Revisiting Lost In Space...
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
The more I read about Irwin Allen, the more I wonder how he could function as a human being. He was a few fries short of a Happy Meal, wasn't he?
"The Hungry Sea" ***
The Robinsons head south hoping to avoid plunging temperatures only to learn how eccentric the planet's weather really is.
I actually liked this one. It was better. I liked the idea of them learning how extreme the planet's orbit was even though it was exaggerated in terms of how quickly the weather transitions were from one extreme to the next, but hey it's television. I liked seeing the Chariot crossing the I've field---it was rather cool. The only real quibble I have was how they incorporated some of the final footage from the unaired pilot. The planet's temperature has risen dramatically and yet while they're crossing the inland seas they're wearings parks. ??? Anyway it's just a quibble because otherwise they'd have had to shoot new footage.
Overall, though, they did a reasonable job of utilizing the pilot episode footage into the series first five episodes. Of course it wouldn't be seamless because some of that earlier footage is contradictory with the later episodes framing sequences. And possibly back when this was first aired few people really noticed the contradictions.
Looking over these first episodes I'd have to say that overall the show is just okay. For me its most interesting aspect is the hardware: the Jupiter II, the Chariot and the Robot. In each episode I've seen them barely touch on interesting ideas introduced, but it remains to be seen if any of them will be further explored later.
The Robinsons head south hoping to avoid plunging temperatures only to learn how eccentric the planet's weather really is.
I actually liked this one. It was better. I liked the idea of them learning how extreme the planet's orbit was even though it was exaggerated in terms of how quickly the weather transitions were from one extreme to the next, but hey it's television. I liked seeing the Chariot crossing the I've field---it was rather cool. The only real quibble I have was how they incorporated some of the final footage from the unaired pilot. The planet's temperature has risen dramatically and yet while they're crossing the inland seas they're wearings parks. ??? Anyway it's just a quibble because otherwise they'd have had to shoot new footage.
Overall, though, they did a reasonable job of utilizing the pilot episode footage into the series first five episodes. Of course it wouldn't be seamless because some of that earlier footage is contradictory with the later episodes framing sequences. And possibly back when this was first aired few people really noticed the contradictions.
Looking over these first episodes I'd have to say that overall the show is just okay. For me its most interesting aspect is the hardware: the Jupiter II, the Chariot and the Robot. In each episode I've seen them barely touch on interesting ideas introduced, but it remains to be seen if any of them will be further explored later.
Now that was truly awful. A most egregious example of the D&G fad. Alien invaders? Creating an additional Robinson offspring just so they could kill him off? I'd rather have an LIS for kids than an LIS for maladjusted adolescents.
There's no blame at all. Jonathan Harris was a great performer.Jonathan Harris once said that however broadly he played Smith, Irwin Allen kept telling him "More!!" So there's plenty of blame to spread around.
Exactly. He played the character as he did, and is remembered to this day. And most of the time, not alongside the descriptive "suck". Over the top? Yes. A remotely "realistic" character? No.
But then, Shakespear's plays are full of such characters.
I'm watching "The Robinsons" right now. I've seen worse. Did they get the guy who did the Robot's voice in the original to do this one, too? I know he did it in the film...
But then, Shakespear's plays are full of such characters.
I'm watching "The Robinsons" right now. I've seen worse. Did they get the guy who did the Robot's voice in the original to do this one, too? I know he did it in the film...
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Jonathan Harris is an enormously funny talker on getting the job of Dr Smith.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbisA4Zw7ko[/yt]
I went with a friend and his wife to meet Harris at a Creation con once. My friend was the bigger LiS fan, and I really don't care about meeting celebs, so I hung back and watched. Harris was delightful.
My friend approached and said, starstruck "The man! The legend!"
Harris went into character, waved a dismissive hand and said, "Yes, yes, dear boy, I know, I know!"
My friend did a little bit of fanboy fawning and told Harris how much he loved the show and enjoyed Dr. Smith. Harris turned to my freind's wife and said "He's not only cute, he's smart too!"
My friend approached and said, starstruck "The man! The legend!"
Harris went into character, waved a dismissive hand and said, "Yes, yes, dear boy, I know, I know!"
My friend did a little bit of fanboy fawning and told Harris how much he loved the show and enjoyed Dr. Smith. Harris turned to my freind's wife and said "He's not only cute, he's smart too!"
I'm not sure that was the case but rather he had
grandiose ideas on how to make television and films but the studio execs wouldn't fund them as he wanted beyond the pilot.
One of his most famous films, The Towering Inferno is a great example of where Allen got every Hollywood star of the time, notably Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, and OJ Simpson to star in the super production burning buidling and was extremely costly at the time. LIS like inferno started conceptually well but ended badly when the money dried up.
I'm also thinking of his propensity for recycling scripts, props, monster suits, and character concepts from one show to another. I guess this was to save money, but did he really think no one would notice? Or didn't he realize how cheesy it would look when he did it enough times?
Meh, Trek did a lot of that too in terms of 'prop recycling.' In TNG several of the landscapes were used multiple times for different worlds. Here are some amusing examples from Trek:
The Federation transporter pads in the various Star Trek series all use parts of the original one from Star Trek: The Original Series, usually flipping it or swapping out decals. This sort of thing was done fairly often, using parts of one show's sets for the ones that follow.
- The propmasters of all incarnations of Trek were rather quite, well, masterful at prop recycling; most props were recycled either from other shows or movies or even recycled from other episodes of any given preceding Trek incarnation including itself. Starship models, even in the CGI era, were particularly prone to this, the end result being several different alien races, separated by the entire length of the galaxy or even by centuries in some cases (or even both) used variations of the same ship design in various scales (or their medical scanner or communications relay would bear an odd resemblance to a certain race's ship)
- Most of the sets from the Star Trek: The Next Generation era of Trek owe their existence to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Almost every single subsequent starship interior, including those of Picard's USS Enterprise, USS Voyager and so on, and even Klingon ship interiors, were redresses of the Enterprise interior from that film (namely, all eponymous ships [but not stations] shared the same hallway interiors, and Klingon bridges were actually the redress of the engineering room from the film). These 30+ year old sets survived until shortly after Star Trek: Voyager wrapped up, in which they were destroyed by having accidentally been left out in the rain; some were painstakingly recreated for the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
- This site
has a massive list of re-used Trek props, sets, make-up, etc. Just scroll down and click on anything that starts with "Re-Used". These bad boys
- This also occurs with special effects and models. A Retcon was made to justify why both Klingons and Romulans had the same D-7 Battle Cruiser, just so they could reuse the model. The Voyager episode "Dragon's Teeth" has a series of subspace corridors that was simply a different color and miscellaneous debris thrown into the quantum slipstream drive effect. In the Voyager episode 'Warlord,' they reused a ship model from the Next Generation episode 'Unification.' And especially as the series tilted towards CG ships, many different ships were recolored, resized and/or slightly modified from prior CG models to save time and money.
- In Star Trek TOS they sent out some people to go get unusual salt and pepper shakers for the mess hall scenes, so to look "futuristic". The ones they got were rejected because it was decided this would just confuse the viewers and they wound up using normal looking ones. The weird ones were moved to the sick bay and became advanced tech medical instruments.
- The bombardier-like window of a spacecraft in one episode of Star Trek: Enterprise was reused as a portal to the Xindi aquarians the following season.
Not to mention voicing the villainous Lucifer on the original Battlestar Galactica.
I'd forgotten that one, it's been years since I watched the old version.
Aw, ol' Lucifer wasn't a villain. He was a wisecracking sidekick who just happened to work for the wrong side.
Seriously (although I'm sure he could commit genocide with the best of them): Did we ever see Lucifer doing anything but trading jibes with Baltar? And with Starbuck on one occasion, I think.
Seriously (although I'm sure he could commit genocide with the best of them): Did we ever see Lucifer doing anything but trading jibes with Baltar? And with Starbuck on one occasion, I think.
I seem to recall Lucifer Commanding the Base Star during a battle or two, in Baltar's absence (Though maybe I'm remembering another character of the same Mode? I'm sure there was at least one time with Lucifer commanding Baltar's Base Star, and at least one instance of another character of the same Model commanding a different Installation/Base Star)
"Welcome Stranger" ***
A stranger who is also "lost in space" drops in on the Robinsons.
Candidly I was prepared to dislike this episode when I first saw this week's space cowboy named Jimmy Hapgood, silver space suit with a stained cowboy hat and requisite texas drawl and folksy speech manner. But at the heart of it was a man who had gone missing fifteen years before the launch of the Jupiter II and yet had no real interest in finding his way home. This little nugget of historical reference establishes that Earth has had star flight for several years or how else to explain how Hapgood gets so far out in space? Of course although the Jupiter II expedition is lost they actually might not be all that far out there relatively speaking.
One neat moment was when Hapgood chides John and Maureen Robinson for bringing their children out into deep space with them, something that could easily have been said to those aboard TNG's 1701-D. Although the production f/x is cheesy the mutated space spores did kind of underline Hapgood's reticence in bringing the Robinson children with him. And his spacecraft Travelin' Man looked barely large enough for him let alone bringing along two kids for heaven knows how long a flight.
A stranger who is also "lost in space" drops in on the Robinsons.
Candidly I was prepared to dislike this episode when I first saw this week's space cowboy named Jimmy Hapgood, silver space suit with a stained cowboy hat and requisite texas drawl and folksy speech manner. But at the heart of it was a man who had gone missing fifteen years before the launch of the Jupiter II and yet had no real interest in finding his way home. This little nugget of historical reference establishes that Earth has had star flight for several years or how else to explain how Hapgood gets so far out in space? Of course although the Jupiter II expedition is lost they actually might not be all that far out there relatively speaking.
One neat moment was when Hapgood chides John and Maureen Robinson for bringing their children out into deep space with them, something that could easily have been said to those aboard TNG's 1701-D.
Although the production f/x is cheesy the mutated space spores did kind of underline Hapgood's reticence in bringing the Robinson children with him. And his spacecraft Travelin' Man looked barely large enough for him let alone bringing along two kids for heaven knows how long a flight.I haven't seen that episode in a long time, but I seem to recall they helped Hapgood out by giving him some vital part from the Robot-- which incapacitated it. And yet the Robot was back to normal later. Did they ever explain that?
No. And the robot was indeed perfectly fine afterwards.
Convenient tech. Must have been a bio-neural gelpack!
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