Yeah, it was made for kids and increasingly loaded with silly camp (e.g. Robot gets a birthday party and it sings), which helped solidify TOS's claim of being advertised as "adult sci-fi" in 1966 (even though the camp wasn't as prominent when TOS first came out (!!)), but kiddie or not it still has some decent ideas and not without fun or moments. (Added bonus for the blu-ray set for episodes with cast commentaries!)
It also helps to NOT look for a continuing saga in any conventional sense; pretend surrounding episodes hadn't happened and it helps prevent the irritation of "Dr Smith puts them all in danger as a gag, again." (even though many LiS episodes end by segueing into the next week's adventure with "To be continued..."!)
More horror-centric, but the Saticons were nothing less than iconic.
"The Anti-Matter Man" is an all-time classic, even if simplified to meet LiS's format. The lighting and direction were exceptional...
1960s technobabble prevailing, this time-travel-to-1947 episode is surprisingly solid, even robust. Is surely a possible influence for DS9's "Little Green Men"?
"The Time Merchant" features a revelation that, had it not been for Dr Smith stowing away and adding weight not accounted for in navigation calculations, the ship would have been destroyed by a meteor collision. Nice touch.
Season 3 revved up the excitement by putting the crew in peril then ramping up a countdown -- pretty slick, actually. Shame the rest of the episodes didn't always line up, but sometimes they had. Must have been really brill in 1967 to see this for the premiere...
If you think TOS could be casually sexist, LiS pretty much says "hold my beer".
But then there's this, since contrarians are cool:
That episode surely wants you want to eat some carrots? A crappy episode that does the most bizarre turn at the final two minutes and becomes one of the creepiest and most sinister, for a misguided belief no less. Shame the previous 47 minutes were garbage, but nothing's perfect... usually you get a story that's really great for 47 minutes but then the reveal/cause is crap. So kudos to LiS for actually doing it the other way around.
And, yeah, "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" was one of television's three times where someone scrounging for ideas decided to have killer plants as a main driving plot element. Just treated badly. Even if the denouement has John being gentle to the big-ass carrot that was hurting them, with nice long speech. Space 1999 would borrow from this with the hideously bad "The Rulers of Luton" where the audience gets the biggest lesson as to why a script needs to be consistent with its material... but at least Doctor Who gave us "Terror of the Vervoids", which is by far the least annoying of the three and is more often than not genuinely robust.
All three seasons have something to offer that's genuinely good and not "cringe". What are some of the series' moments that you recall the most fondly?
It also helps to NOT look for a continuing saga in any conventional sense; pretend surrounding episodes hadn't happened and it helps prevent the irritation of "Dr Smith puts them all in danger as a gag, again." (even though many LiS episodes end by segueing into the next week's adventure with "To be continued..."!)
More horror-centric, but the Saticons were nothing less than iconic.
"The Anti-Matter Man" is an all-time classic, even if simplified to meet LiS's format. The lighting and direction were exceptional...
1960s technobabble prevailing, this time-travel-to-1947 episode is surprisingly solid, even robust. Is surely a possible influence for DS9's "Little Green Men"?
"The Time Merchant" features a revelation that, had it not been for Dr Smith stowing away and adding weight not accounted for in navigation calculations, the ship would have been destroyed by a meteor collision. Nice touch.
Season 3 revved up the excitement by putting the crew in peril then ramping up a countdown -- pretty slick, actually. Shame the rest of the episodes didn't always line up, but sometimes they had. Must have been really brill in 1967 to see this for the premiere...
If you think TOS could be casually sexist, LiS pretty much says "hold my beer".
But then there's this, since contrarians are cool:
That episode surely wants you want to eat some carrots? A crappy episode that does the most bizarre turn at the final two minutes and becomes one of the creepiest and most sinister, for a misguided belief no less. Shame the previous 47 minutes were garbage, but nothing's perfect... usually you get a story that's really great for 47 minutes but then the reveal/cause is crap. So kudos to LiS for actually doing it the other way around.
And, yeah, "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" was one of television's three times where someone scrounging for ideas decided to have killer plants as a main driving plot element. Just treated badly. Even if the denouement has John being gentle to the big-ass carrot that was hurting them, with nice long speech. Space 1999 would borrow from this with the hideously bad "The Rulers of Luton" where the audience gets the biggest lesson as to why a script needs to be consistent with its material... but at least Doctor Who gave us "Terror of the Vervoids", which is by far the least annoying of the three and is more often than not genuinely robust.
All three seasons have something to offer that's genuinely good and not "cringe". What are some of the series' moments that you recall the most fondly?
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