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

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I think the movie made Smith worse rather than "solving" him. They took away what little nuance the original character had, making him such a cartoony, one-dimensional villain that he literally called himself evil, breaking one of the most basic rules of writing interesting villains (that they don't see themselves as villains or their actions as unjustified).

All good points. Still, some people simply are evil - even if they don't see themselves that way, it doesn't change the fact that THEY ARE.

I actually found the lack of ambiguity rather refreshing, in a way. The movie Smith clearly would have no qualms about killing anyone who stood in his way. Makes one wonder what the Robinsons eventually did with him...

As for the show in general: "The Anti-Matter Man" knocked it out of the park (although I'd have liked to see more evil duplicates than just John and Major West - for example, what was the alternate Smith like?), but the rest of it... meh.

 

[Skipper]

All good points. Still, some people simply are evil - even if they don't see themselves that way, it doesn't change the fact that THEY ARE.

There are people in real file who admit they are evil..? I mean, I think that even Hitler thought he was doing a great job for the sake of Germany.

 

[Christopher]

Still, some people simply are evil - even if they don't see themselves that way, it doesn't change the fact that THEY ARE.

Yes, but that's exactly the point -- that even the most evil people rarely recognize their actions as evil, so they don't call themselves that. They convince themselves that they're in the right, that they're naturally superior and entitled to win at any cost to others, that the ends justify the means, etc.

If you look at the most truly good and caring people in the world, like Mahatma Gandhi, they usually see themselves as terrible sinners, as screwups just struggling to do the best they can. Whereas the most evil people in the world, like Donald Trump, tend to assume they're the greatest people in history and everything they do is absolutely right and good. Because you can't be a good person until you recognize your own capacity to do wrong and strive to become better. People who deny their mistakes just double down on them rather than correcting them, and thereby become worse.

So it's just dumb writing for an evil character to say "I am evil." Anyone self-aware enough to see evil in themselves is probably basically good, or at least on the way toward making themselves better. A genuinely evil person would deny they've done anything wrong, would rationalize their actions as justified and right. The much better version of Dr. Smith (or June Harris) in the Netflix Lost in Space demonstrated this quite well. She had an excuse and a rationalization for every misdeed, and she couldn't really redeem herself until she admitted she was the perpetrator of wrongdoing rather than a victim of circumstance.

And that's another thing, though -- neither TV version of Smith was truly evil. The original may have been written that way at the very start, but that wasn't sustainable in a regular character, so he quickly became less a villain and more just a profoundly flawed person, someone who had no genuine malice toward anyone else but was just so fundamentally cowardly and selfish and dishonest that his actions often proved harmful to others. And June "Smith" was much the same in a more nuanced way, not wanting to hurt others but being willing to sacrifice them to protect herself if it came to that. Both were more multifaceted, interesting characters than Gary Oldman's "I'm so evil I actually call myself evil" version of Smith.

 

[Skipper]

My LOST IN SPACE story:

Years ago I attended a marketing presentation for the 1990s remake (I was sniffing around the the novelization rights at the time). At the beginning of the presentation some guy from New Line Cinema announced that there were three great science fiction franchises: "STAR WARS, STAR TREK . . . and LOST IN SPACE."

I somehow managed to keep from laughing.

Uh, now that I think about that, which should be the "third" great science fiction franchise in the 90s at a global level? Doctor Who? But as far I know it wasn't very well known in the US at the time. And virtually unknown in Italy (they just broadcast a handful of episodes in the 80s of the fourth doctor).

 

[Christopher]

Uh, now that I think about that, which should be the "third" great science fiction franchise in the 90s at a global level? Doctor Who? But as far I know it wasn't very well known in the US at the time.

To the general public, perhaps not, but Doctor Who had been a mainstay on nationwide public TV since the early 1980s and in some parts of the US since the '70s.


Anyway, pardon the tangent, but Lost in Space fans might be interested to know that Disney+ has the late 1950s Zorro series starring Guy Williams. LiS made me a fan of Williams, who I always thought was a terrific action hero and father figure as John Robinson. After how he got marginalized once Dr. Smith took over LiS, I find it refreshing to see a show where Williams actually gets to be at center stage throughout. (Perhaps too much so, since Zorro's cover identity as Don Diego is supposed to be an uninvolved dilettante, yet he keeps managing to involve himself directly in defending his politically active friends against the villainous governor's machinations.) It's actually a pretty well-written show, with a lot of the writing done by future Star Trek producer John Meredyth Lucas, and a couple of episodes by classic TV stalwart Jackson Gillis (who wrote seven LiS episodes starting with the classic "My Friend, Mr. Nobody"). And Williams does indeed make a very charismatic lead.

 

[Starscream2112]

Love Lost in Space. Season 3 is my favorite. It was Lost In Space that got me into sci-fi in general.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Uh, now that I think about that, which should be the "third" great science fiction franchise in the 90s at a global level? Doctor Who?

Doctor Who was dead in the water in the 1990s, with the original series officially filed away as of 1989 with "Survival". Aside from the sleep-inducing 1996 movie, the filmed property could not realistically be called the great anything among 1990s science fiction franchises. By the end of the 1980s--especially in the U.S.--interest in the original Doctor Who had faded dramatically, to the degree when the press release was issued announcing the series was over, there was no TOS-esque fan outcry / campaigning for its return. The 1990s was very hit and miss with old properties, only leaving Trek and Wars standing as the representation of global sci-fi film properties. The rest were dodgy attempts in the form of the aforementioned Doctor Who TV movie, and of course, the 1998 Lost in Space film.

 

[Christopher]

He didn't murder Penny. He killed her. Where did I claim it was intentional?

You used it as evidence that he was a "killer," which implies that he did it on purpose or out of malice. That is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Uh, now that I think about that, which should be the "third" great science fiction franchise in the 90s at a global level? Doctor Who? But as far I know it wasn't very well known in the US at the time. And virtually unknown in Italy (they just broadcast a handful of episodes in the 80s of the fourth doctor).

As far as juggernauts go, Planet of the Apes might be a contender for third sci-fi franchise having multiple sequels, a TV series and a cartoon not too mention all the merchandise. Though I can't say how global it actually was.

If restricting to shows in the ballpark of SW/Trek in theme, Doctor Who might be the closest but distant third.

 

[Christopher]

If restricting to shows in the ballpark of SW/Trek in theme, Doctor Who might be the closest but distant third.

Yeah, that's the thing people forget. Star Trek was unprecedented in its popularity, succeeding far beyond anything else in American science fiction. It was basically the beginning of modern fandom, spawning the first conventions as we know them, and nothing came remotely near its level of success until Star Wars happened. And heck, even Star Wars was riding on Star Trek's coattails, blatantly imitating its title. Lucas used ST's success as an example to try to convince studio execs that his space opera could turn a profit.

So there really wasn't a third thing on that level, not in the US, though Doctor Who would certainly count globally.

 

[Skipper]

As far as juggernauts go, Planet of the Apes might be a contender for third sci-fi franchise having multiple sequels, a TV series and a cartoon not too mention all the merchandise. Though I can't say how global it actually was.

You have a point.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

As far as juggernauts go, Planet of the Apes might be a contender for third sci-fi franchise having multiple sequels, a TV series and a cartoon not too mention all the merchandise. Though I can't say how global it actually was.

Planet of the Apes as a global franchise of note was put to rest as its popularity took a nosedive with the lackluster audience response to 1974's live action TV series, and the even lower-rated Return to the Planet of the Apes cartoon in 1975. While ten of the '74 TV series' 14 episodes were re-packaged as "movies" in the '80s, and the films were released in every home media format that's ever existed (starting with 8 and 16mm home movies), as an active global property, it was on the shelf during the last two decades of the 20th century, with attempts to revive it as a movie twisted in Development Hell until Tim Burton's abysmal "re-imagining" was greenlit in the late '90s, but would not be release until 2001.

 

[Christopher]

As for Planet of the Apes, it was pretty successful with merchandising, notably comics and toys. But I wouldn't count the 14-episode live-action show or the 13-episode animated show among its successes. The only reason the live-action show wasn't forgotten was because ten of its episodes were repackaged as five TV movies and rerun incessantly in strip syndication, along with movies repackaged from other short-lived failures like The Amazing Spider-Man, Battlestar Galactica, Master Ninja, and so on. As for the animated series, I somehow missed it entirely as a kid.

 

[Mudd]

They were only 10-15 years old at that point. My current car is at the 15 year point (not that I don't need a new ride...).

They did in fact run out of Chargers and substituted retrofitted Plymouth as stunt cars on a number of occasions.

 

[Christopher]

Even calling it "killing" is overstating it, since Penny recovered without harm. Yes, realistically, turning someone into an inanimate material would kill them, but fiction, especially children's fiction like LiS, is full of examples of such transformations that are treated more as a form of indefinite, reversible suspended animation, or even allow the subject to retain consciousness (or mobility, e.g. Iceman or Emma Frost in the X-Men). Taking a work of children's fiction and interpreting it in darker terms than intended is not clever, it's just missing the point.

 

[JD]

How many people did the Parker Posey Smith kill? I only watched each season once, so my memory isn't very good.

 

[Christopher]

How many people did the Parker Posey Smith kill? I only watched each season once, so my memory isn't very good.

I think "kill" is an overstatement there as well. At the beginning, an officer who was about to expose her as a fraud got trapped in an airlock that was about to open, and she hesitated to let him out, considering letting him die to protect herself. She hesitated long enough that the airlock opened and he died, but it seemed to me that she was just about to save him when time ran out. So it wasn't killing him so much as failing to save him (which by Christopher Nolan Batman standards doesn't count), and if she'd decided a second sooner, she would've saved him. (Although legally it would constitute felony murder, as it was a death that happened as a consequence of her commission of a crime.)

I think we learned in a flashback that one of June's cons led to someone's death, but I'm not sure. Also, she left the real Zachary Smith (Bill Mumy) locked in suspended animation on the Resolute and erased his file so nobody knew he was there, and he wasn't seen afterward when the Resolute was destroyed, so it's implicit that he died as a result of her actions, but that was never confirmed. But again, that would be a case where she didn't do it on purpose, since she didn't know the ship would be destroyed. "Smith"/June was not a killer, just a very frightened and irresponsible person who made terrible mistakes and ran from the consequences and made bigger mistakes in the process. She was capable of leaving others to die to save herself, but she never wanted to harm anyone on purpose if she could avoid it. Indeed, we saw very early in season 1 that she had an opportunity to launch the Jupiter 2's cockpit as an escape pod and leave the Robinsons to die, but instead she chose to stay and help them launch the ship.

 

[publiusr]

“Hunter’s Moon” was one of the better episodes played straight for the most part, though not as good as “The Challenge” with Ansara and a very young Kurt Russell…or “The Deadly Games of Gamma 6” with the Russian Roulette “Wheel of Life” supplying the most gripping scene of the whole series.

Unlike Shatner’s Kirk, I thoroughly believed Guy’s character was Ansara’s equal, though a kinder individual at his core…and a better role model than the tedious anti-heroes that followed. Only Michael Rennie’s character was as firm.

 

[JD]

I think "kill" is an overstatement there as well. At the beginning, an officer who was about to expose her as a fraud got trapped in an airlock that was about to open, and she hesitated to let him out, considering letting him die to protect herself. She hesitated long enough that the airlock opened and he died, but it seemed to me that she was just about to save him when time ran out. So it wasn't killing him so much as failing to save him (which by Christopher Nolan Batman standards doesn't count), and if she'd decided a second sooner, she would've saved him. (Although legally it would constitute felony murder, as it was a death that happened as a consequence of her commission of a crime.)

I think we learned in a flashback that one of June's cons led to someone's death, but I'm not sure. Also, she left the real Zachary Smith (Bill Mumy) locked in suspended animation on the Resolute and erased his file so nobody knew he was there, and he wasn't seen afterward when the Resolute was destroyed, so it's implicit that he died as a result of her actions, but that was never confirmed. But again, that would be a case where she didn't do it on purpose, since she didn't know the ship would be destroyed. "Smith"/June was not a killer, just a very frightened and irresponsible person who made terrible mistakes and ran from the consequences and made bigger mistakes in the process. She was capable of leaving others to die to save herself, but she never wanted to harm anyone on purpose if she could avoid it. Indeed, we saw very early in season 1 that she had an opportunity to launch the Jupiter 2's cockpit as an escape pod and leave the Robinsons to die, but instead she chose to stay and help them launch the ship.

Oh, OK, I was thinking he had seen her outright kill at least one or two people. I might have just been exaggerating what happened to the guy in the airlock and the real Smith in my memory.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I still like the very first season of the original show. It wasn't played up as much as what we got in season 2 and 3 and had they stuck to that formula it may well have been a 3 or 4 season show but as many others have said they were trying to compete in a crowded market. "Hunters Moon" was a most excellent episode and they did well with that one, the weapon they had with the flying disks I believe was actually made to work so I love when they do things practical like that.

As for the show in general: "The Anti-Matter Man" knocked it out of the park (although I'd have liked to see more evil duplicates than just John and Major West - for example, what was the alternate Smith like?), but the rest of it... meh.

I like where you were going with this, what would the anti matter Maureen, Judy, or Penny be like? I mean it stands to reason the whole family would have had their opposites so what would the Robinsons be like in that world? I find that interesting.

Dr Smith in the very first season would have killed if he could I have no doubt about that, when you see what he got the robot to do to that space helmet in I think the first or second episode. That scene gave me a bit of a chill.