Toto sang that love isn’t always on time, and the same can be said of the animated series “Invader Zim”. This bonkers show from the darkly comedic mind of artist Jhonen Vasquez must have boarded the fastest spaceship from the planet Conventia, arriving far too early on our television sets.
It was March 30, 2001 – a Friday – when a quirky programme about a little tyrannical alien named Zim (voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz) dropped on Nickelodeon. The hook is wonderfully chaotic: Zim’s people, the Irkens, don’t really like him, so they send him to a faraway planet on a fake invasion mission to get rid of him and pretend like he’s doing something useful. Grabbing parts out of the trash, the Irkens piece together a companion bot GIR (Rosearik Rikki Simons), which is about as useful as an icemaker in Antarctica – but GIR turns out to be a good pal/pet for Zim, even if the petulant alien doesn’t recognise it.
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While Nickelodeon wasn’t opposed to off-kilter animated series like “The Ren & Stimpy Show” and “Rocko’s Modern Life”, “Invader Zim” faced a big problem in the form of an absorbent, yellow, and porous character who lived in a pineapple under the sea.
In 2001, “SpongeBob SquarePants” was one of the hottest shows on Nickelodeon, but Zim’s escapades didn’t exactly attract the same audience. While “SpongeBob” loves its occasional tiptoe into the waters of surrealism and double entendre, it never gets as dark or destructive as “Invader Zim”. Consequently, it’s unsurprising that the network executives would side-eye any expensive and high-profile show that wasn’t pulling in the same ratings as the madcap adventures taking place in Bikini Bottom.
“Our ratings were not doing well, our demographic at the time was not ‘The Fairly OddParents’ demographic, which is what we premiered with, and we premiered to really, really good critical acclaim,” Horvitz told Syfy. “But ratings-wise, the only real barometer [was the] target audience, 6- to 10-year-olds, and I think that it was a little too much for that [demographic], and the parents also might have thought it was a little graphic for them.”
“Invader Zim” didn’t get the opportunity to settle in and find its niche audience either, as a real-life event rocked the world a few months after the show’s debut. The September 11 attacks devastated people around the globe.
In the wake of tragedy, American audiences turned to comfort films and TV shows with more positive, uplifting messages. A series about an alien trying to conquer Earth and blow up things didn’t exactly inspire viewers then. As a result, “Invader Zim” had the plug pulled on it in 2002, even before all its second season’s episodes had aired. Those remaining episodes would be released years later.
It’s a classic case of wrong place, wrong time, because “Invader Zim” was never designed to be a traditional kids’ show. Sure, children could gravitate toward the cartoonish animation style and colourful action on screen, but the show was always geared toward teens and adults who grew up on the macabre and cynical sensibilities of Tim Burton and horror comedies of the ’80s and ’90s.
Zim is the loner, the social outcast. He certainly has his faults, but he’s only trying to find his place in the world and a sense of belonging – much like Edward Scissorhands or Lydia Deetz from “Beetlejuice”.
His journey to Earth is a way of gaining approval from his peers, even if his methods are… questionable at best. Yet the world that Zim wants to be part of isn’t that special. The Irkens are useless, while Earth’s people — except for Dib, who seems to be the only person with his eyes wide open around here — are oblivious to Zim’s schemes and potential invasion.
It’s a double-edged gag poking fun at absolutely everyone, since Vasquez demonstrates that humans are too dumb to realise they’re being invaded, while the aliens never click that they don’t need to work too hard to enslave us in the first place. What everyone should truly fear here is the curse of apathy and dysfunctional authority systems. It’s this type of adult-leaning and subversive storytelling that would lay the blueprint for hit series like “Hazbin Hotel” and “Solar Opposites”.
Even though “Invader Zim” wasn’t on the air for too long, it built its legion of followers and sank its tentacles into different kinds of media (and even the Netflix film “Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus” in 2019). It isn’t a catastrophic failure by any means; something that isn’t lost on Vasquez. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like Zim took off, but it crashed and burned,” he told ComicBook.com. “That’s what’s amazing about it, because if we did crash and burn, people just keep walking into the fire.”
All things considered, one can’t help but wonder if the show’s success would have been greater in modern times. Streaming services crave edgy adult animated series that are tailor-made for mature audiences, as shows like “Creature Commandos”, “Harley Quinn”, and “Invincible” dominate the platform rankings. A show like “Invader Zim” would fit right into this approach and be able to push the boundaries of its humour even further.
Television audiences have matured since the 2000s as well. There’s far more acceptance for shows trying to be different than ever before, whether the programme is cynical or hopeful in nature. There’s a time and place for everything, including an extraterrestrial who wants to take over Earth.
And if we’re being honest, would an alien invasion really be that much worse than what we’re experiencing as a collective society today?
