Why Did LOST iN SPACE Change?
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I seem to remember the same thing sort of happened with Allen’s “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” series.
That is very true :-) I've got some Voyage videos coming up :-) stay tuned, Dan
True. If they'd installed seatbelts in the Seaview, the show would have SUNK due to boredom. LOL
@@MoviesMusicMonsters I love Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Tv series. I 💕 the espionage, Political And Ailen Stories. I didn't like the monster of the week stories in the 4th & Final season. The Terrible Leprechaun is the worst episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Also Brand of the Beast ,The Mummy, The Terrible Toys , Savage Jungle Fatal Cargo & The Plant Men are also terrible episodes.
ABC believed the audience for Voyage was boys. So seasons 2-4 evolved into a juvenile adventure. Thought the penultimate episode “The Death Clock” was trippy-hippy. 7:30 pm was for family shows. The WWII series 12 O’Clock High went from an adult drama to an action show, because ABC moved its timeslot to 7:30 pm and replaced lead actor Robert Lansing with the younger-looking but chronologically older Paul Burke. I am convinced programming decisions like this made this network consistently third-place in ratings until Jiggle TV in the 70s.
The change in Lost In Space in many ways paralleled the changes to Happy Days a decade later. Happy Days started as a realistic (and humorous) look at the 50's and later, to get better ratings, it became the Fonzie show. Fonzie and Dr. Smith had much in common with their roles.
That's true too and is why I stopped watching that show, too.
Good point. The show that inspired the phrase "jumping the shark".
Yeah, Wayne! Happy Days' first season was the only one I cared for.
Yes, they jumped the shark. Rather Irwin Allen did.
The same complaint was made by "Star Trek's" co-stars, as Shatner carped to Roddenberry, that he wanted more screen time. Major script changes were routine. Nichols and Takei were very upset.
I was a teenager at the time. I saw something in the Will Robinson and the Robot characters that made the show a winner. And Penny was drop dead gorgeous!
is it just me... or is this narrator's voice just pure GOLD! 👍
Haha, hey thanks so much :-) Dan
"Last week as you recall....."
Born Jonathan Charasuchin in the Bronx to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Harris adopted the stage persona of a classically trained British actor. And that is just cool!
Yes it is!
My favorite piece of “Lost In Space” trivia was finding out a while ago that Bill and Angela hooked up a few years after the show ended and almost got married.
It went from a sci-fi series, to the Dr Smith and Will show.
I'd say the 'Dr Smith, Robot and Will' show. A perfect triple act. The rest of the LIS cast basically just faded into the background, and apparently they were not too pleased about it - but I guess they just kept getting their paychecks season after season, and were not doing anything too demanding, so just shrugged their shoulders and kept quiet about it.
@@frglee "The Evil Triumvirate" as I think of them now! LOL
Jonathan Harris was also a voice actor on “Battlestar Galactica”, as Lucifer.💜😈
Yes he was and he was awesome :-) I'm doing some Battlestar Galactica videos coming up this month :-) hope you had a great holiday, Dan
"By your command."
Yep yep yep,
And every time he KNEW it would come back to bite them on the ASS❗️💜😈
As a kid, I was fascinated by the early episodes of "Space." But as it morphed into the "Will & Dr. Smith Comedy Hour," I stopped watching. Even an 11-year-old knew garbage when he saw it.
Same here. I loved the early B-Ws and liked the attempts early in S3 at getting back to something a little more serious, but otherwise, count me out. Even as a kid.
Actually, some of LIS's best and most memorable episodes were from Seasons 2&3. However, most of them were indeed crap...
The Anti-Matter Man is one of the series best episodes.
It's certainly is. One of my all-time favorite :-)
Smith went from an evil spy to a spineless jellyfish, all in one season. Oh the pain...
I was lucky to get to have lunch with Mark Goddard and Marta Kristen once. Very nice people, down to earth. They both had nothing but the highest compliments for Johnathan Harris. They said he was the nicest man they ever worked with. Lots of praise for Guy Williams as a professional. Marta Kristen and Mark Goddard were very nice too.
I once met Marta Kristen and Mark Goddard at a convention. Mark was a little uppity, but Marta was very friendly and a pleasure to talk with. I even had lunch with her.
At the time I met them, I was working at a foster home as a teacher. Mark Goddard was doing the same kind of work in Philadelphia. We talked shop most of the time. To me he seemed quite nice. Also working with kids at a foster care facility requires some bit of kindness. Maybe you caught the guy on a bad day. But yes, Marta was also really nice.
@@richardranke3158
Marta is very sweet
I always thought the show went downhill the moment Jonathan Harris started to camp up the Dr. Smith character. It was like this decision of his marked the beginning of the show's unwatchability. I had also heard or read long ago that Harris believed his character was on the chopping block, so he decided to ham it up as a "F--- you" to those calling for his character to be removed from the show. Maybe that information was incorrect, but I still feel that Harris going camp marked the end of the show's watchability for me. It took the character of Harris' voiced Lucifer in _Battlestar Galactica_ to partially redeem the man in my eyes.
Doctor Smith is analogous to Gilligan in Gilligan's Island. Both the Robinsons and the Seven Castaways are in similar predicaments, and Doctor Smith serves a similar role as Gilliigan in driving the plot of each episode.
@@thomaskalbfus2005 Gilligan was more successful.
@@leerhode1021 that was because Gilligan's Island wasn't a science fiction show, though it did have a professor capable of inventing a bunch of crazy gadgets, but none of which got the castaways off the island!
@@thomaskalbfus2005 👍🏾
Man, those first 5 episodes were awesome before the start of the slow decline into corporate marketing madness.
I never understood it. Even as a kid, I was so disappointed when it de-evolved from a top notch Sci Fi show into a campy Sid and Marty Krofft pre-school comedy. The only thing missing was the talking flute.
You might have been a more observant kid than me. I just rolled with the changes and didn't much think about it. When I look back, though, my favourites were early episodes like Hungry Sea, There Were Giants on Earth and Follow the Leader and the Keeper.
My only complaint was with silly space versions of Earth - space pirates and Vikings. I was there for weird aliens monsters, not pantomime characters!
RIP Mark Goddard 2023
Dan, I love your impression of Smith. When my son was little back in late 90s we watched it regularly here in England and when I did the Smith impression he went into hysterics, he still does. Bungling ninny was another
Voyage to the bottom of the Sea had the same problem serious the 1st season campy when it went to color
"Oh the pain!" Now that would make a good ringtone.
My favorite show as a kid. The Dr. Smith-robot dynamic was hilarious. And the aliens were interesting.
As a kid we loved Lost in Space , when i watch an episode now I wonder how my parents put up with it.
This was my favorite show when I was a kid. Wednesday nights, 7:30, somehow remains special in my mind nearly 60 years later. Even then I regretted the change from serious to campy, but back then, kids took what they could get on network television.
Great video! Note that in the movie Lost in Space Gary Oldman played the sinister Dr. Smith - right up until the ending shot were he ran into the cockpit yelling "We're DOOMED!!" as a nod to the campy version of Dr. Smith on the TV show.
The voice of the robot, Dick Tufeld, was used in the opening of Lost In Space, The Time Tunnel and even, Peyton Place. I remember my mother sending me out of the room when Peyton Place came on.
Some of those Television execs from yesteryear look increasingly narrow minded and short sighted in retrospect. When I was a kid, the early episodes of "Lost In Space" scared the heck out of me.... but I LOVED IT! I was also watching "Dark Shadows" and the original "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" for many of the same reasons: because a lot of kids like scary movies and shows! The goofier "Lost In Space" got, the less I liked it!
As a kid watching it after school on weekdays all I remember are 3 things:
1. I loved the dark haired girl
2. Always wanted them to bust out the laser rifles and battle gear more often
3. Grew to utterly despise Dr Smith
Dr. Smith was so flaming, I can't believe he was allowed on the "family hour."
"Oh isn't that Liberace such a nice man, and he so loves his mother."
I think the theme songs and opening credits played into the change as well. The first having more of a sci-fi scare to it and the b&w animated family floating in space on a safety line. Then the second being more upbeat and pop sounding, bright colors and the actual actors in the credits with their colorful, mod costumes.
I love both equally as an adult. But as a little kid, I liked the 2nd opening more.
"Family Hour" didn't become a thing until the 1970's. Lost In Space was on opposite Batman. That's why they changed.
RIP Mark Goddard as, "Maj. Don West" who passed away in 2023.
"Oh ...the pain!!!".... of watching this show as a kid
Being in my mid teens at the time (and a huge Sci-fi fan), I was bitterly disappointed with its deterioration into crude pantomime and stopped watching the show. The fact that it only ran for three seasons proved that it was a short sighted decision to dumb the show down.
The same thing happened to Man From Uncle. I remember Robert Vaughn dancing with an ape in a treehouse. I've always considered it the Batman effect.
James Aubrey was the President of CBS. He was the executive behind Beverly Hillbillies and Giligan's Island. The campy comic LIS was a lot cheaper to produce than the early sci Fi episodes. Cost was a major factor in the demise of The Twilight Zone.
I couldn’t stand the shows you mentioned either! So stupid!
Lost in Space reruns always came on after the morning cartoons in my town, so I watched a lot of it as a kid. It’s true that the early episodes had a lot of tension and seriousness, but it leaned into Dr. Smith’s antics after a time. Always entertaining 😂
Thanks for all your work. Bill Mumy said about Harris' role in his first episode, "It was actually implied that this villainous character that sabotaged the mission and ended up with us was going to be killed off after a while." The series was successful upon its debut and, midway through the first season, Harris began to rewrite his own dialogue to add more comedy because he felt that his strength was in portraying a comic villain. Due to Harris's popularity on the show, Irwin Allen approved his changes and gave him carte blanche as a writer. Harris subsequently stole the show, mainly via a seemingly never-ending series of alliterative insults directed toward The Robot, which soon worked their way into popular culture. However , after listening to Mr. Monroe's excellent explanation of the rest of the story I now understand the actions and causes of the change. Thank you, Mr. Monroe. The elephant in the room was why would the parents permit the evil Smith to go on excursions with their child and the Robot. The first black and white season was fun. The Dr.Smith and Will Robinson show was silly and very strange. ‘Oh the pain … the pain’.
I had heard about the Robot, Wil and & Dr. Smith becoming the most popular characters, but I was not aware of the network execs directions to drive it toward kids. It makes sense as kids buy toys whereas teen boys are off chasing girls while teen girls are busy acting like they don't want to be chased.
I, like many others, loved the first season. I tolerated the next two seasons because I loved Lost in Space that much. On a personal note: I hope if there is ever a resurrection of the show that You do the voice of the robot! I was very impressed with your take on it!
Hey, thank you so much :-) I appreciate the support. I would love to do the robot voice LOL :-) Dan
@@MoviesMusicMonsters You do a pretty good Dr. Smith too!😂
They did do a resurrections on Netflix.
@@timothyirwin8974I meant if they ever bring back the original robot, I would like him to do the voice.
Have no fear! Smith is here!!!!!
That was an interesting analysis. I never thought about the time slot it was in. But it seemed as if all of Irwin Allen's shows (like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel) started off with serious intentions and gradually veered into campy fantasy. Maybe it was hard to find enough writers to crank out 26 "serious" episodes each season. I read where the writer of The Great Vegetable Rebellion had simply run out of ideas. BTW, all of the interviews with Jonathan Harris are priceless. He was quite a raconteur.
"Basically becoming the straight man to Jonathan Harris" 😂😂😂
Great breakdown of the change in direction Dan.
Thank you so much :-) Dan
I remember thinking the beautiful blonde daughter always looked lost and didn't have many lines
she was lost - in space.
It went from Intriguimg in Season 1 to Stupid in Season 2 to assenine in Season 3.
Been waiting for this one as well
Enjoy :-) let me know what you think :-) Dan
@@MoviesMusicMonsters , loved every second of it especially your spot on impressions , gave it a like cant wait till the next one , also do you have any resources or links for anyone wanting to keep up on the progress of the chariot restoration ?
Such a shame. The first season was brilliant. Once it went to color...it became a live action cartoon for kids. Even as a kid, I presumed that Dr. Smith had a mental breakdown, going from proper villain to hapless victim of his circumstances.
I don't know the original time slots, but a similar changed happened to "The Man from UNCLE". It was a serious spy series in the black and white episodes and when it switched to color it gradually got campier to the point of being completely silly. I still blame TV Batman for this shift.
Billy mumy should have sent Mr smith to the cornfield 😅
I faithfully watched Lost in Space when it first aired. I was 9 years old and had all the merchandise. However, I much preferred the first season even at my young age and became a Star Trek fan when the original series aired. I also enjoyed Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.
You know Lost in Space and Star Trek have the same parent, that is the movie Forbidden Planet, the seeds of both shows are in that movie. Forbidden Planet has a flying saucer, a robot, an organization called the United Planets, the crew of the saucer in Forbidden planet is much like the crew of the Enterprise, they have a quasi military organization similar to Star Fleet.
@@thomaskalbfus2005 Forbidden Planet has withstood the test of time, and it is still a very enjoyable movie, and it is well over sixty (60) years old.
The first five or six episodes of this show was very good science fiction and then it had to change. I prefer the black and white episodes overall.
Me too. The first half of the first season is great sci-fi Adventure :-) hope you had a great holiday, Dan :-)
The same could probably be said about "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" where that series became "the monster of the week".
But overall far more serious in tone, despite absurdity like werewolf undersea island. Even Land of the Giants, a full on the nose allegory about the thread of communism, had its ridiculously campy moments.
I'm 62 ands a new subscriber. Loved this show as a kid. The dr. and robot together ws my favorite. Thanks for all the hard work you put into this channel.
From good sci fi to campy. Oh the pain, the pain.
Great vid! I had believed Jonathan Harris' claim that he hijacked the show by his scene-stealing antics. Your explanation makes more sense. As a pre-teen kid watching LIS reruns in the 70's, I absolutely loved the show! As a teen who started getting into Star Trek, I began to totally scoff at the silliness of LIS' color episodes. As an adult, I appreciate the show for what it was. A bittersweet anecdote that demonstrates the impact this show had: I was caregiver for my elderly father who passed away at 93. During the last six years of his life, my father suffered from dementsia/Alzheimers which of course wreaked havoc on his memory. Although a college professor during his work career in the US, he came from a modest background: a Sicilian farm family. One night, my father asked me if I had "fed the donkey" thinking he was back in his old home town in Sicily. When I explained to him the reality that we were in the US and we weren't living on a farm, he realized just how messed his memory was and he replied "I'm Lost in Space like Doctor Smith!" Of all the things that still remained firmly implanted in his fading memory....
As a child I was thrilled by the special effects that made certain scenes seem other dimensional. Some kind of larger dimension inside of a smaller dimension. That was fascinating and scary to me as a kid.
The very alien design of the alien ship from 'Invaders from the fifth dimension' was memorable...
@@charlestaylor253 Got a link? The show did have it's moments. I like the way they gave each cast member their own episode or two.
@@charlestaylor253 I checked it out. But yeah a lot of their alien tech seemed to be organic. Spooky. Thrilling to us young kids.
Dude, your voice is crazy good. Also, there was immense pressure from Jonathan Harris to be a campy villain, of which he played a bunch on stage.
Hey, thank you so much :-) and yes, Jonathan was really good at playing comedic villains :-)
When I watched Lost In Space reruns as a kid, I saw the second and third seasons before the first. When I saw the earliest episodes, especially the pilot, I was shocked to see Dr. Smith and the Robot out to KILL the Robinsons and Major West! It felt like I was watching a different, darker show. I wondered "How could the Robinsons let this murderous duo travel with them on the Jupiter 2?". Actually, "murderous duo" is present-day me talking, 9 year-old me just thought those two were really, really BAD! How can this be?
At the very least, the Robot should have been dismantled or reprogrammed and Smith should have been put in a freezing tube. Instead they were treated like part of the family, albeit Smith was treated like an annoying ne'er do well uncle like Joe Carson in Petticoat Junction.
Born in 1958.
Must admit that Smith pushed all of my buttons. I hated him.
You have a great radio voice!
Thank you :-)
As a kid, I enjoyed all of it. As an adult, the first season is the best version.
I know what you mean but there were few color episodes that were good. One was about a frozen prison where all the prisoners were frozen on a pedestal and Dr Smith messed with the controls only release some of them.
"CRUSH KILL DESTROY"
This made me go back and watch the original un-aired pilot with the "Gemini 12", set October 16, 1997) that was worked into the first few episodes (no smith, no Robot). It was an actual serious attempt at "Swiss Family Robinson" in space. It's still "out there" in cyberspace.
It was actually a good pilot,with a couple interesting things.... Judy was planning a career in musical comedy before the family being picked, per the news commentator. Don West held a doctorate, not a military Major, and was their "assistant", not their "pilot", whose study was theoretical fitness for human habitation of other planets.
A couple of nits to pick:
For some reason, with the temperature dropping, John rejects Don's suggestion of staying in the ship, and to migrate south, as if a spaceship designed to travel in the cold of deep space wouldn't shield them from -150 degrees (I assume Fahrenheit).
Don gets splashed off the roof of the Chariot trying to reconnect solar batteries in the stormy Inland Sea, and everyone thinks he's gone, when he's just hanging over the side, which they could see if they just looked at the clear side walls.
John's written log entries (with a voice-over) which revealed that they were traveling in space for over 3 years before crashing (without details on their revival from suspended animation) were a nice touch, as was the ending, with "aliens" observing them after they get to the tropical area, leaving an open ending fit for a pilot episode.
If Irwin Allen had stuck with that, he might have had a true competitor to "Star Trek", but definitely not "kiddie" sci-fi (but, I liked "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" as a kid in the '60s).
But, the later movie remake and the Netflix series showed that you can go "serious" with LiS, but still be cringe-worthy...
Actually the situation with the -150 degree temperature was not really that unscientific. In space objects hold heat much better because of being in a vacuum. In our atmosphere a big part of cooling is from convection, where air brushes up against an object and absorbs heat and carries it away. Same thing when submerged in water. However in space the only way to get rid of heat is by radiation, mainly through infrared light. Think of looking at something with a night vision camera, you are seeing the heat radiating from it. Infrared radiation only eliminates a limited amount of heat however, so the Space Shuttle for example and the International Space Station have to work hard to get rid of excess heat. So the Jupiter 2 insulation could handle being in deep space, but on the planet the -150 air which is coming in contact with the spaceship would pull a tremendous amount of heat out of it.
As for the Chariot, I just saw that as a normal visual discrepancy, sort of like scenes that take place at night, we usually see things a lot better than someone would in real life. That's because if they portrayed how it actually looked then we wouldn't see much and it would not be as interesting to watch. Same thing with the storm, in "real life" it was dark, and the waves were crashing against the windows, sort of like heavy rain in a car with no windshield wipers. So it is quite conceivable that they could not see Don outside. However visually the scene was shot with plenty of light, although made to look somewhat dark and stormy, so that we as viewers could see what is going on. And there was just water (probably buckets of water) splashing against the windows but not enough to stop us (as viewers) from seeing through the windows so that we could see the waves and storm outside and add to the visual effect. So I give them a pass it wasn't really a "goof" in my opinion.
In my headcanon, the crew of the Jupiter 2 died in Season 1 from the sabotage, and the rest of the show is them travelling the astral plane. Explains the weirdness, the colorization, and changes in Smith (who dies and now shows his true cowardly nature) and the Robot (who is now simply a construct of their collective minds).
The same thing happened with Happy Days, they realised Fonzi was popular so they made every show about him and screwed it up.
Very true :-)
"screwed it up"? The show was a hit for ten years and Fonzie became an icon even 50 years later.
@@christopherjames9843lol you've obviously never heard of the phrase "jump the shark"? It was a much better show when it was about the Cunningham's and Fonzi was a better character. Also Lost in Space was a hit and Dr Smith became a legendary character as well, doesn't mean they couldn't have made it better.
"jump the shark" are you ten years old? Nobody really cared in 1977 when the Fonz was water skiing and nobody cares now. It was a comedy.@@chalkandcheese1868
Happy Days was much better prior to becoming another sitcom filmed before a live audience.
Same thing happens Voyage to the bottom of the sea
I can't binge watch "Lost In Space" like I can other classic Sci-Fi series. No disrespect to Jonathan Harris, but I can only take so much of Dr. Smith at one sitting.
And Stanley Adams as "Tybo the Carrot Man." LOL! I watched the first few episodes of "Lost in Space," then, in 1966, I boldly went where no man has gone before.
I used to note a pattern with nearly all Irwin Allen series from the 60s. They start out great and then erode into silly. I recall really enjoying most of the first season of 'Lost In Space'. The darker tone of the show as well as straight science fiction scripts appealed to me. I even had the Aurora robot and cyclops model kits. I lost interest in the show when it became silly. The same with 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea'. I never gave the others much of a chance because of this. But I imagine TV shows succumb to network execs like this all of the time.
I was ten years old when Lost in Space out and I was in seventh heaven. I loved the show but, I quickly left it when it became a fantasy farce. It may have been a kids show but, not all children are immature during adolescence. I'm nearing seventy now but, I haven't lost the kid in me. Remember, growing old is mandatory but, growing up is an option!
Bill Mumy went on to form one half of Barnes and Barnes, who gave the world the classic gem “Fish Heads”
He was great on Babylon 5 too.
I have had the pleasure of meeting Marta Kristen a few times at the conventions, she is one of the nicest most gracious ladies you will ever know .
I loved the first season when I was a kid, I used to rush home from school to watch it, when the second season started I stopped rushing home from school.
It turned into the Dr. Smith / Will screwing up show, not about exploration. Or 25% about family. Itturned stupid real quick. Love the Robot, Jupiter 2,Chariot. Thats about it.
Dr. Smith always cracked me up.
Opening theme music with the trumpet section blasting, basses rumbling was just fantastic though !
Dan, you really do a respectable Robot/Dr. Smith voice.
I've been waiting for this one!
I think you'll enjoy it :-) let me know what you think :-) Dan
@@MoviesMusicMonsters Yeah, that does explain a lot - not that it's all that surprising. Had it continued along at the pace of the first 5 episodes, the Netflix series - which DID stick mostly to serious/action/adventure, may never have happened! Great cameo on that by Bill Mumy though... : )
They wanted Star Trek to be like Lost in space. Thank God it was not done that way.
I credit the actors with the success of early Star Trek.
I think color TV also had something to do with it.
Other good shows that started with black-and-white episodes (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea springs to mind) turned into a pointless, repetitive, formula show shortly after transitioning to being "IN COLOR".
Could it be the production cost of color production made more imaginative shows prohibitively expensive?
As a kid in the early '70s, I loved Lost in Space... at first. I would come home from school in the afternoons and watch reruns of the first season of the show, on TV. It didn't bother me that those episodes were in black & white. I was fascinated! At school, I would daydream of being Will Robinson's brother and being Lost in Space with him and the Robinson family. I even began writing stories of us having adventures together. But then the show started getting campy, and I eventually lost interest. It was the same with me and the Batman reruns on TV. Even though I was an avid reader of comic books, as a kid, I did not care for that "Batman" - I found it to be silly and uninteresting.
I was there when this originally aired. I remember the disappointment when it went silly. I do remember wondering why Dr. Robinson didn't apply some summary execution to Dr. Smith after he tried to murder his family.
After the first season it was unwatchable even for my 10-11 year old self. It was summed up perfectly further down by markkomis6160 when he observed how Irwin Allen had amazing concepts that quickly deteriorated into schlock. The robot is still it's one saving grace!
Not long ago, it was showing on some broadcast network and I snagged it. I remembered it as a child and thought parts of it was really stupid but that certain segments were entertaining. Watching it as an adult, I think two episodes got me to tell my DVR to delete all.
I used to work with Rick Harris, Jonathan’s son. Jonathan would visit us a couple of times a year. Both of them were kind and extremely intelligent. I am grateful for that experience and what I learned.
In both the TV series and ANY Movie adaption I really would have shot Mr, Smith out of an airlock into space within the first 5 minutes!
If you and I both pushed airlock buttons, would Dr. Smith have been ejected farther😁?
Tybo the carrot-man needed his own spin-off show. 🤣🤣🤣
right along with floating in Space Lincoln from Star trek.
I'll bet he had 20/20 vision!👀
I liked the first season the best.
Jonathan Harris was a serious stage actor. There is no hint of his New York accent. He was raised in either Brooklyn or the Bronx .
The original pilot didn't have Dr Smith or the Robot and major West was not in the military but a Dr West.
I agree that the show was campy and silly but on that thought my favorite episode was when Dr Smith fooled around with that machine they found and accidentally ordered something from the Intergalactic Department Store. Then the great character actor from the 1940’s, Fritz Feld, playing the account’s manager came to collect the debt along with his goon enforcer. He would do his trademark clicking his heels and make a pop sound with his mouth chasing Dr Smith around the area.
Fritz Field as Zumdish was such a popular character that he made three appearances in Lost in Space, the season 2 episode _The Android Machine_ which is the one you are thinking of, _The Toymaker_ later in season 2, and the season 3 episode _Two Weeks in Space._
Another show The Wild Wild West also transitioned into camp. Also switch from B&W to color.
I didn't mind the campy nature after the second season . I was a little kid when it came out , and it was epic to me. Frankly at the time I never questioned Doctor Smith's softer , more goofy character after the first season. I just loved the adventures of that family in space. They could not have chosen a better cast of seasoned actors to play the adults , and a perfect mix for the kids. Still to this day I fondly go back and watch choice episodes on my DVD set of all the episodes.
We made sure we were home to watch it in June, July and August. I was just a boy at the time.
Essentially, Lost In Space became Laughs In Space starring Bill Mumy, Zack Smith, and the Bungling Booby.
I preferred the darker version of the show. I found it more intriguing.
Same here. If they had stayed with that tone it would have possibly made for one of the best sci-fi shows of all time.
What happened to the space chariot, the badass jet pack... And Penny's alien monkey (debby?). Some of the coolest things in the show... All gone after color transition.
great photo of the cub scout troop with smith and the robot they had fun that day
I was six back when this first aired in the 60s, and I was already a big science fiction fan, spurred on by my oldest brother who was deep into the genre. Initially, I loved the show (especially the robot and the Jupiter 2), but as the show grew sillier and Smith increasingly became the focus of it, my interest flagged--which is about the time when Star Trek hit the airwaves and gained my allegiance. Better ship. Better adventures. Better SFX. Better characters. And, more importantly, some of the best writing in television at that time.
Lost in Space had some decent episodes that I can even now watch and enjoy (though Smith never ceases to irritate me), but far too often it got even the basics of science wrong. It's amazing how ignorant and/or how (clearly) indifferent the writers (and producers) were to getting even the simplest of facts about space and space travel correct. I mean, you knew they were clueless and/or uncaring when terms like solar system and galaxy were bandied about as if they meant the same thing. And there were so many improbable situations, not least being the litany of encounters with other people (some from Earth) who never seemed to be able to help the family get back on track and find their way home (or at least to the oft-mentioned Alpha Centauri).
When you watch the original pilot for the series, you get some inkling of what the show might have been had they not had the Smith character chewing up the scenery and turning each episode into a wearying display of ham acting and over-the-top camp. I don't think it was ever going to be the measure of Star Trek, but it could have been a far better and more memorable (at least in a good way) series than it was.
By the time the third season aired my family had moved to Pakistan (because of my father's work on a Canadian aid project there), so I never got to see those final (excruciating) episodes. Even decades later, I've yet to view more than a handful of season three episodes, and of those there is little that can be said is redeeming. The Smith character had become a parody of himself, so inanely ridiculous that one couldn't even laugh at the spectacle. And you had to feel sorry for the rest of the cast, who often looked as if they'd reached the end of their tether and were just going through the motions, waiting for the nightmare to end. (Except, perhaps, Billy Mumy, who seemed to be gamely playing along with Jonathan Harris' buffoonery.)
In Pakistan I had the good fortune to discover the Gold Key Space Family Robinson: Lost in Space comics, which I initially bought because I though they were adaptations of the TV show. However, the comics were unrelated to the Allen's series, and, in my opinion, generally better. They also had a longer run than the TV series, in terms of years, and remain a favourite collectible for me. If you've never read them, you owe to yourself to seek some issues out and take a gander. Well worth it.
Born 57, I guess I was the target age for the change. 1952 Superman went through the same format change too. Like Superman, those first episodes were the best, from an adults point of view.
I was 12 years old when Lost in Space premiered and I think there is more evidence that the Batman TV show influenced the change to the camp tone of the show than the "family hour" . There were many shows that were mature and violent before and during LIS series that ran in the 7:30 to 8:30 PM time slot such as Gunsmoke,Voyage to the bottom of the Sea,Combat,Garrison's Gorrillas ,Outer Limits, 12 o'clock High,Rawhide,The Wild,Wild West , Ironhorse and two shows The Virginian and Custer of the West actually ran opposite LIS in the same time slot. In fact many family shows like Family Affair and Andy Griffth ran later in the evening. The "family hour" did not become a set programming practice until 1971 in response to an anti violence campaign on TV that sprang up after the Martin Luther King and RFK assassinations. The Family hour plan also coincided with the FCC rule in 1971 which gave the 7:30 to 8:PM time slot back to the local network channels. Source : The Complete Directory of Prime time network shows 1946 to 79.
Excellent analysis :-) and much of what you said is very true. However, I'm simply going by the reasons given directly between Communications from CBS to Irwin Allen. There's an excellent Trilogy of books by Mark Cushman, on Lost In space. The books take an extremely deep dive into this topic. Yes, once the second season hit in color there was definitely an influence from batman, but I was basically speaking with the initial changes were in the first season. Hope you had a great holiday :-) Dan
I was also 12 and I never missed an episode of Lost In Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Combat, The Outer Limits, 12 O'clock High or The Wild Wild West. They all ran in Prime Time and they were all good shows. Great times, when less was definitely more.
I was born and raised in Hawaii. We never got to see "Lost In Space" as it was released. The episodes were never shown in sequence, some episodes we never got to see, many times they would show the same show for two weeks, and they were less than 30 min. and the "TO BE CONTINUED..." we never saw in order. All TV was like that over there. Most kids watched it if there was nothing else to do.
One other change I noticed was that in the beginning, serious science fiction writers were providing the stories and/or screenplays (e. g. S. Bar-David) but after that all the writers were in-house production staff or "no-name writers" of no known science fiction credibility.