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PostPosted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 2:07 am 
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I never saw the show, or, if I did, I really dont remember it. Did the Martians themselves ever get shown, or was it all a suspense/body snatchers type show? Anyone know where I could see some screenshots of the Martians in the show, if they were shown?<br /><br />


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 6:23 am 
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Yes, the Martians did get shown. They were mainly tall people in long cloaks which I guess saved on make up and FX..<br />Then they gained the ability to take human form.. not unlike in 'The Invaders'. It was actually pretty graphic on the gore front too at times.<br />In the second series it emerged that they weren't really Martians at all, but I thought the second series was crap anyway.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 8:58 pm 
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In the first season, it was revealed that the aliens had the ability to 'fuse' themselves with human victims, and walk around in their bodies. On the few occasions that the aliens were seen in their natural form, in the early episodes they looked more-or-less the same as they had in the 1953 movie.<br /><br />However, as the first season progressed, the aliens (in their natural form) turned into stuntmen wearing unconvincing, shabby-looking monster costumes.<br /><br />In the much-changed second season, a new group of alien overseers turned up, who had shape-changing abilities, and so looked human all the time.<br /><br />


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 10:38 am 
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I found this fairly good overview of the series...<br /><a href='http://www.jd.gosling.btinternet.co.uk/wotw/eye.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.jd.gosling.btinternet.co.uk/wotw/eye.htm</a>


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 3:26 am 
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Well, the aliens in the first season weren't from Mars, either. It was revealed in "The Prodigal Son" (which the nits at Paramount aired out-of-order) that their homeworld is actually Mor-Tax - a planet 40 light-years away in the Taurus constellation. Personally, I don't think the reliance on Mars as their planet is that imperative, especially since they created the planet in a way that opened up the show to lots of metaphors and ways to create a social commentary. I think the centre of this is that Mor-Tax is a garden planet. When you see the pollution on this earth, you can't help but understand why the aliens hate humanity.<br /><br />Anyway, in the first season, the aliens were seen in their natural state. They were wisely regulated to being hidden mostly on-camera, either being obscured in shadow or behind objects, or just having only parts of them visible to the audience. The most we ever see of them is in "The Raising of Lazarus" where one is scurrying through a ventilation system, and we get a good outline of its body. But yes, pretty much every episodes showed the aliens own body to some extent. Of course, Season 2 only showed them, I think, a total of three episodes. In Season 2, you were never given the impression that the Morthren were even aliens, which makes me think that the people who put Season 2 together simply didn't "get it."<br /><br />
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They were mainly tall people in long cloaks which I guess saved on make up and FX..
<br /><br />Actually, this was the Advocacy. Their attire was a means to keep them safe from the killing heat of the radiation they needed to negate the presence of bacteria. The Advocacy were really aristocratic so they had to stay behind in those caverns (located in the Neveda desert where the atomic bomb was tested) because they were pretty much the "head" of the invasion force on earth, a triad of sound counsel, without which, the lower classes cannot operate. So as a means to tackle thier spot between a rock and a hard place, they made contamination suits from various stolen supplies. They, and only a select few other aliens who held base in the caverns (such as the Commanders), wore the suits. It made sense, too. They only took possession of bodies in order to accomplish their goals, and once away from the eyes of humanity, they would no longer need those disgusting bodies. The suits kept them out of human bodies, but saved in having the audience constantly seeing the aliens in their natural form, and therefore ruining the hidden effect. The design of the suits gave them an alien look and in general, it made them look very menacing over their underlings. I think the Advocacy were one of the best villains in television history.<br /><br />The whole thing with the Morthren taking on human form was crap, mainly because it was never explained. I believe that the new producers simply conceived of the idea to conviently remove the radiation plotline (and, very naively, the aliens' hang-up with germs), but didn't really think it through so they never bothered to allow the audience to gain knowledge of it either. It was also sickening in terms of assassinating the aliens' collective character since at one point (in "The Defector"), an alien is seen as imperfect because his human face was scarred. And we're supposed to believe that these are the workings of an alien race? What a contrast to "The Walls of Jericho" where the Advocacy looked like rotting corpses (as Norton put it, "We're talking Night of the Living Dead"), but were still regarded as high on the food chain as the Pope is to Catholics, and had the lowly scientists killing themselves to keep them alive.<br /><br />By the way, from what I know of The Invaders and what I definitely know of the first season of this show, I don't see the comparison as entirely accurate. The Mor-Tax took over human bodies, with their telltale signs being radiation sores that were a natural effect, and thereforer had to take a new body. Whereas on The Invaders, they took human form, which featured flaws that were there present for no other reason than to create a telltale sign. And they had to replenish as a means to keep up appearances. I think this was the interesting thing about the first season in that it had a very down-to-earth approach to its science fiction. Everthing seemed organic. This was also what turned me off about Season 2, which pretty much excreted sci-fi cliches to the point where I couldn't relate to the environment or any of its content. But that was only one problem with Season 2. Yes, what a turd that thing was, and shame on Paramount for allowing Frank Mancuso Jr, who had been blunt in his igorance of the first season, to make such a stinker of a show. Friday the 13th: The Series wasn't as awful as that, was it?<br /><br />By the way, <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%28television%29' target='_blank'>Wikipedia</a> has a great page on the content of the show.<br /><br />As for a screenshot of an alien, this is an artist rendering of what the aliens' body look like: [attachmentid=4]<br /><br />This is one in real-live action:[attachmentid=5]


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 4:17 am 
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Well done for those corrections, The Third, it's been quite some time since I saw it and some of the details were a little hazy.<br />In the Invaders, wasn't one way to tell the aliens from humans by the fact that they had a bent little finger?<br />I didn't see many of the original Invaders but it struck me as a pretty well done series for it's time.


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:44 pm 
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The most we ever see of them is in "The Raising of Lazarus" where one is scurrying through a ventilation system, and we get a good outline of its body.


'The Raising of Lazarus' was the episode I was thinking of when I wrote the following;

Fenris wrote:
However, as the first season progressed, the aliens (in their natural form) turned into stuntmen wearing unconvincing, shabby-looking monster costumes.


This is because the aliens, when glimpsed in earlier episodes, are extremely thin, squat, and clearly created by animatronics. When I first saw 'The Raising of Lazarus', the sight of a decidedly non-thin stuntguy having to crawl around a ventilation shaft in a ridiculous costume was, for me, the moment that this series lost whatever credibility it still had.


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 12:47 am 
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According to Greg Strangis in interviews before the series started, Mars was merely the launching point for the invaders (although it is never verbally mentioned in the series). Regarding "The Raising of Lazarus"- number one, I didn't think the suit was really unconvincing. Could it have been better- sure but Paramount was not ponying up Star Trek money to the series in terms of budget- and the producers were doing the best they could with a measly 650k per episode budget (which if you know anything about production- is anemic for a show- even back in 88). I think it's a miracle they accomplished as much as they did in the first season given all their obstacles including the writer's guild strike and the budgetary restraints. And I won't even go into the hell that Paramount gave the producers of year one. Those stories are legendary unto themselves (and trust me, I know from excellent sources). <br /><br />Also, I enjoyed the Advocates suits because it further displayed the hive-like nature of the Mor-Taxan society. Remember, none of the first season aliens had names- they were all referred to as ranks- and when they possessed human bodies they assumed the host's identity completely (even to the point of referring to each other as the human host's name). The suits of the Advocacy made them look like insects- which was intentional. And besides, the aliens (especially the Advocacy) loathed humans (notice their disgust at the "rancid creature" who was being used as a test subject in "The Good Samaritan"). The sooner the Advocacy could disassociate themselves from the human bodies the better. They were so proud of their natural states- they would have no use of the human bodies in the caverns.


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