27 thoughts on “Lost In Space”

  1. Street vendors in NYC will sell you a dog! Or pretzel. Or any number of things you can’t find anywhere else. You can not beat the food in NYC. Unless it’s Mexican. They never figured that one out.

    Lost in Space was certainly campier than Star Trek but Trek was a lot campier than Firefly. I wish somebody back then had thought of doing a belter series.

      1. Jerry Pournelle hadn’t written “Those Pesky Belters and their Torch Ships” yet; the Belters would likely have been based on grizzled old prospectors. I’m not sure what all could be done with that–it seems more like an episode of Tom Corbett than an ongoing series.

  2. I thought the pilot and first few shows were pretty good, at least on a par with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea first season. For some reason as soon as they started with color, things went downhill fast. At least in the first season they tried to stay a bit technical, with them discovering the planet they landed on had a wildly eccentric orbit that affected the climate and life forms, etc. They couldn’t keep it going, probably because they didn’t care that much after all, and likely found the likely audiences didn’t care, either.

  3. It was deliberately stupid, after the first season. They were competing with “Batman,” which was deliberately stupid. Or “campy,” as they say in Hollywood.

    Prior to that, it was just badly written, like most Irwin Allen productions.

  4. Agreed…By the end it was no more believable than Gilligan’s Island. And nearly as silly.

    1. For some reason I had nightmares about the Hippies in Space episode (Lost in Space’s, not Star Trek’s) back in grade school.

    2. I was perhaps 7 or 8 when the series premiered. IIRC, the first season didn’t seem all that bad. I do recall one episode where a planet of sentient plants wanted to kill Dr Smith because he killed a plant. “A life for a life.” Pretty bad. By the last season, there was the line, “It must’ve happened when we passed through that galaxy last night.” Speed like that makes Warp 9.6 seem slow.

    3. WHAT? You mean Gilliagn’s Island wasn’t real??? I thought it was the first reality based TV show!!!

      I remember watching LiS reruns when I was around 10. It was right up there with Ultra Man! Good stuff…for a 10 year old. Ahhh…but then I discovered Star Trek reruns in my early teens. Campy sometimes…but usually good stories.

      1. From “Galaxy Quest”:

        “Surely you don’t think Gilligan’s Island was real?”

        Aliens, looking sad, “Oh, those poor people!”

  5. Saw an old Larry King interview of Jonathan Harris on You Tube from about 25 years ago. Harris claims responsibility for taking Dr. Smith over the top. He said a one-dimensional villain was just not good entertainment. Harris intentionally injected camp into the show, which he claims boosted ratings and irritated the “star” of the show by eclipsing the character of John Robinson.

    The pain, the pain.

    1. So that is why Guy Williams fled to Argentina after the series 🙂

      yes, the pain of it all…

  6. I watched because I had a crush on Angela Cartwright.

    The first season was OK. When they got to the talking/ambulatory vegetable episode, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I don’t understand why the actors didn’t walk off the set when they first read that script.

    1. I wonder if blackballing was a threat back then. If they had walked off due to poor scripts or being injured by the pyrotechnics in the sleazy special effects would they ever have worked again? Maybe Guy Williams or June Lockhart would have had enough starpower to be able to survive that, but would the others?

      Maybe it was just characters named “Penny”, but I also liked the girl on Sky King.

    2. I read somewhere a couple of actors (I’m remembering June Lockhart and Don Goddard, but I could be wrong) actually were written out of a couple of episodes because they couldn’t keep a straight face during that week’s filming.

  7. Apples and oranges. Trek was about Youth, Independence, and Exploration. Lost was about Children, Family, and Settlement.

    “We’re not explorers! We’re settlers!” – Maureen Robinson [June Lockhart]

    As a kid, I loved them both. I still do.

  8. I’m not so fussed about the series sometimes as about the cool models companies produced.

    Star Trek TOS had the original Enterprise, the Klingon battlecruiser, and the Romulan Warbird.

    For LIS we only got the Cyclops monster and a (small) model of B9. :-/ Thank goodness Polar Lights finally released a model of the Jupiter 2. I can’t tell you how many times I used a Frisbee to simulate the Jupiter 2 crash-landing…

    1. TOS also had the Galileo 7 and a trio of instruments–communicator, phaser, and tricorder. I think phaser 2–otherwise it’s too similar in shape to the communicator. The tricorder wasn’t to scale–much too small compared to the others.

      LiS had the chariot and the space pod that could have been made into models (the chariot might have had too many windows to have made a good model). Not sure how they missed that market–the Invaders UFO made it.

      1. Was that the UFO model that had the interior? I remember thinking that it was awesome…

        I never understood why no one made a model of the Discovery from 2001. I think there are resin models now…but they are very expensive.

  9. I wasn’t interested in the Invaders–I didn’t get that model.

    They had the Orion shuttle and the moon buggy; I don’t remember seeing one of the spherical earth-lunar shuttle, although that would have been relatively simple (or maybe not–I don’t recall seeing spherical models). Discovery would have been a real pain–way too long and segmented to hold together well. Maybe have individual models and suspend it in pieces from the ceiling?

    I remember a wheel space station, but that was a pre-2001 design. This one had a semi-cylindrical solar collector along the wheel. I don’t imagine that would have been easy to orient right. There was also a nuclear rocket, with the rocket and reactor at the top of the model towing the passenger module underneath. And of course the Leif Ericson, later redone in glow-in-the-dark plastic as a UFO something or another. The Leif Ericson was the basis of one of the ships on Niven & Pournelle’s Mote in God’s Eye.

    I saw a limited production model of an Orion Nuclear Space Battleship a couple years back. Wow.

  10. I loved that show during its original run. That’s probably because I was the same age as Will Robinson, so I naturally identified with him.

    I really, really wanted a Jupiter 2. Still do. It was one of the coolest spaceships ever.

    I bought the model about 10 years ago, but that was long after my model-building days, so it still sits in its box unassembled. What I would have given for it way back when. (Much more recently, last year in fact, I bought the flying Falcon 9 from SpaceX, even though I have no plans to build and fly it. I bought it just because.)

    LIS came up a few weeks ago on another blog I read, and I did a bit of searching on the internet. I found Bill Mumy’s thanks to fans on Amazon (see the first “review”), and I also discovered that Angela Cartwright is now an artist, and has a really nice website.

    1. I really, really wanted a Jupiter 2. Still do. It was one of the coolest spaceships ever.

      A real one, I mean, not a model. Just to be clear. Although I would have settled for a model.

      It would be much more manageable as a private spacecraft than a Constitution-class starship.

  11. Does anybody remember the cardboard models gas stations used to give away of the LEM in the late 60s. After folding it together I hung one from four strings and flew mine around the attic landing on a moon simulation made up of pieces of carpet and cans.

    1. Yep. I remember riding in the back seat of my father’s car with my sister on the afternoon of July 20, 1969 with the cardboard LM on the shelf under the rear window.

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