Billy Mumy was one half of the fictional brother team of Barnes & Barnes, who did the song Fish Heads (among several albums of other strangeness).
Anybody here a fan of Lost in Space?
- Thread starter steveda19
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That's crazy, and looking on Youtube Bill Paxton directed and features in the music video.
Watching this again in hi-def is a different kind of experience, especially the last batch of episodes that were so day-glo and low-fi at the same time. I caught the start of an episode without knowing it was Lost in Space, and how the production design was staged, it looked so cheap and soundstagey that I almost thought it was a Laugh In sketch. The high-def exposes the scotch-tape and cardboard a lot worse than what people complain about with TOS.
It's important to understand that setting doesn't necessarily determine genre. In other words, the superficial trappings of a show don't define what it is. The story and how it is executed do. At its heart, Lost in Space is not sci-fi. It's about family bonding and morality plays. Doctor Smith eventually becomes an adopted "black sheep" member of the family. That is the reason he isn't permanently exiled or executed. Most people have a member of their family or extended family who continually makes bad decisions, seemingly never learns, and the rest of the family needs to do damage-control to undo it, and yet despite that, they are still family, and we let them back to the table. If you want some single uplifting theme from Lost in Space, that's it. It's a bunch of morality plays about the sin of greed and selfishness and the virtue of forgiveness, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you don't attempt to buy into the plausibility of the science.
What I missed the most, when judging it against that metric, is more of a change in Dr. Smith's character. I would have liked to see him show a little heroism or self-sacrifice eventually, to show that the good karma the family gave him was eventually making an impact. But that's not how shows were written back then. It was more formula where you could watch shows out-of-order. So while he was more relaxed in later episodes, he was still just as casual about throwing the family under the bus on a moment's notice as he ever was.
It's important to understand that setting doesn't necessarily determine genre. In other words, the superficial trappings of a show don't define what it is. The story and how it is executed do. At its heart, Lost in Space is not sci-fi. It's about family bonding and morality plays. Doctor Smith eventually becomes an adopted "black sheep" member of the family. That is the reason he isn't permanently exiled or executed. Most people have a member of their family or extended family who continually makes bad decisions, seemingly never learns, and the rest of the family needs to do damage-control to undo it, and yet despite that, they are still family, and we let them back to the table. If you want some single uplifting theme from Lost in Space, that's it. It's a bunch of morality plays about the sin of greed and selfishness and the virtue of forgiveness, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you don't attempt to buy into the plausibility of the science.
What I missed the most, when judging it against that metric, is more of a change in Dr. Smith's character. I would have liked to see him show a little heroism or self-sacrifice eventually, to show that the good karma the family gave him was eventually making an impact. But that's not how shows were written back then. It was more formula where you could watch shows out-of-order. So while he was more relaxed in later episodes, he was still just as casual about throwing the family under the bus on a moment's notice as he ever was.
To me, he was very protective of Will, even though he was constantly trying to get him killed.
Your last point is interesting. Quite a bit of retcons and fan fiction that I have read suggest that Dr. Smith's personality was fundamentally altered by the physiological stresses he experienced during the Jupiter's initial liftoff, effects that continued to accrue and advance over time. The impact posited as a kind of accelerated senility or dementia, one of its primary attributes being an overt sense of helplessness.
Based on the actual body of work, I would say that the character did become somewhat more pliant as the show progressed and his machinations were sometimes spun out as if motivated by an urge to present the grandiloquent fiction of real villainy, but without that as the true intent at its heart.
I think your characterization of the show's thrust, both as originally conceived and in its altered form as the first season progressed, is spot-on.
Wait a minute, where have you seen Lost in Space in high-definition? It hasn't been released in Blu-ray, has it?
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