Invader Zim
animated television series

Invader Zim is an American animated television series created by comic book writer and cartoonist Jhonen Vasquez for Nickelodeon. The series centers on the titular character (voiced by Richard Horvitz), an extraterrestrial from the planet Irk. His mission is to conquer Earth and enslave the human race along with his malfunctioning robot servant GIR (Rosearik Rikki Simons). However, Zim is antagonized by Dib Membrane (Andy Berman), a young paranormal investigator who is determined to stop Zim from succeeding.
Nickelodeon contacted Vasquez about pitching ideas for an animated series for their older demographic, and Invader Zim was the first thing he pitched. In Vasquez's words, "it went from pitch to series without hardly any waiting". As the series went on, ratings declined and budgetary issues became more frequent. Before the second season was completed, Nickelodeon canceled the series, leaving several episodes unfinished. The series originally aired on Nickelodeon from 2001 to 2002, with six of the completed second-season episodes initially going unreleased. These episodes were first released on DVD in 2004 and later debuted on the Nicktoons Network in 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Invader Zim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.