War of the Worlds Complete 2nd Season (5-DVD)

Aired between 1988 and 1990 in national syndication, the two-season science fiction drama WAR OF THE WORLDS constituted a big-budget sequel to the 1953 Byron Haskin-George Pal feature of the same name. A word of explanation may be helpful for those unfamiliar with this franchise. In the original Pal-Haskin film, a group of aliens from the planet Mars crash landed on Earth when their own planet became uninhabitable. As the film's title implies, however, these were not peaceful aliens, but bellicose and bloodthirsty ones, hell-bent on destroying human civilization and wiping out homo sapiens. The Martians just about succeeded at obliterating Earth itself (and demonstrated complete immunity to all traditional weaponry), but eventually succumbed to their own vulnerability to earthly bacteria. Television producers created the small-screen sequel, in part, to capitalize on the sudden resurgence in popularity of the 1953 picture on the home video market. When the series begins, 35 years have passed since the original invasion, with the aliens contained in an abandoned underground nuclear test site. The aliens inevitably escape at the outset, and set about trying to rally their species for a new war, but have developed the ability to morph into human bodies and walk among the populace virtually undetected save the leprosy-like symptoms that eventually materialize following their exposure to radiation. Attempting to counter their activities (from a rural bunker) were a crack team of fighters that included an astrophysicist, a computer whiz, and a steel-tough military man. When the second season began in 1989, however, a number of key changes had taken place: a new title (WAR OF THE WORLDS - THE SECOND INVASION); a bevy of new humanoid invaders, former inhabitants of the planet Morthrai, who wiped out the alien "servants" from the first season and set about taking over themselves; a new Earthly environment that found the world in political turmoil and engulfed by bizarre storms; and several new characters. The premises of the individual episodes from Season Two had the aliens attempting to systematically purify the human raise, and cloning many humans in the process, while a band of renegades attempted to stop them. This set contains all twenty episodes from Season Two as originally broadcast from 1989 to 1990.