The Invisibles

“The Invisibles” was the 19th episode of Season One that aired on February 3, 1964. The plot involves a “puppet masters” type of scenario which has a secret agent attempting to penetrate an underground society populated by humans taken over by the alien invaders and thwart their attempt to overthrown world governments. The puppet masters are a crab like creatures which can assimilate into its human host if his or her physical make up conducive to the 'infection”. A bad pairing results in disfigurement to the human host in the form of a hunchback.

The hairy alien parasite on the TV program was roughly the size of a football with twitching legs and odd growling sounds. It wasn't a particularly convincing monster but it certainly well beyond anything that had appeared on network television at the time.

The 1/8 scale kit is from Dimensional Designs, roughly one quarter the size of the alien seen on the TV show. Here's the site link for the kit: https://www.dimensionaldesigns.com/alienparasite.html The resin cast was fairly clean and had a total of 18 pieces including the standard Dimensional Design base and the “Outer Limits” title card. The sculpt was done by Kimihiko Ito and was surprisingly detailed even on the underside which made me decide to display the parasite on a 8” x 8” mirror which I purchased online.

Since the Outer Limits was broadcast in black white, this allowed me some leeway on the creature's color scheme. The hair was white or light gray on the TV screen and the rest of the features were medium gray and black so I could do just about anything I wanted with it. Not really sure where to start, I went on the Google machine and did a color search on crabs. I came across an interesting color palette in the form of a moon crab which had reds, orange, white and violet coloration on the shell and appendages.

Assembly is pretty straightforward and there are instructions & drawings included to show the buildup. I never really cared for the cast in 'hair' look on any resin kit so I decided to attempt placing real hair (yak hair as it turns out) on top of the cast hairy areas. It proved to be more difficult than I expected so my hat is off to makeup artists everywhere that use this technique. I essentially applied Mod Podge as a fixing agent to a small area at the rear of any hair near the bald spots and attached roughly one inch long sections of the yak hair. Once this set, I'd repeat and roughly overlap ¾ of an inch more hair at a time, moving forward each time until the entire hair area was covered. I trimmed the random fly away hair with scissors and then hit the whole thing with a blast of hair spray to secure everything in place.

All in all, a nice little kit and reasonably priced. Note that the Outer Limits line from DD is limited to 500 so once they are gone, that's it. Unfortunately, some of the more interesting creatures of the series are sold out and though you might find one on eBay, it is pretty unlikely. 2/24/21

A brief video with the Outer Limits opening sound track to set the mood.