One Season Wonders: Invasion America

In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine. This month: Invasion America.

I’ve written about animation a lot here at Paste, whether about promising upstarts and prophets of grit who once went toe-to-toe with Disney, movies that send up Disney’s history of animation, and the first time Disney animated something. Animation in the United States has two categories now: Kiddie fare (which has shifted largely to 3D animation now) and “adult animation,” which are those shows that would not exist without The Simpsons. So basically, it’s all Disney (remember who owns The Simpsons now).

The ’90s had a great run of alternative animation, as this column has mentioned. There were other bright spots that seemed to indicate that maybe, just maybe, action or sci-fi series aimed at people over the age of 13 might have a shot. Invasion America, a television event co-produced by Steven Spielberg right off a run of successful and fondly remembered kids’ cartoon shows, was aiming for something like that. It didn’t shy away from violence, peril, war, or big anime eyes, but didn’t go so dark it couldn’t air during primetime.

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Like other earnest attempts at animated sci-fi at the turn of the century, though, nobody went for it, and now Invasion America will forever lie unfinished and, due to what is surely a Gordian knot of rights issues between the babel of production companies who created and distributed it, viewable only on YouTube.

The Show

Airing over just a month in the summer of 1998, Invasion America was billed as a special television event on the WB (which was a broadcast channel that used to exist back when televisions had rabbit ears and dinosaurs roamed the earth). At 13 episodes of 22 minutes each, you can knock the entire experience out in an afternoon marathon, if you don’t mind watching a grainy version online.

David Carter (prolific voice actor Mikey Kelley) is a teen with a chip on his shoulder in a sleepy Massachusetts town, wondering about the truth of the father he’s never met. Stern local sheriff Rafe (Edward Albert) knows the truth, however: David’s father was an alien monarch from the planet Tyrus. Like Star Trek aliens, they’re humanoid except for having anime eyes and can apparently have children with humans. We witness a flashback during which David’s father, Cale Oosha (Lorenzo Lamas!!), visits Earth alongside Rafe, his bodyguard, expecting to find Tyrus’ diplomatic mission to our little planet to be coming along as scheduled. (They’re speaking English because Cale wants to be a model visitor.) Instead, Cale and Rafe find that the guy in charge, the Dragit (the late, the great, the inimitable Tony Jay), has created a subterranean military base beneath the Utah Badlands, infiltrated Tyrusians into the U.S. military (including Leonard Nimoy as a scheming general), and actually plans on invading America as a precursor to conquering Earth and repurposing it into a replacement world for the Tyrusians’ dying home planet.

Cale wants none of that, so the Dragit brings to bear every laser, explosion, and genetically engineered alien hellhound he has available to try to assassinate the young ruler. Cale and Rafe escape with the help of Rita (Kath Soucie), who happened to be poking around the restricted area when the coup went down. Fast forward a bit, and we find she and Cale have had a kid and Cale, still the target of repeated assassination attempts, decides to leave Earth for his family’s safety.

Back in the present, a pair of FBI investigators (Greg Eagles and Kristy McNichol) discover evidence of Cale and Rafe’s arrival on Earth that points them to David and his mother. And, because the Tyrusians have infiltrated the government, they get the same info and immediately move to kill David. He goes on the run, uncertain whether the father who left him as a child is alive and leading the resistance against the Dragit, or dead.

The story is a serialized adventure from there, with David evading capture by the Tyrusians’ increasingly weird agents, seeking out allies, learning about his heritage, and occasionally blowing shit up to put a stop to the invasion.

The difference between really cartoony stuff and what I’d consider to be “mature animation”—not necessarily violent or lurid, but serious—is the vocal performances. Harley Quinn is a great show that is doing some great stuff, and part of the reason is because its performances are very over-the-top and stylized. You’re getting distinct performances from that show, not naturalistic ones (and that’s good! It works!). Invasion America, like the show that birthed Harley Quinn the character, deals entirely in naturalistic performances (except for Tony Jay, whose villainous rasp voice directors always counted on to descend from outer space and devour the scenery).

The show was also smart and mature in subtle, intelligent ways beyond that it wasn’t afraid to show characters bleeding and dying, changing allegiances or sacrificing for causes larger than themselves. The Tyrusians’ strategy to cripple Earth’s defenses is simply to lob asteroids at the defenseless planet—why arouse suspicion or risk troops? In one scene, David, who knows precisely one word of Tyrusian, is performing sabotage when he’s discovered by a Tyrusian soldier… who hits on him. With no understanding of what’s being said to him, David deploys the entirety of his vocabulary. It works.

In another scene, David, who has been on the lam since the first episode, goes to a close friend’s mother for help. It’s a very short scene and not strictly necessary to the plot—it could easily have just been elided, but I’m glad it wasn’t. The mother has maybe three lines of dialogue, but they tell you everything you need to know about their relationship: You can hear that she has known and loved this boy because he grew up alongside her son. It’s such a small thing, but I remember it for a reason.

The show was also notable for being another example of blending 2D and 3D animation, with most of the Star Wars-style laser and explosions happening in outer space being computer generated. It’s most noticeable in the finale, which tasks David and his allies with blowing up an alien base on the dark side of the moon. And then it ends in a cliffhanger I will spoil because this is never getting a second season: David’s father is alive, and the words “End of Book One” appear before the cut to credits.

It’s almost, almost, a complete story. Presumably, subsequent “books” in the series would have dealt with David and his father putting down the Dragit’s regime, and maybe struggling with how David is literally the prince of an alien planet whose language and customs he doesn’t even know. The series built an intriguing world and set itself up to explore it further.

So why did it get canceled?

Animation, as I’ve also said, is not cheap or easy, even with CGI stepping in to do some of the heavy lifting. That’s never a solid basis on which to build an ongoing series. Unfortunately, back in the days of broadcast television, when airtime was in limited supply and niche shows simply couldn’t get enough eyeballs outside of cable, something as seemingly quirky as an animated show with a PG-13 sensibility wasn’t going to find enough interested people.

The WB and Dreamworks seemed to know this, and re-aired the series with some of its violence and innuendo toned down for younger audiences. The show aired right around the time it should have been a shoe-in for a DVD release a year or two later, but for whatever reason was simply never considered for one. You’re welcome to enjoy the one grainy transfer of it that exists on YouTube until one of the companies that owns one or another aspect of its reproduction rights issues a takedown notice.

Best episodes

Invasion America is highly serialized, and episodes often leave off on cliffhangers or right when the action is getting good. The action-heavy episodes are often its weakest entries, honestly—most of what’s interesting here is the worldbuilding and character work. For a sampling of what works, pilot episode “The Legend,” followed by “Renewal,” in which David meets another unexpected and offbeat Tyrusian, and “The Trip,” in which David must resist psychic torture, are some that ask and answer interesting questions about the world.

Shows to soothe the pain

For more hard sci-fi animation that is really in danger of only being one season, guys, pack plenty of supplies and go out in search of Scavenger’s Reign.

For another take on a half-human son grappling (figuratively and very literally) with his alien heritage, suit up and watch Invincible.

For another kid staving off an alien invasion with the help of his plucky friends, check out Kid Cosmic.

Tune in next month as we honor Spooky Season with a creepy show canceled before its time, American Gothic.

Kenneth Lowe is yosh! You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

One Season Wonders: Invasion America Told a Mature Sci-fi Tale with Animation