"Lost in Space" - any love for this old show?

The Anti Matter Man is top notch as well. You gotta wonder what all the other anti matter Robinsons were like after that one.

 

But like a lot of LiS episodes it made no sense. It starts out with the antimatter versions of the John Robinson and Don somehow chained up and prisoners. if they were also actually lost in space, who in that universe caught them and imprisoned them? Also since they were Chained and in prison, why weren't there any other cards in the area to prevent them from escaping to another universe?

 

Good questions, but it might have bogged down the episode a bit. I just put it down to the anti matter universe being the same but sufficiently different that different events played out there. They might have been caught doing whatever was against the rules there and got chained up. Our heroes were never ever meant to encounter them.

 

Gotta be down-and-dirty alternate June Lockhart. She probably killed Will, Smith, Judy and Penny to eliminate the competition. Whether she possesses a Spock-like beard is another question.

 

From what I have read about the period she was a bit of a wild thing in those days

 

Fonzie made 'love' (if he did it) to women of his own age, not to anybody underaged, at least as I remembered it. He's good with the ladies because he's an outgoing sort and is cool with himself, so no, I don't see him as being a 'creepy' anything like many people would see him today.

 

OK that's fair enough but it's still icky to a lot of modern friends who I have shown Happy Days to

 

So I am continuing to slog through season 2. I’m about 3/4 through, and the show has simply devolved into this formulaic drivel:

1. Will, Smith, and Robot are out somewhere, doing something, by themselves, while rest of family is on Jupiter 2.

2. Alien* or aliens appear out of nowhere with nefarious motives.

3. Will, Smith, and the Robot inexplicably do whatever said aliens want.

4. When Will, Smith, or Robot tells family what’s going on, family invariably thinks they’re making it up (despite this sort of thing happening every episode.)

5. Smith acts like complete ninny throughout entire episode, and is usually the cause of each week’s problems, yet family hardly ever punishes him or even chastises him, and the few times they do, it ends up status quo by the end.

6. Aliens are eventually defeated while leaving all their bases and technology behind for the family to completely ignore.

*I use the term ‘alien’ very lightly. Usually they look and act exactly human, even though they’re from other planets that Earth presumably has not made contact with.


Really, at this point there’s just no taking this show seriously. The characters never grow or develop at all. I will say, however, that the real star of the show has got to be the Robot,
both with Bob May on the inside and Dick Tufeld providing the voice. Some of his lines are simply brilliant.

 

The Robot was absolutely the true star of the show.... Bless that guy

 

Par for the course for early SFTV, and even a lot of early prose science fiction despite the lack of budget limitations. I just finished watching the complete Rocky Jones, Space Ranger on YouTube. It was actually a fairly high-budget show for 1950s TV, shot on film with impressive special effects for the day, and mostly consisting of 3-part story arcs that were then compiled and released theatrically (the source of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies Manhunt in Space and Crash of Moons). But its aliens, who lived on other planets and moons of the Solar System and beyond (most of them imaginary), were invariably just humans in exotic clothes. In the early episodes, they did a good job having the aliens speak alien languages except for those who'd learned English from previous space explorers, and the storyline that Crash of Moons was a sequel to had an interesting take on computer translation to carry on a conversation. But later in the series, they abandoned that without explanation and had all aliens, even newly contacted ones, speak English.

 

Amen to everything quoted above. I pity the Robot for having to share the stage with the two stooges. Billy Mumy is a good actor but Will Robinson is a one-note twit. Doctor Smith is a tedious scene-snatching waste of space. Jonathan Harris? He's overpaid....and just about everything Smith is with minimal improvement and maximum narcissism.

 

I wouldn't say that. He could be a magnificent screen villain, as you can see in the early episodes before Smith got goofy, when he was basically Iago. (The Shakespeare one, not the Disney one.) I recently saw him in a guest role in the 1957 Zorro series, the first time he worked with Guy Williams that I know of (though they had few scenes together), and he was superbly malevolent. The problem is that he was encouraged to be self-indulgently clownish as Smith.

 

Jonathan Harris is a good actor. He decided he wanted to stay on Lost in Space and he knew that if the character of Dr. Smith remained the way he was at the beginning of the first season; it would be a strain even for the audience to believe that the Robinsons wouldn't eventually kill or send the character packing off on his own in the wastes of a hostile planet. So he morphed to the selfish/idiotic version of Smith that dominated seasons 2 and 3.

 

Well, no, first he morphed into the comic character he became over the course of season 1, a character defined by greed and cowardice but still participating in relatively decent, watchable stories. What happened in season 2 is that Batman became a breakout hit and LiS's producers tried to emulate its campiness, but they did it badly and it just became obnoxious. There's a difference between comedy and camp, and between good camp and gratuitious inanity.

 

Don't forget the minefield of exploding beach balls.

 

I just rewatch "The Golden Man" on Monday! Except for the beach balls not a bad episode. I really like Penney centric episodes.

 

Yeah it was not a bad episode. Any Penny centered story is usually better then the rest

 

I've not seen any of the old show but I think the new show is probably my favourite sci-fi show in recent times. I read and liked the MAD parody of the 60s show and I felt that 90s film started good but then went downhill.

 

As much as I anticipated the 1998 film version, it's one of my least re-watched DVDs in my sci-fi batch. I do like the last 30 minutes of its music more than any of its other elements.

 

I loved the Netflix series a bunch but wish the season 2 and 3 were on physical media. They are not. Great show but my only gripe was that there were never any breaks. It was a constant run from peril to peril