The Invisible Man

From the archive

he Invisible Man, the second television series with this title, debuted in the US in 1975 on NBC and starred David McCallum as the scientist Daniel Westin and Melinda Fee as his wife, Dr. Kate Westin. The series was created by Harve Bennett. A pilot TV movie initially aired in May 1975 and was followed by a 12-episode series later that year. A TV tie-in novel based on the script of the pilot episode was written by Michael Jahn and published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1975. Inspired by the original 1897 novel by H.G. Wells, the pilot film depicts Daniel Westin working for a company called the Klae Corporation, which is doing experiments in teleportation. He discovers the side effect of his work is the ability to turn objects invisible, and tries to find medical applications for his invention. He discovers that objects that are made invisible reappear after a few hours, and on living test animals the collars they wear re-appear before the living cells themselves. Obsessed by his invention, Westin decides to become invisible himself, in part to prove that a human can survive the process, and also to test a serum he has developed to reverse the invisibility. He reveals the process to his boss, Walter Carlson (Jackie Cooper), who is initially unimpressed by what he sees as millions spent on a nuclear disintegrator, but he becomes more interested when he realizes that the pen Westin disintegrated is actually still there ("Do you know what you've got here?" "An invisible pen..." "Cute. No, invisible armies..."). He wants to back the project for military purposes, and in the course of the argument it is revealed that the Pentagon has provided the funding for Westin's research; in effect the military already own the process. Westin tries to destroy his invention by sneaking into the lab after hours and deleting his research. In order to make his escape he becomes invisible for a second time, before triggering an overload and destroying the apparatus. But it appears that after all the process is unstable, and he becomes only briefly visible before turning permanently invisible; he cannot return to his visible state any longer, and the serum is ineffective. He goes to his friend, Dr. Nick Maggio (Henry Darrow), a skilled plastic surgeon who creates a disguise for him in the form of a face mask and a pair of gloves using a special material called Dermaplex that has the same properties as human skin, which enable Westin to appear in public. The Dermaplex side effect is that Westin has to remove the mask from time to time because, as Dr. Maggio states, "The beard will be your enemy, and the itch will drive you crazy." By the conclusion of the pilot, the process's lack of stability renders it effectively useless for commercial or military applications, and the Klae Corporation is persuaded to re-employ him in his research capacity despite his condition, and thus the series begins from this point. Westin seeks to perfect his work and at the same time find a cure—a means of restoring his visibility.