The cult classic ladies and gentlemen. Invader Zim is arguably the most memorable out of all the nicktoons. The show opens up on a planet of aliens known as Irks who go around and conquer planets. When it’s time for their annual conquering event one of the Irks named Zim who wasn’t selected for the event demands and begs to be given a planet to conquer. Wanting to get Zim out of their hair once in for all they send him to a far off galaxy (our galaxy to be exact) where he lands on Earth, puts on a horrible disguise to blend in with us, and begins to plans to conquer Earth. But luckily for us a kid named Dib who is the son of a famous scientist recognizes Zim as an alien and does his best to stop all of Zim’s plans and expose to the world that Zim is an alien and that he’s not crazy.
The show is just hilarious mostly because of the characters. Zim is overzealous, impulsive, crazy, somewhat stupid, and totally convinced that he is the greatest conqueror in the galaxy when in truth he’s the worst conqueror in his planet’s history and they don’t care for him. But that’s probably why we like him so much. He sucks at his job but he’s trying his best to achieve his goal even if he’s completely out of his league and totally oblivious to his own incompetence as a conqueror. We’ve all been in his shoes before or at least acted like him at some point in our life. It’s almost like watching a kid who thinks he can dance but deep down you know he can’t dance but for the sake of sparing his feelings and humoring him you go along with his delusion. Dib was also pretty funny in that he comes across as the crazy kid that no one believes and is doing his best to save the world. Even though you know he’s the good guy and everything, deep down you’re hoping he fails because you wanna see Zim succeed because Zim is just that likable of a character. Dib also had a sister named Gaz who was a huge video game otaku and if you ever did something to hurt her or had something she wanted she would stop at nothing to get revenge on you or get it. Some of my favorite episodes usually involved her. There’s this one episode where Dib wants to report his discovery of Zim to this secret organization but in order to do that he needs to get his dad’s written permission and his dad runs a talk show where only a select few are allowed to attend and the security guards don’t believe Dib is his son so he has go through trails in order to meet him. During these trails Gaz tries to sabotage Dib to get revenge for him for eating the last slice of pizza. There’s another episode where Gaz wants to buy a game but this one guy in front of her gets the last copy so Gaz stalks and haunts the guy until he gives her his copy of the game and then there’s this other episode where she rescued Dib from Zim just so she can have a family pizza night with her dad who’s never around and completely not caring about Zim being an alien because to her he’s too dumb to pull it off. But all of these characters are nothing compared to the greatness that is GIR, Zim’s robotic assistant. He’s an erratic robot whose personality can’t be understood or predicted. He’s pretty much a defective robot who is easily distracted, doesn’t listen to Zim’s orders, and pretty much just does whatever he feels like doing not caring about the mission. As for the whole plot of each episode there’s really not much to say, Zim comes up with a plan to conquer Earth but it always gets stopped by Dib or Zim’s own incompetence and stupidity. As the show went on they tried to add in more characters to give the show some form continuity like introducing another invader named Tak who had an unfortunate past with Zim and seeks revenge against him and introducing a resistance group whose goal is to bring down the Irkan Empire. The show even goes out of its way to make fun of Nickelodeon by adding in a character named Nick whose only defining character is being excessively happy because the executives wanted the show to be less dark and more happy. Yeah this was a pretty dark and grotesque show. Like in one episode Zim steals the organs of his classmates and becomes this grotesque monster while replacing the body parts he stole with random stuff. It’s a pretty disturbing episode. If I’m being really honest it’s probably the most disturbing episode in a kid’s show I’ve ever seen. Another disturbing episode is the one where Zim tries to kill Dib. In the episode Zim opens up a portal to the past and interferes with Dib’s past giving him serious life-threatening injuries and we see how Zim’s meddling is slowly killing Dib until it finally kills him and he gets saved by his dad who turns him into a super cyborg. Good God what dark place were the writers for this show in when they wrote this episode?
While the show had a short run of only 2 seasons (46 episodes total. Actually by today’s standards this is a pretty long run episode wise) it was a show that left quite an impact on our childhoods as being one of the craziest, weirdest, and darkest cartoons that we can remember. The show felt like a second coming of Ren and Stimpy, a show that was going to define just how dark and crazy a cartoon can get but before they had a chance to really dive into it the show got cancelled and pull from the channel. But in the end Invader Zim will always be remembered by its fans and still continues to be talked about by people to this day. It made little sense to be, but I loved this show.