History Series / WarOfTheWorlds1988

* CanadaEh: Shot in and around Mississauga and Toronto in the Ontario area. Many significant landmarks can be spotted during the series, including Toronto and Mississauga City Hall, the Lakeview Generating Plant (the Morthren base for the entirety of the second season) and the Ontario Place Cinesphere pavillion.

* LargeHam: Philip Akin in the pilot episode, who uses an exaggerated Jamaican accent when he talks. (In fact, all his pilot dialogue is overdubbed, suggesting he performed it with a Jamaican accent and was then asked to re-record it with an American accent, which still sounds oddly semi-Jamaican due to the cadence.)

* StrandedInvader: During the 1953 invasion, an alien discovered early that it could meld into a human body, and took over a man named Quinn, adopting his identity. Quinn has been merged with a human for so long that he cannot leave the way other aliens can, and finds himself too adapted to a human lifestyle to want to aid his fellow aliens in completing their invasion, frequently aiding our heroes in fighting them, though usually for his own ends.

* PuppeteerParasite: The Mor-taxans are this, and this is how they manage to infiltrate society. They can possess people by liquifying thmselves, and then seep their way into their victim's body before taking control of the host's cells. They can also absorb the host's memories this way. The only downside is that due to the radiation they have to treat themselves with as to not get ill again, their host bodies gradaully break down over time, so they have to keep replacing them every 24 hours. This makes them more suspicous to onlookers as their time runs out.

!!!'''[[SimilarlyNamedWorks You may be looking]] for ''Series/WarOfTheWorlds2019'' or ''Series/TheWarOfTheWorlds2019'', different television adaptations of ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds''.'''

''War of the Worlds'' (1988-1990) was a television series inspired by ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds''.

* HeartWarming: in the final episode [[spoiler: rather than an outright victory the few remaining aliens and the human resistance cell actually broker a peace between the 2 sides, one of the most violent and sadistic tv shows in history ends with the human heroes looking at one another and wondering what to do next? "Let's go for a walk" suggests Harrison "I think it's going to be a beautiful day". And they do. And it is.]]

* Debi [=McCullough=] (Rachel Blanchard, later of ''Series/SeventhHeaven''), Suzanne's young daughter. Rarely involved in the action in any way until season 2, but the only major supporting character with an ongoing presence in season 1.

* Suzanne [=McCullough=] (Lynda Mason Greene), psychologist and [[HotScientist biologist]].

Noteworthy guest-stars included Ann Robinson, who reprises her role from the film as Sylvia Van Buren, the now-insane love interest of Clayton Forrester (who became his wife and adoptive mother of Harrison), and John Colicos (of ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica|1978}}'' fame, see LargeHam) as the renegade alien Quinn. Not to mention a cameo by Australian rock legend Billy Thorpe, who also provided the music for the first season.

* StuffedIntoTheFridge:
** As a rule, even female characters weren't spared from the wrath of the aliens.
** Rene, the daughter of drug baron Jonathan Laporte in the second-season episode "Synthetic Love," gets captured, has her brain sucked out, and is shown being vaporized in order to twist the knife further into her father (who summarily [[DrivenToSuicide kills himself out of grief]]).

Based on and serving as a sequel to the 1953 movie, ''War of the Worlds'' added Cold War sensibilities and a liberal dose of ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' to create the prototype for alien invasion Sci-Fi in the 1990s.

Since, as part of the show's gimmick, almost no one remembered the 1953 invasion, the only opposition to the alien plot were the members of the Blackwood Project, a secret military taskforce assembled to repel the alien menace. The Blackwood project was approximately a FiveManBand composed of:

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/war_of_the_worlds_tv_series.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:The first season cast. Left to right: Colonel Ironhorse (Richard Chaves), Dr. Blackwood (Jared Martin), Norton Drake (Philip Akin) and Dr. [=McCullough=].]]

-->-- Jared Martin as Harrison Blackwood

-->-- Off-screen news reporter as the camera flies around a model night-time cityscape

The two-hour premiere [[RetCon retconned]] the ending to the Creator/GeorgePal movie (and, for that matter, the Creator/HGWells novel), deciding that the aliens were really NotQuiteDead, but simply comatose. A terrorist attack on a storage facility exposed the alien bodies to radioactive waste, neutralizing Earth bacteria and awakening the aliens, who promptly revealed a nifty new ability: they could absorb themselves into human bodies, at least until radiation (and the fact that the host was essentially an animated corpse) caused the body to break down. Also the aliens were eventually revealed to be from the planet Mor-tax 40 light-years away in Taurus, rather than Mars, as was assumed in the original movie (though never confirmed except in the prologue narration).

* Suzanne [=McCullough=] (Lynda Mason Greene), psychologist and biologist. [[Main.HotScientist Hot Scientist]].
* Lt. Col. Paul Ironhorse (Richard Chaves), Native American military leader. [[Main.TheBrigadier The Brigadier]] and Blackwood's personal character foil.

Taking a cue from the movie, the first season included a heavy religious allegory, with most of [[IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming the individual episode titles inspired by bible quotes]].

After a season of fighting aliens who were, essentially, stand-ins for communists, the show was taken out of the hands of executive producers Sam and Greg Strangis and given to Frank Mancuso Jr., who radically {{retool}}ed the show. Chavez and Akin were written out, replaced by Creator/AdrianPaul, and the world of the series was reimagined as a CyberPunk (minus the futuristic technology) {{Dystopia}} in the midst of collapse, with the new tagline "Almost Tomorrow" usually taken to mean that the show had shifted TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, though this never became explicit. A "second wave" of invaders, calling their planet Mor-thrai instead of Mor-tax and themselves Morthren, arrived on Earth following the destruction of their homeworld by a "light storm". Physical possession was replaced with cloning process and, basically, everything else about the show changed. (The only remaining sign that this was meant to take place in [[TheVerse the same universe as]] the original movie came in the episode "Time To Reap", when the characters traveled back in time to 1953, and in the series finale, "The Obelisk", where footage from the movie was used in a [[{{Main.Montages}} flashback montage]].) The alien race was even renamed.

The show's violence was substantial, starting as early as the first season. Each time an alien was killed or otherwise injured, they spent significant time focusing on [[NightmareFuel excessive]] [[{{Squick}} alien gore]] and an almost FanService-like fascination with showing the putrifying alien corpses. Think of a floor spill consisting of smoking egg whites cooked sunny side up with a side order of mucus and radiator fluid, and you get an idea of the ''milder'' forms of some of the gore factor. Being that it was a syndicated show the human gore factor wasn't particularly restrictive either, being almost R-rated in terms of human gore. It was relatively toned down during the second season, but still somehow became even ''darker''.

* AbsurdlySpaciousSewer: The Blackwood team lives in an underground maintainance system for the duration of the second season. In one episode, Harrison and Suzanne investigate a water blockage in a sewer large enough for them to stand in.

* BrokenAesop: The second-season episode "Synthetic Love" tries to paint the owner of a pharmaceutical company, Laporte, as an evil man for wanting to accept a deal with the obviously-shady Malzor, who wants to give him a new experimental drug because the former is concerned with big profits (to the point that he would sell out his own daughter for it). However, despite the episode's message that DrugsAreBad, everything else shows that Laporte is quite possibly the ''least evil'' businessman in the series, as he owns and operate his own rehab centres, runs his business at a constant loss, and is happy to support a drug that would cure personality disorders and allow people to (albeit temporarily) escape the hellish CrapsackWorld.

* CatchPhrase: In the first season the Mor-taxians frequently said, "To life immortal". It's usually uttered as a [[FacingTheBulletsOneLiner facing-the-bullets one liner]].

* ChestBurster: How the disguised aliens in the first season attack other people, up close and personal.

* CrapsackWorld: The TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture aesthetic in the second season runs smackdab into this, with the world having devolved into lawlessness near-apocalyptic conditions and constant shortages in food, water and supplies. There are attempts to explain what happened in the interim between seasons ("Synthetic Love" claims that the world's problems can be traced to [[DrugsAreBad The War On Drugs]]), though previous episodes also show that the world's soil is infertile, exacerbating the problems).

* DownerEnding: Some episodes of both seasons had some ''very dark'', and disturbing endings.

* EvilTwin: Ironhorse's clone in the second-season premiere, who nearly destroys the Blackwood Project himself.

* GeniusCripple: In the first season, Norton Drake is often portrayed as the super-genius of the main cast.

* HandicappedBadass: Norton, who is a bad ass martial artist despite being in a wheelchair, handing Ironhorse his ass in a sparring match.

* {{Hypocrite}}: In the second-season episode "Breeding Ground", Dr. Gestaine attempts to justify his actions to Blackwood and Kincaid by saying that he's always taken the moral high-ground, and is fighting a "war against murder, disease and despair". This happens ''after'' he forcibly impregnates an elderly woman with alien spores against her will and uses her to bear a child.

* ImportedAlienPhlebotinum: Several alien devices are stolen by the Blackwood Project during the course of the series. These devices usually allow them to access the Mor-taxians/Morthren's memories or work as weapons, and are usually destroyed/broken by the end of the episode.

* MagicFloppyDisk: [[spoiler: An alien infiltrator]] in the first season episode "Among the Philistines" is able to fit everything the Blackwood Project knows about the aliens on a single 5" Floppy disc. Which then, a couple of scenes later, has somehow turned into a CD-Rom.

* TrashTheSet: The cottage headquarters of the Blackwood Project is blown up in the second season premiere (in a glorious model miniature explosion.

''War of the Worlds'' (1988-1990) was a television series. For the novel that inspired this series, see ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds''. For the 2019 BBC mini-series, go [[Series/TheWarOfTheWorlds here]]. The ''second'' 2019 miniseries (by Fox and Studio Canal) is [[Series/WarOfTheWorlds2019 here]].

* AnArmAndALeg: The third episode of season 1 involved a scene where some disguised aliens participate in a hockey match, which quickly goes south when one unlucky player has his arm ''torn clean off'' by an alien before the latter of whom is shot dead.

* CanadaEh: Shot in and around the Mississauga and Toronto in the Ontario area. Many significant landmarks can be spotted during the series.

* CerebusSyndrome: The first season had more explicit gore, but it also had more humor and had a brighter, cheerful mood. The main characters were allowed personality quirks and banter. In the cyberpunk second season, all of the humor and banter vanished, and most of the season's episodes were set at nighttime. The opening credits for the first season followed the standard fare of most adventure shows of TheEighties, an upbeat theme and mood. This was not the case in the second season where the opening credits was accompanied with a fly-through of the corridors of an abandoned, dilapidated building, accompanied by news bits of escalating violence and crime. It ends by showing us that this abandoned building is a city hall building in front of which is a sculpture of what appears to be the Spirit of 76. In a dramatic, symbolic fashion, the sculpture topples over and crumbles.

* CrapsackWorld: The TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture aesthetic in the second season runs smackdab into this, with the world having devolved into lawlessness near-apocalyptic conditions and constant shortages in food, water and supplies. There are attempts to explain what happened in the interim between seasons ("Synthetic Love" claims that the world's problems can be traced to [[DrugsAreBad The War On Drugs]]), though previous episodes also show that the world's soil is infertile, exacerbatng the problems).

* EvilTwin: Ironhorse's clone.

* FiveRoundsRapid

* HopelessWar: On both sides, specifically season 1.

* ImportedAlienPhlebotinum: several alien devices are stolen by the Blackwood Project during the course of the series. These devices usually allow them to access the Mor-taxians/Morthren's memories or work as weapons, and are usually destroyed/broken by the end of the episode.

* ItOnlyWorksOnce

* PlotArmor: In one episode, the aliens catch Suzanne alone, pretending to be a brainwashed bystander. One alien suggests they kill her, and another that they absorb her body. The scene then cuts to the rest of the team running in to find the aliens gone and Suzanne unharmed, with no explanation given why the aliens left her alone.

*** In the novelization of the pilot episode, the aliens piloting the ships are already succumbing to radiation sickness affecting their performance.

* StuffedIntoTheFridge: The Advocacy, who are brutally executed by the Morthren in the second season for no valid reason.
* TrashTheSet: The cottage headquarters of the Blackwood Project is blown up in the second season premiere (in a glorious model miniature [[SpecialEffectFailure Special Effect Failure]]).

* ThemeTuneCameo: One of the aliens' plots from the first series was to hide [[SubliminalSeduction hypnotic messages]] in a hit pop song, which was a variation on the end title music.

* TheReptilians: The Mor-taxians.

* UnresolvedPlotThread: Quinn, a radiation-resistant alien who was stranded on Earth after the first invasion; Q'tara, who helped the Blackwood team and promised to bring reinforcements (actually intending [[spoiler:to preserve humanity [[ToServeMan as a food source]] ]]); the threat of another invasion force that would be coming in five years; the fate of an alien/human hybrid newborn taken by aliens in the episode "Unto Us A Child Is Born."

* AnArmandaleg: The third episode of season 1 involved a scene where some disguised aliens participate in a hockey match, which quickly goes south when one unlucky player has his arm ''torn clean off'' by an alien before the latter of whom is shot dead.

* CharacterizationMarchesOn: By the second season, Harrison Blackwood had lost touch with his kooky pacifist ways and completely dispensed with the tuning fork and other nutty professor hijinks. He also grew PermaStubble and had no reservations about carrying guns. The friction between him and Ironhorse of the first season was not transferred to Kincaid (the second season's army guy). The loss of Blackwood's comedic BlackBestFriend (Norton) meant that he had no comedic partner in the second season.

* RidiculouslyHumanRobot: Q'tara, a "Synth" from the planet Qar'to. Moved like a cross between a [[PowerRangers Power Ranger]] and a Shields and Yarnell robot sketch.

Based on the 1953 movie, ''War of the Worlds'' added Cold War sensibilities and a liberal dose of ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' to create the prototype for alien invasion Sci-Fi in the 1990s.

* An Arm and a leg: The third episode of season 1 involved a scene where some disguised aliens participate in a hockey match, which quickly goes south when one unlucky player has his arm ''torn clean off'' by an alien before the latter of whom is shot dead.

* AnArmandaLeg: The third episode of season 1 involved a scene where some disguised aliens participate in a hockey match, which quickly goes south when one unlucky player has his arm ''torn clean off'' by an alien before the latter of whom is shot dead.