"The Invaders" (1967) TV series 1967-1968

Creator:

Larry Cohen

Seasons:

1 | 2

Release Date:

10 January 1967 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline:

The nightmare continues!

Plot:

David Vincent, an architect returning home after a hard, hard, day parks his car in an old ghost town...

Plot Keywords:

Dying Planet | Cult TV | Hurricane | Alien | UFO

Cast

Roy Thinnes	...	David Vincent (43 episodes, 1967-1968)
Hank Simms	...	Introductory Narrator / ... (43 episodes, 1967-1968)
William Woodson	...	Narrator (43 episodes, 1967-1968)
Kent Smith	...	Edgar Scoville / ... (13 episodes, 1967-1968)

Runtime:

51 min (43 episodes)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:PG | Australia:PG

Filming Locations:

Rossmore Leisure World, Laguna Hills, California, USA

Company:

Quinn Martin Productions (QM)

Trivia:

Some Invaders could be identified by what David Vincent calls a "deformed fourth finger". Technically, the finger is not deformed, but immobile, always sticking out. There are hints dropped from the beginning that the aliens are correcting this problem so that not all invaders have it. Toward the end of the second year they seem to have eliminated the defect altogether.

Quotes:

[opening narration]
Narrator: The Invaders: alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it *their* world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found...

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Mystery Science Theater 3000: Gamera vs. Zigra (#4.16)" (1991)

"How does a nightmare begin ?"

"The invaders" is the last great 1960's series and it is inspired by the "Invasion of the body snatchers" concept of conspiracy : science fiction + horror + reality = the fear of the unknown. One of the best show produced by Quinn Martin, including "The untouchables" and "The fugitive". Among the best episode, "The innocent" sums up the paranoiac symptoms at its best when Michael Rennie brainwashes Roy Thinnes in his flying saucer. According to me, the David Vincent character is a blend of Cary Grant, from "North by northwest", and Kevin Mc Carthy, from "Invasion of the body snatchers" : the innocent witness who becomes the new Cassandra, alone against everybody ! The pessimistic message of the series is equivocal : the world is corrupted by the authorities (officials, politicians, army, C.I.A., mafia) or the world is dominated by a claustrophobic mass conformism or the world is on the verge of being overthrown by the emotionless Soviet Union agents (blue collar workers who manufacture weapons and torture to get informations in hidden factories, and businessmen who infiltrate the power and whose bodies turn red when they die). Who knows ? The aesthetic of the show also adds more terror to the stories (the Wayne Fitzgerald expressionist title credits, the dead-serious tone of William Conrad's narration that gives you a cold warning at the beginning and the end of each episode, the Dominic Frontiere's suffocating music and the distorted cinematography). The best brainwashing episodes are : "The experiment", "The leeches", "The innocent", "The dark outpost", "The possessed" and "The pit". One of my all-time favourite tv show (with "The twilight zone", "The outer limits", "The wild wild west", "The time tunnel" and "Mission : impossible"). A word to the wise, don't watch the worthless new series aka "The impostors", you know what I mean. "The nightmare has already begun," and will never end, Mr. Vincent !