Lost ... in Space, and Opportunity

I guess Lost in Space has been on my radar about as long as I've had a radar.  I remember as far back as age 3-4 watching the show, and having a tiny little dimestore spaceship with even tinier spacemen which I decided were the Robinsons.  The show went into syndication almost immediately after leaving the networks in the spring of `68, and was running on local station KTVU (Ch. 2) from the spring of 1970 until early 1972 (I may have seen it even before that).  I watched it pretty frequently and a number of scenes are still burned into the video section of my memory bank, though sometimes altered by time and imagination into something different than they actually were. 

After that early `72 departure, LiS kind of slipped from my memory until it showed up again on KTVU on Saturday afternoons in 1974.  Two years is a milennia when you're ages 6-8 and it was definitely an "oh yeah!  I remember that show!  It was great!" moment.  However, is aired on sporadically (usually afer sports events I think, when there was an hour free on the schedule.  I think there were only 3 or 4 showings.)

After that it was gone again and faded into the background of my mind, until the summer of 1976, when KBHK (Ch. 44) picked it up, running it in the late afternoons.  We had family visitors that summer, and for the the first couple months I only saw it occasionally.  But after our guests left in August, I had a few weeks free to catch it every day.  That's when I decided it was my favorite show.  But it was a short-lived affair: just as school started up, it was replaced on the schedule by the Brady Bunch.

I really missed it this time.  Coincidentally, returning to school that year I made a new friend who was as hot on the show as I was.  Then, in the summer of 1977, it was back, sending the Bradys into orbit.  With nothing to distract me this time out, I watched religiously, often with my buddy. 

That August, KBHK, having run through the color episodes from the second two seasons, began airing the black-and-white first season episodes.  We couldn't wait!  This was the origin story!  This was where it all began!  Neither of us had seen these in years - none of them had aired since at least 1972, and again, five years is a long time when you're bridging the gap from 6 to 11.  

To say we weren't disappointed would be an understatement.  Look, we were 11, and as much as we loved the show, we did realize a lot of it was pretty damn silly, even condescending.  But these episodes were different.  And they were good.  Really good.

Starting with the look.  The episodes were filmed in stark, noir-ish black and white.  Striking aerial shots and occasional odd camera angles gave the show the odd, sometimes surreal look of The Outer Limits.  The storylines, too, had a darker edge.  The Robinsons vulnerability was often emphasized, and many plots sprang from issues of food, water, or supply shortages, or other possible threats to the family's survival.  What's more, the show was often spooky, even frightening.  Many scenes took place at night, and several episodes involved chilling appearances by hostile, or at least unfriendly, alien life forms.  Even today scenes like the horned devil creature crawling up out of the earth in "One of Our Dogs is Missing" or Judy's eerie trance dance in the field of ululating alien flowers in "Attack of the Monster Plants" rattle the back teeth.  

The characters, too, were quite different from what came later.  The most obvious was Dr. Smith.  Instead of buffoonish comic relief, Smith was a cold, conniving, and ruthless son of a bitch, quite willing to sacrifice the entire Robinson clan in order to achieve his wish of getting back to earth.

Dad John Robinson was firm, manly, dashing and alpha male all the way, but also occasionally let his doubts and concerns show.  Maureen Robinson was a space-age frontier mother, but the two of them were depicted as fiercely devoted to one another and very much in love.  They were often shown getting romantic, and moments when they expressed their worries and possible regrets about bringing their family into this situation were touching and well done.  Major Don West was a younger Dirk Squarejaw, but Mark Goddard played him with a certain feisty edge - he and John even butted heads - heatedly, at times.

As to the kids: Judy never was much developed as a character and really never seemed to fit.  She mostly stood around looking pretty, but Marta Kristen, who aspired to be a serious actress, did try when they gave her something to work with.  She was openly hostile to Dr. Smith, and at the same time so gentle-natured that she became furious when he was briefly exiled from the camp - she couldn't stand to see anything mistreated - even a snake like Smith. 

Angela Cartwright as Penny - beautiful even at 13 - was an angelic and dreamy child (though she and Will sometimes bickered) - but the few episodes focused on her were real gems (particularly "My Friend Mr. Nobody" - not only the series best episode but one of the best SF/fantasy episodes ever produced for TV).  And then of course, there was Will.  Billy Mumy was one of the best (and busiest) child actors of his time, and he was perfectly cast.  Will was highly intelligent, with an adult's grasp of electronics, physics, and astronomy; but the writers managed to consistently keep an oft-forgotten fact in mind; no matter how gifted, a child is still a child.  Will was relentlessly brave, anxious to prove himself as and be treated as a man, sometimes defiant, often disobedient (he was constantly running off after being told to stay back at the ship, or messing with things he'd been sternly warned not to mess with).  He was recklessly naive and often manipulated by Smith, and his propensity for saving the day in the end seemed to leave his parents both aggravated and impressed.  

It was also brimming with ideas.  After the first few episodes, which dealt primarily with the Robinsons floating through space and trying just to keep the ship operational, they made rough landing on a planet (they later started calling it Priplanus) and the show seemed to settle into its groove.  Priplanus was actually an interesting place, with unusual weather features, several bizarre lifeforms and, most tantalizingly, the ruins of a vanished, ancient civilization - apparently humanoid.  Aliens encountered by the Robinsons were alien.  In "The Sky Is Falling" an alien family appears on the planet, apparently on a colonization mission identical to the Robinsons.  Though these aliens are entirely human in appearance, and, apparently, in concerns, they are unable to effectively communicate with the Robinsons or overcome their basic distrust.  Others included the eerie, nearly featureless "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension", and the "bubble creatures" seen in episode two ("The Derelict"), nearly formless balloons of lumpy tissue that seemingly communicated via crackling electrical pulses.  

Despite all these good qualities, and the fact that many, in fact most, of the first season episodes are excellent, Lost in Space was still deeply flawed.  The major problem was a lack of attention to detail, largely the result of the lack of a real vision at the helm.  Star Trek had Gene Rodenberry, et al, who believed in the core concepts and themes of the show, and were willing to pay attention to such details as not having 20th century salt shakers on the Enterprise, or making sure there was a mix of ethnicities among the background extras at all times.  This lack of care led to some bizarre foibles: the Robinsons find a dog in a space capsule in "One Of Our Dogs is Missing" and adopt it.  But it is never seen or mentioned again in subsequent episodes.  In "Return From Outer Space" Will is temporarily transported back to Earth, but ends up in a small New England town that seems to be a throwback to the 1940's, not even 1965 (when it was filmed), much less 1997.  No one seems to have thought, or cared, enough to suggest what small-town 1997 might look like.  None of those interesting ideas implicit in the early episodes was ever followed up on (except, maybe, the planet's former inhabitants - unfortunately, not in an interesting way).

I say that Lost in Space lacked a real vision at the helm, but this is not entirely true.  It did, sort of.  The problem lay in the responsible party.  Gene Roddenberry sought to confront Big Issues in the guise of sophisticated science-fiction drama.  The Outer Limits had Joe Stefano, who sought to express his fevered literary ambitions through the lens of science fiction and Gothic horror.  Lost in Space had Irwin Allen, who's only ambition was to put an hour of colorful entertainment and to bring it in on time and under budget (to be fair, the latter was universal in TV production).  Allen had no interest in drama, characterization, or depth.  As David Hedison, who starred in his 1960 film The Lost World and later the pre-LiS series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, put it: "Irwin totally wasted the top-notch cast.  We spent the whole film running around from one contrived disaster to another." This indeed was Allen's formula - put together an impressive cast, spend a fortune on spectacular sets and effects, and then make a headlong rush from action sequence to action sequence. There's nothing per se completely wrong in this approach, but it limits the potential of the story.  More importantly, in Allen's case, he was quite willing to throw logic out the window - the reason the dog never reappeared was that getting takes with it had caused the episode to go overbudget by eating up more camera time, so he struck a tag scene which would have included the dog and simply had it written out of the show, without explanation.  And although he was willing to spend a fortune on some sets and effects (and boast about how expensive they had been), he would turn around and cut corners on others - again seemingly without any driving logic - thus a good-looking spaceship prop might be inhabited by an alien in what looked like a dimestore monster mask. Allen was often his own worst enemy in terms of getting a quality production out there (though he likely didn't care).  And while most of the actors and others who worked with him speak highly of him while laughing at his eccentricities, he sounds like a classic narcissist - confused, erratic, and completely full of himself.  Latter-day apologists defend Allen, but he was the wrong guy to have the helm for a show like Lost in Space.  While his other three shows of the time (Voyage, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants) could get away with the typical Allen approach, it was touches of real human drama, the very things Allen didn't want, that made Lost in Space special.  The other series were about military men, scientists, and strangers, in science-fictional situations.  Lost in Space was about a family.  As Mark Goddard put it - Lost in Space had heart.

While he deserves credit for pulling it together and getting it on the air, it would have been a much more classic show if Allen had handed production off to someone else and left it completely alone.  Ah well.

The other handicap was the network itself.  CBS saw Lost in Space as a children's show, pure and simple (science-fiction in general was looked down upon in those days - several critics even wrote Star Trek off as kiddie fare).  They demanded an end to the romance between John and Maureen, insisted that the children never appear to be in any real jeopardy, and that monsters never appear actually menacing (thus most LiS monsters do little other than wave their arms around and snarl).  Most of all, they pushed to allow Jonathan Harris, in the role of Dr. Smith, to push the part from a sneaky villain to a completely ludicrous fool.  Smith's actions began to make little sense and, while Harris played the part with gusto and was fun to watch, even by the last few episodes of season one he had devolved from a conflict-causing character to absurd comic relief.  

Season one still ended strongly (after a few stinky puffs that anticipated the disappointing later seasons) with a moving episode, "Follow the Leader", which actually embodied a lot of what was best about the series.  There was still hope.  But when LiS returned the following fall, this time in full color, all hope was dashed.  It had become a ludicrous children's show, closer to H.R. Pufnstuf than anything in science-fiction.  Only an occasional minor gem (such as "The Dream Monster") showed even an echo of the first season's best moments.  Season three made a feeble attempt at righting the ship with a few more serious episodes that put someone other than Smith front-and-center ("Hunter's Moon", the surreal "Anti-Matter Man"), but more typically sank to the bottom of the barrel with episodes like the infamous "The Great Vegetable Rebellion", which even Bill Mumy has apologized for being associated with.  While the episodes were in garish color, they lost the exciting camera work that made the first season visually striking.  The show started to look cheap, and cheaper as it went along.  Finally, after three seasons, Allen pulled the plug when CBS stipulated that it would only be renewed with a significant budget cut.  

But into syndication it went.  And the rest, as they say...

My interest in Lost in Space waned after that summer.  The following summer the Best Buddy
and I watched it, fairly often, but mostly to grouse and make fun of it.  The summer after that, I had moved, but it was still running (albeit at noon now).  I usually watched it all the same, although I often wasn't paying attention.  The first season eps were no longer being shown.  I found the sheer dumbness of the color episodes insulting.  Did they really think I would fall for this even when I was a little kid? (of course I had).  The summer after that, it was back on late afternoons, but I'd lost interest.  If I was watching TV at that time, I'd usually watch Land of the Giants, another Allen show, coincidentally, which was running on a rival station in the same slot.  Giants had some of the LiS vibe but without the silliness, even though it was never half as compelling as LiS had been at its best.  

One afternoon during a commercial, I decided to flip over to KBHK for a sec, and caught about 30 seconds of LiS.  

It felt strange.  It felt like nothing. It had meant so much to me, been so important at one point in my childhood.  Now it was just a stupid show.  All its mysteries had been revealed, and found wanting.  I felt strangely sad and empty.  Sometimes growing up is like that.

Well, so it goes.  I grew up and put away childish things and the only time Lost in Space came up was to get some laughs at a party when someone would shout "Danger! Danger!" or "Oh the pain!".

I might have been done with the show, but it wasn't done with me.  In the late 80's, Lost in Space had made its way to the USA networks, and aired in the late mornings.  In college then, on days when I didn't have a morning class, I'd often sleep in (or sleep it off) until 10 or 11.  Sometimes I'd watch it - they were showing those first season ones again.  The flaws were more obvious to me now - but no denying ... they were still good.  About 8-9 years later, when I finally got the Sci-Fi Channel, I set up the VCR to tape the best of the episodes, though it would be almost another 10 years before I dug the tapes out and watched them (they provided comfort food during a particularly rough patch).  A few years later I encountered the DVD set at the library and, being in the right mood, watched them.  Later I bought the set for myself.

Lost in Space didn't used to get a lot of love from sci-fi critics (much less those critics with no use for the genre in the first place).  Bill Warren, in his classic Keep Watching the Skies condemns it (and Allen's other series) as having no quality and blames it for setting back the quality of TV sci-fi for decades.  Gary Gerani, in his equally classic (and seminal) Fantastic Television as "rarely rising above the level of a Saturday morning cartoon".  Neither are completely wrong.  Certainly the later seasons were mostly little more than a live-action cartoon.  Serious and mature sci-fi shows were a rare thing on TV until at least the early 90's - though how much of this was due to Allen's shows is tough to say.  

But, by 1997, marking the real-world anniversary of the Robinsons departure (September 1997 per the premiere episode), with a big-time feature film based on it in the works, Lost in Space began to get a little respect.  By now the cast were being welcomed at conventions and the Sci Fi Channel was airing a marathon, including the never-before aired original pilot - sans Dr. Smith and the basis for the first five episodes of the series).  The movie was terrible, and a flop, but the love went on.  LiS has taken its place as something of a sci fi TV classic.  

Being a fan of this show is a weird experience.  Go on a Lost in Space forum (there have been several, but this is the active one nowadays) and you'll find the same story: great love for the first season, great disappointment but genuine affection for some of the later season episodes) (yes, having seen those again in recent years, I have a slightly better opinion of them - they are at least colorful, wacky, and unique, once you accept they were going for laughs).  We see the flaws even in those precious Season 1 eps.  But we see the good stuff even more clearly.  Loving Lost in Space means being in love with a show that might have been, as much as the one that actually was.  

Some of its nostalgia, sure.  And for a lot of us, LiS was something of a gateway drug - a sci-fi show a kid could sink his teeth into, before becoming sophisticated enough for Star Trek.  Few of us would argue that Trek et al didn't eat LiS's lunch when it came to serious, thoughtful sci-fi.  But then, LiS was never intended to be serious, thoughtful sci-fi.  It was a family-oriented adventure show, and at that, when it worked, it worked perfectly.  Which is why the show has lasted.