Nazis From Outer Space

...Ridiculous, you say—as if we did not have enough to worry about Yet since E T, this is what concerns the average American, or at least the average TV critic The movie expanded the national consciousness, suggesting that creatures from outer space are not wicked conquerors The Visitors in certainly claimed to come in peace as they hovered over 39th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan They wished to follow the covenants of the United Nations Charter That should have told us something was fishy You have to be from another planet to take that document seriously Another hint that these handsome, slimy people were hostile was their snappy red shirts, black jackboots and Darth Vader visors The producers did not indulge in any '30s camp humor, no brown shirts But this bunch operated like fascists, employing group psychology to subtly terrorize people, turning family members against one another They used the media to warn of an international conspiracy Scientists and their relatives had to be rounded up for our protection In fact, the Visitors were a master race of reptiles out to conquer the earth They had a leader similar to the Fuhrer, a real Dragon Lady or gila monster She was a bookworm, apparently familiar with the latest Hitler diaries as well as Mem Kampf and the standard texts on race, breeding and medical ethics She was not above conducting hideous experiments in the bowels of the spaceships To make sure we didn't miss the totally obvious parallels with Nazi Germany, they had a Bernstein around who lived through the Holocaust I can just see Brandon Tartikoff—the dean of program executives at NBC (he's 34)—explaining to his staff of pink-cheeked MBAs "They won't get the Nazi thing It's too subtle Let's have this guy in a skullcap with a heavy Yiddish accent telling his kids how if one goes they all go, how the humans have to stick together and fight back right away " You can imagine how the wheels turn in broadcasting I'm sure somebody from the suede-loafers-and-aviator-sunglasses set pitched the idea for Kto NBC shortly after the E T hoopla began "I've got it Let's do something different What if the extraterrestrials were really Nazis...

...Everybody will have to carry a green card When the E T craze began last year a little voice in me—the extraterrestrial in all of us—told me the whole bunch of them were meshuga The society that allowed E T to flourish is crazy, a product of drug-induced, institutionalized madness from the planet of Los Angeles I'm told the California state line is drawn in cocaine, and that the incomes of producers, directors and actors are equal to the GNP of Colombia Before VI never believed in aliens, nor did I especially fear them I saved my worry for the people who look at me funny from the next lane on the highway Aliens from other galaxies didn't give me a chill This was no doubt an indication of my ignorance According to one LA authority on the CBS documentary ?T and Friends (December 14,1982), "We are all from different planets Except we have forgotten " Go argue with that logic It's nice to know there are other Woody Aliens out there, creatures with his kind of humor and the same glasses, or a planet full of Howard Cosells Enough of this profundity I would like to add a personal note Maybe it should be on the editorial pages, rather than in the TV column Nevertheless, I think the President is right about threats to American society Let's blast the hell out of the UFOs Let's not sit around helplessly, waiting for their intentions—friendly or not—to become clear I don't care what their politics are, they are no good Let's zap them out of the sky and ask questions later, instead of letting them marry our sisters and daughters (Don't laugh—one of the most startling stones in V depicts a Valley Girl falling in love with one of the Visitors And in the final episode she is expecting tadpoles—realpolitik al its mos disgusting') So V has made me a hardliner on UFOs 1 won't frighten you with the domino theory applied to outer space Suffice to say the President should make it plain to all visitors that they are not welcome, that they should go home or else NBC should be congratulated for alerting us to the real menace we face today We have missed the true danger by focusing on greed, injustice, unemployment, pollution, corruption, the ultimate destruction of society by a nuclear mistake, and other mundane stutt...

...Instead of being in Argentina all these years, suppose they were biding their time in outer space Hitler and Martin Borman and the other reptiles were put into a V-2 rocket at Peenemunde on the last day of the W and shot into orbit There, they kept in touch with the others ('Hitler phone home') And then he comes back to earth disguised as Madame Nhu " What NBC managed to do, in effect, was cross E T with The Winds of War Actually, V was conceived and written by Kenneth Johnson, one of the medium's leading thinkers He created The Bionic Woman and The Incredible Hulk, two of the last decade's most profound shows Johnson is a Concerned Person Some of my colleagues have suggested that V was the biggest thing to hit TV since white bread They maintain the show was the greatest science fiction since Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, The Powers of Matthew Starr, and The Night li win Alien Stood Still I leave it to experts in the field to determine how many million light years V misses by The opening two-hour episode played more like NBC's The A Team, the home team rather than the visitors First, we witnessed an endless stretch of gunplay in El Salvador, which established the credentials of a TV cameraman as sympathetic to the heroes of resistance movements on all planets, including Central America Of course, V also ended with a battle This dramatic enactment of a video game highlighted a blond med school student who led the survivors in a Warsaw Ghetto-like comeback The action took place in a mountain camp in California She stood in the middle of the grounds firing a handgun at the spaceships m a pose recalling John Wayne What symbolism' Sometimes I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this pretentious piffle And when the intergalactic experience was over, I had not the slightest idea what the real message was Beauty is only skin deep9 Watch out for aliens9 It is too late Martians may have already taken over at NBC Certainly they are doing strange things at the network this season, including threatening to cancel Second City's SCTV I also happen to know that Mister T (Tartikoff) hails from another solar system "That' s what those hamsters were doing in his office," a high level NBC source explained Any day it will be learned that Tom Brokaw is an alien, too—how else to account for his bizarre behavior lately, such as serving on a jury downtown, as if he were a real person or something...

...Soon Richard Dawson is going to kiss some guest on Family Feud who will turn into a frog right there, and the whole shocking truth will be known It is only a matter of time before a Congressional committee starts asking, "Are you now, or have you ever been, an alien...

...On Television NAZIS FROM OUTER SPACE BY MARVIN KITMAN T he most extraordinary and provocative minisenes of the year, I could tell from the way NBC was promoting it, would be V "The Visitors are coming," the network heralds warned "Prepare yourself for V" I'm ready, I told myself the exciting first mght of the show (May 1) Every alien in LA, I thought, must be waiting for the ship to arrive from outer space, for the chance to catch up with their relatives and old friends The scene will be reminiscent of the Stieglitz photographs of Ellis Island with the immigrants arriving from the old country This science fiction offering will at last vindicate those who claim to have seen green people or to have traveled in UFOs, categories that together, I suspect, comprise a hefty cross section of Southern California residents So I was not surprised when Vs ratings went through the roof The season's biggest minisenes for NBC, it beat outrage of Angels, Little Gloria, the repeat of Shogun, and The Executioner's Song More people were interested in the visitors from outer space than in Gary Gilmore's death, despite Norman Mailer And if you really want profound meaning, consider this Part one of Kwas the second most watched show of the week, topped only by Life's Most Embarrassing Moments, an ABC rip-off blooper show The Irwin Allen sort of disaster picture was miles away from E T The beings who landed those ships the size of Manhattan did not resemble Steven Spielberg's little Eddie Cantors with popping eyes and leathery skin from too much sun in Miami Beach Nor did they look like Star Trek's Mr Spock What a shock At first glance they appeared to be handsome California gas pump jockeys, the ones who peer into your car to see whether you're a producer before they fill your tank Warner Brothers must have cleaned out every valet parking lot and service station from Rodeo Drive to Vemce to cast this expedition They all wore shades None of them could act, either Tanned, trimmed and vacant, the Visitors had trouble speaking their lines Their odd voices sounded like they were speaking Swedish dubbed simultaneously into English Maybe their words were being sent back to a satellite, thus producing an echo effect In any case, it was the most hollow dialogue of the year Underneath the plastic faces, we soon discovered, the Visitors were reptiles Not lovable turtles out of their shells, a la ET , but slimy creatures with forked red tongues that darted out when they got upset The females of the species, it developed in the concluding two hours on the night of May 2, wore bikinis under their red uniforms You wouldn't want to take one of these out-of-towners to lunch...

...They ate fast foods—rats, other rodents, furry little weasels None of this microwave cooking for them, either They liked their hors d'oeuvres really fresh and live I don't think anyone will ever feel the same way about a pet iguana after V The big issue here was captured in the headline of the NBC ads in the New York Times- " Alien Visitors Our Friends...