Month: February 2008

A Second Shot at Reptilian Fascism

It seems I chose a bizarre time to rediscover “V,” my favorite TV show from childhood about an alien invasion of Earth that served as a Holocaust parable. In a Penn Station book store on Friday, I noticed that familiar spray-painted “V” on the cover of a book called “V: The Second Generation.” Date of first publication: February 2008. The salesman who rang me up was as surprised as me to see it. “This used to be a TV show, didn’t it?” The book is written by Kenneth Johnson, who created the initial 1983 miniseries but left before NBC made a mockery out of its sequels. Johnson writes the book as a straight up sequel to the original miniseries, taking place 25 years after the events in the original. In Johnson’s timeline, the Visitors have made good on their promise of sharing their scientific advances with mankind. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s […]

Fascist Reptiles and Other Cautionary Tales

How well does childhood memory of favorite teevee shows hold up? Judging by the maddening 80’s nostalgia currently in vogue, I would wager not well. I mean, “He Man” and “Jem” were pretty stupid as far as kids shows go. They’re simply painful to sit through as an adult. As a kid, my favorite “adult” show was “V,” an occasional miniseries turned shortly-lived regular series about the human resistance against an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. What my five-year-old self enjoyed about the show was the rough-and-tumble adventuring antics of the resistance fighters, the “vshboo, vshboo” sound of the aliens’ laser guns and the frequent reveal that under the aliens’ human masks were lizard skins. An exciting action-adventure serial with no redeeming qualities, or so I recalled. Revisiting the series on DVD, I was surprised to find that the original 1983 miniseries was a taut, sophisticated Nazi allegory. In a montage […]