Operation: Annihilate Question

I'd hardly call it a waste. Williams's scores for the first season of Lost in Space are my favorite works of his to this day.

 

Oh, I love his work on Lost in Space. It's just a shame some of his best television scoring ended up on shows that were so terrible. (I just read that he scored The Tammy Grimes Show of all things, a notorious four week flop; I suspect his scoring was impeccable for it as well).

Then again, I suppose many film and television composers have done fine work on mediocre projects (Goldsmith practically made a career of it).

 

Wasn't Dehner a psychiatrist? Great career and excellent gender representation in terms of the episode, but not quite a suitable branch of medicine for a CMO, I would think.

 

It's television. I don't think they'd have to be quite so strict about which specialty she was "really" suited for. Especially since, as you know, psychiatrists are in fact medical doctors.

I'm just saying, an attractive woman doctor (in place of McCoy) could have had a much more interesting triangular relationship with Kirk and Spock. No sex, but always the theoretical possibility, the "will they or won't they" that viewers love. [Imagine The X-Files or Moonlighting with two dudes instead of a man and a woman. Something is lost.]

 

In "Court Martial", McCoy's field of specialization was also said to be "space psychology"... (Which sort of makes it doubly odd that he was so unwilling to give medical evidence against either Kirk or Decker when the two skippers showed clear signs of flipping.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

I sit corrected then.

 

Wasted?

Hardly. His scores for the already mentioned Lost in Space was bold and atmospheric--the same as the cues composed for Land of the Giants. Both series benefited to a great degree from his understanding of Allen's larger than life concepts, but it was all original--no repeating ideas used on other series.

I would argue that Williams was at his most original in this period--as opposed to his post-Star Wars work, where he often produced sound-alike variations of his big main titles over and over again with few exceptions, such as the scores for The Empire Strikes Back or Dracula.

 

From Magnus Robot Fighter #3 (great comic book by the way!)

 

Like several guys here, I have all the Lost in Space CDs (three GNP volumes and the 2-disc set from LLL), and I would never part with them. For those of us who can appreciate it, LIS music is a lifelong treasure-- like TOS music itself.

 

Now that I finally have a phone with a working music player, I recently put together a playlist of all my season 1 Lost in Space scores in episode order, although I haven't yet had a chance to listen through the whole thing (I keep getting interrupted). I'm tempted for completeness's sake to get the soundtracks for the Bernard Herrmann film scores that were used as stock music in several first-season episodes and incorporate the relevant cues into my playlist.

 

I'm rewatching Girl off and on lately, and yes, April Dancer was too often in distress and rescued by Mark. It was the other way around occasionally, though. But she was never the timid, screaming damsel in distress; she always expressed confidence.

Big Valley was headed by Barbara Stanwick. She was an incredibly powerful presence, and a very strong character.

Ironside? I've watched some of season 1 recently, Barbara Anderson is pretty much an equal member of the team. She gets to tell off the boss once in a while. Bur I recall she was replaced in alter seasons, and I don't remember that actress at all.