\na religious-oriented TV series based on the 1953 version of War of the Worlds<\/em>? Foster’s novel hit
\nabout six months before the series and pitiful geeks like me sucked it off the
\nshelves and ran screaming over to the jellybean and 78 ounce coca-cola store to
\nread the thing before moving on to the latest Grue comic. Weird commercials
\nwith hands bursting out of shadows and the woo-woo-woo hum of the Martian
\nbattleships and the suckered alien hand enveloping the earth had started to
\ncrop up here and there.\u00a0 The invasion
\nbegins in 1,965 days.\u00a0 Oh, countdown
\ncommercials!\u00a0 They went on for
\nmonths.\u00a0 The invasion begins in X days…
\nDown, down, down until (and, by then, we’d all read the cool book), the
\ninvasion begins…tonight!\u00a0 Fuckers!<\/p>\n
\nof the alien corpses from the 1953 George Pal invasion were stuffed in barrels
\nand hidden away at various nuclear waste dumps.
\nTheir battle machines, a mystery to the government, were broken up and put
\nin Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouses, along with various other sci-fi
\nequipment recovered from the invasion.<\/p>\n
\na group of terrorists head out to a nuke dump with the idea of retrieving
\nthe waste and using it to terrorize US cities with what I guess would be dirty
\nbombs (not very 1988, is it?).\u00a0 In the
\nensuing gun battle with the guards, a few of the waste barrels get machine
\ngunned.\u00a0 This is all the Martians need to
\nrevive themselves and escape.<\/p>\n
\nthat killed them, see?\u00a0 So as long as
\nthey keep themselves fully irradiated, the Martians will be able to
\nsurvive.\u00a0 This means that they need to
\nconstantly smear themselves with horrible goo.<\/p>\n
\ninside the skin of the dying human terrorists and use them to escape back to
\ncivilization where they begin a new mission — freeing the other Martians
\nscattered around the world, retrieving their battle machines and getting back
\ninto the invasion business.\u00a0 (The pilot
\nepisode enjoys scantily clad, mousy terrorist girls and, best of all, a Martian
\nbattle machine rising from a buried bunker and zapping the fuck out of
\neverything until our heroes figure out that it can be destroyed with spitballs
\nand tin cans.\u00a0 Drat, foiled again by
\nthose pesky humans!)<\/p>\n
\nMartians establish contact with Mars and get new orders from the super-duper
\nMartian leader.\u00a0 In the book, Foster goes
\ninto detail about the social status of the surviving Martians and builds some
\nstorylines undeveloped in the series where the warrior class, which answers to
\nthe scientist class, are pretty goddamned pissed off about the failed invasion
\nand want to go rogue.\u00a0 The Advocacy, in
\nthe book, are under fire from within and without, their power seemingly usurped
\nby a shadow-Advocacy of Martian army officers.<\/p>\n
\nhatch a plan and fail in every episode.<\/p>\n
\nJared Martin.\u00a0 Forrester is the nephew of
\nthe main girl in the 53 film <\/em>and remains
\nscarred by the invasion, which he witnessed as a child. Ann Robinson reprises
\nher movie role as the now-crazy Sylvia van Buren.\u00a0 Can you do better than that?\u00a0 Set up a TV series and get as many of the
\nsurviving stars from the 1953 film as possible?<\/p>\n
\nat poopy-pants university.\u00a0 Thanks to
\nthis show, I entered high school with plans to become an astrophysicist and
\ntook really hard math classes, which broke my soul and ruined my life forever. Forrester
\nis recruited by a Cherokee colonel in the employ of the secrety secret US
\ngovernment.\u00a0 So we get our space
\nscientist, our tough guy Indian, a super computer hacker and bombshell
\nbiologist Brunette Boobs together at a big mansion that’s sort of like the
\nM.A.S.K. headquarters.\u00a0 A secret battle
\nbetween this crack team of Martian hunters and the evil aliens rages on while
\nyou and you and you go about your daily lives, unaware that a second terrible
\ninvasion is coming.<\/p>\n
\nwere all destroyed in 1953.\u00a0 That would
\nbe okay if the series was something of a reboot, but they do go ahead and admit
\nthat the 1953 invasion nearly wiped us out.
\nSo…okay.\u00a0 I’ll accept these idiot
\nfucking flaws in the poorly constructed scripts that were written by a team of
\ngerbils on PCP with pens stuck up their asses because, still, it’s a pretty fun
\nseries.\u00a0 At first.<\/p>\n
\ncall this the Rape of a Somewhat Promising Series.\u00a0 All of a sudden, we flash forward 10 years to
\nthe apocalypse, kill half the cast (without showing how they died!), replace
\nthe Martians with Star Wars bad guys in tight grey jumpsuits and…I don’t
\nknow.\u00a0 Not a single scene in all of
\nseason two is memorable in the least.<\/p>\n
\nnine seasons, I’m blown out of my chair when the new Martians take the beloved
\ncomic relief of the Advocacy, burn them alive, and then turn to the camera like
\nin a really bad street performance and say, “We are the new rullaaarz!”\u00a0 Right, then.
\nOkay.\u00a0 No, wait – what?<\/p>\n
\nAll of the main characters are dead, and we’ll just act natural.\u00a0 Keep going, don’t mention anything.\u00a0 Martin Landau’s still there, right?\u00a0 No problem. Oh, and we fired every script
\neditor and replaced them with…nine year old children.\u00a0 Angry yet?
\nWe’ll cool you down with a scantily clad alien that can change into
\nanimals to save the day.\u00a0 Except she
\nchanges into mice and sparrows and gets in even more trouble than the person
\nshe’s trying to save.\u00a0 Roll film! I won’t
\neven mention Galactica: 1980<\/em>.\u00a0 What’s with low budget sci-fi shows and their
\nsecond seasons?\u00a0 Hey guys, you got a
\nsecond season because we liked the first season. \u00a0We would actually want more of that, not a plotline
\nset 60 years in the future starring puppet versions of your daughter’s My
\nLittle Ponies.<\/p>\n
\nissuing shrill orders to clumsy soldiers who inhabited the bodies of bikers and
\nbums and evil Wall Street brokers, the radiation eating away at the skin and
\nslime pouring out of the holes.\u00a0 Fierce
\ndevotees of the “Morthern Deity,” the head boss on Mars, they’d throw
\nthemselves into battle against our clever heroes, fail miserably, get blown up
\nby A-Team<\/em> like gadgets pieced together by Jared Martin, and yell out “To
\nLife Immortal!” as their greeting (always a giveaway that the guy with the
\nrotting flesh and questionable agenda sitting next to you at the bar may not be
\nwhat he seems).<\/p>\n
\nseconds.\u00a0 Cut to our heroes and it’s just
\nJared Martin and Brunette Boobs who have survived…something that isn’t being
\nexplained.\u00a0 Roll film!\u00a0 Seriously, can we, at least, get a little
\nnarration telling us what happened?<\/p>\n
\never watched Highlander: The Series<\/em> if not for War of the Worlds<\/em>.\u00a0 Philip Akin (he’s our token black man) also
\nplayed the token black man in Highlander<\/em>.\u00a0 Adrian Paul, who helped to ruin the second
\nseason as a replacement for our Cherokee tough guy, went on to become the Highlander
\nhimself.<\/p>\n
\nslink around in her polyester jumpsuit in season two just had to go on to that
\nshow where she played the kindly doctor helping Nick Knight recover from
\nvampirism.<\/p>\n
\nloose-fitting radiation suit.\u00a0 Then I’ll
\nset up jerry-rigged, retro-fitted Martian technology in an old LA warehouse,
\nsummon the Morthern Deity, and scream “To Life Immortal!” whenever it tells me
\nI must defeat the small group of poor actors selected by the US government to
\nfight against my superior force of highly irradiated Martian soldiers with
\ntheir small cache of laser guns and their fierce, suicidal devotion to my
\norders.\u00a0 I’ll watch my boys get fucked
\nover by an egghead and a washed-up Indian armed with a jar of ammonia, a pistol
\nand a really fast jeep.<\/p>\n
\nreview some bullet points here?<\/p>\n
\nFor more Cult Culture nonsense, visit our forums<\/a> and head to our Cult Culture section<\/a>, which is full of drunken reviews and rants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[403,353,104,360],"class_list":["post-2567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-cult-culture","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-sci-fi","tag-war-of-the-worlds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2712,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions\/2712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}