by Robert Hornak
The faddish and fun story of the Space Family Robinson, which happens to be the name of the comic book the show was first based on, one whose creators had to sue to rectify the ignominious swiping of the concept (perhaps inadvertently) by mega-producer Irwin Allen. Long story short, Allen got to keep the concept and the comic book got to change its name to the now-more-cash-creating Lost in Space. The show is a beloved totem from that golden time when the moon missions of old-school sci-fi overlapped with daily updates of real men in real space suits in real danger, flinging themselves around the planet in tiny intrepid buckets, stoking the imagination of an entire generation of Cold War kids and preying upon the fantasy-tinged optimism of dreamers. Surely from the vantage of the pilot episode in 1965, the show’s setting of 1997 seemed too far in the future for this to finally be happening – surely we’d be launching families into space by 1975!
Besting the original Star Trek by a full television season, Lost in Space was among the first to parlay that genuine sense of humanity’s unstoppable curiosity and know-how into a weekly television franchise, but even as it ran alongside the NBC show’s more philosophical bent, and even with the unbreakable family-like bond of ever-squabbling Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, CBS’s gambit was altogether more linked to ready-made and ever-wholesome family entertainment, much more – at least at some points in its three-year run – about adventure, bonding, emotional rescue, and physical peril than some over-arching assumption of mankind’s superiority over distant worlds. In fact, if there’s anything central to the show’s DNA, it’s the plot-by-plot reminder that no matter the can-do spirit convened en force upon a single daring Jupiter 2, there’s always going to be a nagging, damning trace of human foible to bedevil any mission. The show’s most famous dynamic was the reliable flexing of prissy, whimpering, cowardly sabotage executed with regularity by stowaway extraordinaire Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris). In the first episodes, the show was much more straight adventure sci-fi, full of black-and-white gravitas and a sense of foreboding doom as the family sets sail with saboteur and accidental passenger in tow, but as the season wore along, and certainly full-blown by season two, that initial intrigue was swapped for a palpable, full-color array of broad and bumbling shtick and a monster-of-the-week gimmick that at once centered the show as one for a younger audience and forever relegated the entire affair into the camp column – perhaps erring a bit too far in the direction of one of its prime time competitors, ABC’s garishly entertaining Batman.
Smith may have slid into the foreground as the series’ most prominent human (Harris was originally only slated for the first episodes), but he’s entirely and unbreakably linked in the mind’s eye with his sidekick and reluctant co-conspirator, a robot simply referred to as Robot. In the history of Hollywood automatons, Robot is among the most instantly recognizable with its clear bubble-looking head full of blinking lights, its accordion arms affixed with electricity-tossing clamp hands, its awkward but workable tank-tread form of locomotion, and, most indelibly, its deep, crisp elocution – provided by Dick Tufeld, also the show’s narrator – most famously immortalized by the phrase “Danger, Will Robinson!” Smith reprogrammed Robot from the outset and uses it as a puppet for his weekly efforts to reroute the ship back to Earth or to mettle in some way with the good Robinson family’s dutiful self-preservation, but as played by Tufeld (with the help of actor Bob May inside the robot’s costume shell), Robot more normally comes across as independent, compassionate, longsuffering, and more often than not, sarcastic. His unique, time-proof look was provided by master Hollywood robot designer Robert Kinoshita, also behind Tobor the Great and the quintessential beauty of Robby the Robot, who indeed has a guest cameo on one of the more intense episodes, “War of the Robots”.
Smith and Robot provide the show with most of its comedy, the tonal agent that keeps the very often sub-par creature and special effects from succumbing to pretension. Any fan of the series must remember the tidal wave of Smith’s accumulated, alliterative name-calling of the poor undeserving Robot: bubble-headed booby, nickel-plated nincompoop, jabbering junkheap, and about a hundred others, all of which came from the mind of Harris himself, who saw it as his duty to spice up the “dull” sci-fi adventure with his brand of simpering cartoon evil. The result of all this married-couple barking was an effective comedy duo. But the Robot was ultimately more well-rounded than Smith, able to show his more vulnerable side when paired, as he was in nearly every episode, with the Robinsons’ youngest charge, Will (Billy Mumy). Most certainly of its time, this is still a very boy-centric show, and Will is the preternatural genius who knows all about science, space, electronics, geology, genetics, etc., while his sisters Penny (Angela Cartwright) and Judy (Marta Kristen) were cast well enough but rarely used properly in that setting, Judy especially coming off as a bland extension of the flat planetary wilderness. Her romance-as-it-were with designated military Jupiter pilot Don West (Mark Goddard) was a non-starter, plot wise – there was more chemistry in the fake rocks sitting in some unlit corner of the 20th Century Fox soundstage. But Will was the assumed engine of the show for its young audience. He got into scrapes, made huge mistakes, saved the day on occasion, and wielded his wide-eyed, matter-of-fact, Boys’ Life know-how upon many an unsuspecting alien – and much to my own glee: I was like many, a smart kid made to feel out of place for it…Will was my hero for being so casually, unceremoniously intelligent. Rounding out the cast is John Robinson (Guy Williams, who quit acting after Lost in Space to retire to Argentina where he had a major following from his earlier role as Zorro) and his wife Maureen (Lassie‘s June Lockhart), but the talents of these two fine actors were effectively subsumed by the show’s increasing simplicity over its run, reduced mostly to “brave father” and “worried mother” when needed.
The score that draws us into each episode is unmistakably John Williams, especially if you’re familiar at all with his rousing compositions for Lucas and Spielberg, with horns blaring a path through an instantly hummable tune – two actually: season one and two’s jaunty, staccato affect and season three’s more fully orchestrated adventure theme, but both feature sinew and muscle that link them easily with the alternately operatic/everyman themes of everything from Star Wars to Superman and Raiders. I don’t know if Williams wrote the closing stinger for the show, you know, the one that follows the epilogue-like new scene of looming danger that was tacked on like a weekly end-of-episode reboot. That three-note stinger, repeated once for emphasis, still bleats in my mind like a clarion call of suspense. I was watching on the old WTBS, every Sunday morning, something like 8:05 to 9:05, so the final title card’s imploring “To be continued next week…Same time, same channel!” meant something – an actual cliffhanger. The gimmick is a great throwback to the old sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers, updated for a real-life Space Age, but by 2018 necessarily turned back on its head as a nostalgia of its own. After all, if the show was set in 1997, Will is out there somewhere today, planet-hopping as a middle-aged castaway in space. Lost in Space can only be called great if it’s passed through the prism of nostalgia, but if you’re like me, inclined to use nostalgia as a metric for personal import, the show, the silliness, the costumes and the catch phrases never get old.