Today is the 60th anniversary of the network television premiere of the science fiction cult classic, Lost in Space. Can you believe it? Why, only ten years ago it was the 50th anniversary of Lost in Space!
Time flies.
I wrote extensively on the subject then — some eleventy jillion words, by my count — and if you want, you can read every one of them here (and here and here and here — it was in four parts, an epic!).
I won't rehash that mammoth exercise in boomer nostalgia except to say I think Lost in Space was much better than its detractors gave it credit for and its catchphrase "Danger, Will Robinson" is still part of the culture. Why, it even got a laugh on Young Sheldon a while back. Take that Petticoat Junction!
The original is available to stream on Hulu, may be purchased digitally from Amazon-Prime and shows up for free every Saturday night on MeTV. The Blu-Ray box set is pretty nifty, too! (Note: In 2019, the series was digitally remastered in widescreen for DVD. I don't own this set so I can't review it but I am intrigued ...)
But for Pete's sake, you don't want to watch all of it — even Will Robinson isn't that fond of the show.
Instead, allow me to recommend a single season's worth of the best Lost in Space has to offer, my highly subjective list of 24 Grade A to B-plus episodes in the order that they originally aired.
The Reluctant Stowaway — The first episode. Set in the distant future of 1997, the Robinson family and their pilot Don West (Mark Goddard) blastoff on a five-and-a-half year voyage to colonize the Alpha Centauri star system. A saboteur, Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris), is trapped on board and when the mission's environmental control robot goes berserk, the ship becomes hopelessly lost in space!
The Derelict — The Robinson family encounters what appears to be a derelict spaceship in deep space. This episode features the best special effects sequence in the series' history — and maybe anybody's history.
Island in the Sky — Thanks to sabotage at the hands of the villainous Dr. Smith, first John Robinson (Guy Williams) then the Jupiter 2 crash land on an alien world.
There Were Giants in the Earth — As the Robinsons struggle to survive on their new home, they encounter a giant cyclops, mutant snap peas, and a malfunctioning robot hellbent for murder. This episode and the next one rely heavily on re-purposed footage from the unaired pilot.
The Hungry Sea — More challenges face our intrepid band of pioneers including earthquakes, electrical storms, cave-ins and an ocean cruise that makes the Titanic look like The Love Boat. This was the last of what I call the Origin Story Miniseries, five interlocking episodes that established the foundation of the show.
My Friend, Mr. Nobody — A rare episode that centers on Penny (Angela Cartwright), this is a poignant fairy tale about a lonely little girl and her not-so-imaginary imaginary friend. The sort of thing Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone excelled at.
Invaders from the Fifth Dimension — Mouthless, disembodied aliens need a brain to replace a burned-out computer component and notice Will (Billy Mumy) has a pretty good head on his shoulders. So they task Dr. Smith with bringing it to them on a metaphorical plate. The show would recycle this plotline over and over but the first time out, it feels fresh. Plus their spaceship is cooler than anything Star Trek ever served up.
The Sky Is Falling — Paranoia and xenophobia is the order of the day when colonists from another planet arrive on the Robinsons' world. Wait until ICE hears about this!
Wish Upon a Star — Filled with the first season's signature elements, this is a top-notch morality tale about the dangers of getting everything you want. Features wonderfully weird expressionistic cinematography, unexplained alien artifacts, and Dr. Smith's self-absorbed jack-ass-ery.
One of Our Dogs Is Missing — Way back in the series' first episode, June Lockhart's character is introduced as "Dr. Maureen Robinson." Apparently she got her PhD in Space Laundry because aside from baking the occasional chocolate cake, washing clothes is all you ever see her do. This is just about the only episode centered on Maureen, here battling an unseen monster terrorizing the camp. It's not perfect — the men are condescending [jerks] and Dr. Smith has never been sillier — but June Lockhart is one tough cookie.
Attack of the Monster Plants — As daughter Judy, Marta Kristen rarely got a chance to shine but here she showed off a saucy bite as her own evil doppelgänger. Like much of season one, there's a dream-like quality to the mood and cinematography that papers over some of the episode's nuttier flights of fancy.
Return from Outer Space — Will borrows an alien transporter and beams himself to 1997's equivalent of Mayberry RFD. Apparently the internet is down because nobody recognizes Will or believes his story that his family is lost in space. This is probably Bill Mumy's best work on the show and maybe the best thing he did after that Twilight Zone episode where he kept wishing people into the cornfield.
The Keeper (Parts 1 and 2) — The only two-parter during the show's run, this one stars Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still) as an intergalactic zookeeper looking for two new specimens for his exhibit — Will and Penny! This was the high watermark of the show's original (serious) concept of a family struggling to survive in a hostile environment. After this, the camp crept in with mixed results.
War of the Robots — The first episode where the Robot crosses over from a mere machine, no matter how clever, into a fully-conscious Turing-Test artificial intelligence. Featuring Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot. If Will was the show's hero, and Smith its plot-driving irritant, the Robot was its soul.
The Magic Mirror — Penny falls through a magic mirror into a dimension with a population of one — a boy (Bonnie and Clyde's Michael J. Pollard) who promises she'll never have to grow up. A beautiful and bittersweet fairy tale about coming of age on the final frontier.
The Challenge — Kurt Russell plays a young prince from a warrior planet trying to prove to his father (Michael Ansara) that he's worthy of his respect and love. A good story about father-son relationships, plus Guy Williams gets to show off the fencing skills that earned him the title role as Disney's Zorro.
A Change of Space — Will takes a ride in an alien space ship and winds up with the most brilliant mind in the galaxy. And still he has to brush his teeth before bedtime! This is one of those episodes that underscores my contention that not all of the trouble Will found himself in was of Dr. Smith's making.
Follow the Leader — The spirit of a long-dead warrior possesses Professor Robinson and turns this warm, rational man into a vicious, unpredictable bastard. Dark, moody, occasionally terrifying. Pop-culture critic John Kenneth Muir called this episode a parable of "alcoholism in the nuclear family." The last episode of season one, and the last in glorious black-and-white, this was one of the series' very best.
Wreck of the Robot — The only season two episode on my list, here three faceless aliens in bowler hats lust after the Robinson's robot for undisclosed and no-doubt nefarious purposes — I'm guessing as research for Elon Musk's next sex partner. Who knows. But it's a good episode and for once it's not Dr. Smith's scheming that drives the plot.
Condemned of Space — The Robinsons are captured by a prison spaceship and Major West winds up hanging by his thumbs. With Marcel Hillaire as a charming murderer who strangles his victims with a string of pearls.
Visit to a Hostile Planet — The Robinsons finally make it back to Earth only to discover it's 1947 and everyone thinks they're alien invaders. A cross between Star Trek and any given day on Fox News.
The Anti-Matter Man — An experiment gone wrong transports Professor Robinson into a parallel dimension where he meets his own evil self. The scenery is summer stock by way of Dr. Caligari, and Guy Williams (having the most fun as an actor since Zorro) gets to chew on all of it. The best episode of the show's third and final season.
The Great Vegetable Rebellion — Featuring a giant talking carrot played by Stanley Adams (of Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles" fame), this is, in the words of Bill Mumy, "the worst television show in primetime ever made." TV Guide respectfully disagrees, ranking it 76 on its list of the 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. This is either the apotheosis of camp or gloriously awful must-see tv. Don't miss it.
Trivia: Originally, the episode was to co-star a trained llama but it kept biting Jonathan Harris and he refused to work with it. Watching with me one day, the long-suffering Katie-bar-the-door muttered, "This would make more sense with an actual llama!" It was that kind of show.
And check out these episodes on your own time:
Season one — All That Glitters.
Season two — The Prisoners of Space, Trip Through the Robot.
Season three — Flight Into the Future, Space Creature, Target Earth, Time Merchant.
Well, that's it. Gosh, I sure do hope I'm around in ten years to do this all again!
June Lockhart is 100 years old today. And, yep, she's still with us!
A personal favorite of mine, she was in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, 1944's classic Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St. Louis, played Timmy's mom on Lassie ...
And here's a little known fact — the Allman Brothers, when they were known as the Hour Glass, were the house band at June Lockhart's wild parties in the 1960s!
Katherine and I saw her on stage at the Kennedy Center in Steel Magnolias, 35+ years ago.
But for me, I'll always love her best as Dr. Maureen Robinson on television's Lost in Space. Week-in and week-out, she lived a marginal existence on the raggedy end of the final frontier, cooking dinner, folding space laundry, and fretting on cue as her precocious son Will, the troublesome stowaway Dr. Smith, and a wisecracking Robot stole the show out from under her. All without a discouraging word.
One of the few episodes that featured her was "One of Our Dogs is Missing." Although set in 1997, the show usually ignored the fact that Betty Friedan was already a household name by 1965, but here June Lockhart got to show off her acting chops when Maureen is left in charge of the ship while the men are away. Threats abound and she handles them all with brains, bravery and quiet resolve.
It was fifty years ago today that Lost in Space made its television premiere on CBS, and in a year chock-full of momentous events — the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the march on Selma, the assassination of Malcolm X, the establishment of Medicare, and lots of great new Beatles music — the premiere of Lost in Space was probably the most memorable.
Or at least it's the one I'm writing about.
I didn't see the premiere — my devotion to the show began during its first years of syndication, about five years later — but still, pretty exciting.
And at last, all 84 episodes of Lost in Space are available on Blu-Ray, fully-restored and remastered with documentaries, interviews, a cast read-through of Bill Mumy's reunion script, and much, much more. Heee wackity do!
I assume most of you pre-ordered your set and are ripping the cellophane off the packaging even as you're reading this, planning to watch the entire series in single three-day marathon sitting. And who can blame you? But for the rest of you, maybe you don't know the series that well or — is it possible? — have never seen it at all, and would prefer to dip your toe into the shallow end of the pool, watching a few select episodes for free (with limited commercial interruption) on Hulu.
Whatever your plans, here's a list that might help you decide where to start (click on the title to watch the episode):
THE ORIGIN STORY "MINISERIES"
Not really a miniseries, of course, but interconnected chapters of one storyline, these five episodes take us from the initial liftoff through the family's first few months on an uncharted planet. Along the way, you'll discover how the Robinsons got lost in the first place, how they reacted to their first close encounter with an alien species, and how the show's best known characters, the villainous Dr. Smith and his odd-couple sidekick, the Robot, came to be on board. Featuring all the best set pieces from the unaired pilot, if you're new to the series or just looking to skim the cream off the top, this is a good place to start. The Reluctant Stowaway The Derelict Island in the Sky There Were Giants in the Earth The Hungry Sea
BEST EPISODE OF SEASON ONE
My Friend, Mr. Nobody — A rare episode that centers on Penny (Angela Cartwright), this is a poignant fairy tale about a lonely little girl and her not-so-imaginary imaginary friend. The sort of thing Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone excelled at.
MOST TYPICAL EPISODE OF SEASON ONE
Wish Upon a Star — Filled with the first season's signature elements, this is a top-notch morality tale about the dangers of getting everything you want, featuring wonderfully weird expressionistic cinematography, unexplained alien artifacts, the harsh reality of frontier living and Dr. Smith's self-absorbed jack-ass-ery.
WORST EPISODE OF SEASON ONE
The Space Croppers — A family of shiftless space hillbillies (led by Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge) cultivate a carnivorous crop that threatens to devour the Robinsons. This was the series' first full-blown foray into WTF. It wouldn't be the last.
BEST EPISODE OF SEASON TWO
The Prisoners of Space — In this, the best episode of the worst season, a menagerie of alien creatures put the Robinsons on trial for violating the laws of outer space. Kafka with monsters.
MOST TYPICAL EPISODE OF SEASON TWO
Revolt of the Androids — A couple of androids drop in on the Robinsons, Dr. Smith hatches a get-rich-quick scheme, and human sentimentality wins the day. This one did at least spawn the catchphrase "Crush! Kill! Destroy!"
WORST EPISODE OF SEASON TWO
The Questing Beast — So many to choose from, among them "The Space Vikings", "Mutiny in Space", "Curse of Cousin Smith", etc. Here, Penny befriends a papier-mâché dragon that is being hunted by a bumbling knight in King Arthur's armor. How can something so campy be so boring?
BEST EPISODE OF SEASON THREE
The Anti-Matter Man — An experiment gone wrong transports Professor Robinson into a parallel dimension where he meets his own evil self. The scenery is summer stock by way of Dr. Caligari, and Guy Williams, having the most fun as an actor since Zorro, gets to chew on all of it. Great stuff, and for those philistines among you who won't touch black-and-white, the best of the color episodes.
MOST TYPICAL EPISODE OF SEASON THREE
Visit to a Hostile Planet — Season three was wildly uneven, but at least it was trying, leavening genuine science fiction with campy comedy. Here, the Robinsons finally make it back to Earth only to discover it's 1947 and everyone thinks they're hostile, alien invaders. A cross between Star Trek and Dad's Army. Good stuff.
WORST EPISODE OF SEASON THREE
The Great Vegetable Rebellion — Featuring a giant talking carrot played by Stanley Adams (Cyrano Jones of Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles"), this is, in the words of Bill Mumy, "probably the worst television show in primetime ever made." So bad, it's good, this is gloriously awful must-see tv.
BEST GUY WILLIAMS (PROF. ROBINSON) EPISODE
Follow the Leader — The spirit of a dead alien warrior possesses Professor Robinson and turns this warm, rational man into a vicious, unpredictable bastard. Dark, moody, occasionally terrifying, pop-culture critic John Kenneth Muir called this episode a parable of "alcoholism in the nuclear family." One of the series' very best.
BEST JUNE LOCKHART (MAUREEN) EPISODE
One of Our Dogs Is Missing — Although set in 1997, the show usually ignored the fact that Betty Friedan was already a household name by 1965, but here June Lockhart gets to show her chops when Maureen is left in charge of the ship while the men are away. Threats abound and she handles them all with brains, bravery and quiet resolve.
BEST MARK GODDARD (MAJOR WEST) EPISODE
Condemned of Space — I've already mentioned "The Hungry Sea" and "The Anti-Matter Man", so I'll go with this one where the Robinsons are captured by a prison spaceship and Major West winds up hanging by his thumbs on an electronic rack. Admittedly, he had more lines in "The Space Primevals" and "Fugitives in Space", but both of those episodes suck. With Marcel Hillaire as a charming murderer who strangles his victims with a string of pearls.
BEST MARTA KRISTEN (JUDY) EPISODE
Attack of the Monster Plants — As daughter Judy, Marta Kristen rarely got a chance to shine but here she showed off a saucy bite as her own evil doppelgänger. Like much of season one, there's a dream-like quality to the mood and cinematography that papers over some of the episode's nuttier flights of fancy.
BEST BILL MUMY (WILL) EPISODE
A Change of Space — As the series' true hero, there are a lot of Will-centered episodes to choose from — "Return from Outer Space", "The Challenge", "Space Creature", among others — but I'll go with this one in which Will takes a ride in an alien space ship and winds up with the most brilliant mind in the galaxy. And still his father doesn't take him seriously! This is one of those episodes that underscores my contention that not all of the trouble Will found himself in was of Dr. Smith's making.
BEST ANGELA CARTWRIGHT (PENNY) EPISODE
The Magic Mirror — Well, the second best, and like the previously-mentioned "My Friend, Mr. Nobody", this is a poignant fairy tale about coming of age on the final frontier. Here, Penny falls through a magic mirror into a dimension with a population of one — a boy (Michael J. Pollard) who promises she'll never have to grow up. Beautiful and bittersweet.
BEST JONATHAN HARRIS (DR. SMITH) EPISODE
Time Merchant — Let's be honest, from best to worst, they were all Dr. Smith episodes. Originally, I planned to pick the episode where Smith isn't a colossal dick, but it turns out there isn't one, so instead I went with this one, an inventive and visually-Daliesque time travel story that poses the question, "What if Smith hadn't been on the show in the first place?"
BEST ROBOT EPISODE
War of the Robots — The first episode where the Robot crosses over from a mere machine, no matter how clever, into a fully-conscious Turing-Test artificial intelligence. Featuring Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot. If Will was the show's hero, and Smith its plot-driving irritant, the Robot was its soul. See also "The Ghost Planet", "The Wreck of the Robot", "Trip Through the Robot", "The Mechanical Men", "Flight into the Future", "Deadliest of the Species", "Junkyard in Space".
BEST GUEST STAR
The Challenge — A lot to choose from — among those I haven't mentioned, Warren Oates, Werner Klemperer, Kym Karath, Strother Martin, Wally Cox, Francine York, John Carradine, Daniel J. Travanty, Lyle Waggoner, Edy Williams, Arte Johnson — but I'm going with Kurt Russell who plays a young prince from a warrior planet trying to prove to his father (Michael Ansara) that he's worthy of his trust, respect and love. A good story about father-son relationships, plus Guy Williams gets to show off the fencing skills that earned him the title role as Disney's Zorro.
BEST ALIENS
Invaders from the Fifth Dimension — The cyclops ("There Were Giants in the Earth") is the most iconic, the "bubble creatures" ("The Derelict") the most outré, but I'm going with the mouthless, disembodied heads from this one. Stranded while visiting from another dimension, they need a brain to replace a burned-out computer component and notice Will has a pretty good head on his shoulders. So they task Dr. Smith with bringing it to them on a metaphorical plate. The show would recycle this plotline over and over but the first time out of the box, it feels fresh. Plus their spaceship is cooler than anything Star Trek ever served up.
BEST OF THE REST
The Keeper, Parts One and Two — The only two-parter during the show's run, this one stars Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still) as an intergalactic zookeeper looking for two new specimens for his exhibit — Will and Penny! Coming at the midpoint of season one, this was the high watermark of the show's original (serious) concept of a family struggling to survive in a hostile environment. After this, the camp crept in with mixed results.
Hope you watch at least one episode of Lost in Space. If you do, leave a comment and let me know what you think.
September 15th is the fiftieth anniversary of the network premiere of the sci-fi classic television show, Lost in Space. In the days leading up to that anniversary, I'll be recycling a couple of old posts on the show and adding a couple of new ones.
Although CBS executives liked Lost in Space enough to put it on 1965's Fall schedule, producer Irwin Allen made two major additions to the show that would radically change the trajectory of the series.
The first was a piece of hardware, a "model B-9 environmental control robot" to survey the new world. The Robot, as it came to be known, was a request of the network which rightly thought, What's science fiction without a robot? Robert Kinoshita, who had created Robby the Robot for Forbidden Planet, designed it, Bob May climbed inside the costume every week and Dick Tufeld added the voice. (See a nice series of interviews about the Robot here.)
The second addition was that of Dr. Zachary Smith, a saboteur, unintentional stowaway and the Robinsons' chief nemesis.
Smith came at the suggestion of the newly-hired story editor, Tony Leader, who noted that the pilot lacked any discernible conflict. Without a villain, the series risked falling into what Leader dubbed a "monster of the week" format.
"[W]e realized we really needed that irritant within the family," said the pilot's co-author, Shimon Wincelberg. "Someone who would get others into trouble, and that's where Dr. Smith came in."
Cast to play Smith was character actor Jonathan Harris, a 15-year veteran of stage and television. Born in the Bronx to Jewish-Russian immigrants, Harris earned a pharmacy degree at Fordham University but chose to pursue acting instead.
Irwin Allen offered Harris the part, sight unseen, on the strength of his work on the television series The Third Man which starred Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still).
"I was ushered into 'the presence,'" Harris said later, describing his first meeting with Irwin Allen, "and there he was behind a huge desk surrounded by a group of his 'retainers' — also known as 'yes men' in the industry — and it was very strange, it was the wildest way to get a job that I'd ever experienced. He said, 'Do you want to be in the series?' And I said, 'Well, I don't know — I haven't read a script.' And Irwin said, 'Somebody give him a script!' Somebody did ... Then he said, 'You know we did a pilot and you weren't in it.' I said, 'And?' He said, 'Now you're in it!'"
Since the rest of the cast had already been signed, Harris was relegated to last place in the credits, a situation that didn't sit well with the experienced actor until he came up with the idea of a weekly "Special Guest Star" billing, an industry first. Harris received this unique billing for every one of the 83 episodes of the show's three-year run.
Allen and his team also made several other changes as the process went on — commissioning "Johnny" Williams (who would later win five Oscars for scoring such movies as Jaws and Star Wars) to write a proper theme and score; tweaking the ship's design and redubbing it the Jupiter 2; changing Don West from a scientist to a pilot; shortening the flight time to Alpha Centauri from 98 to five-and-a-half years; adding a voice-over narration and a weekly cliffhanger ending, etc.
Inserting the new cast members and the other changes into the Robinson's origin story rendered the pilot as written unuseable. But having already spent $600,000, an astronomical sum at that time, Allen was determined to reuse as much of the original footage as possible.
The solution was to build a separate episode around each of the special effects set pieces — the liftoff, the meteor storm, the crash landing, the cyclops, the monsoon — and then fit Smith and the Robot into the narrative, explaining away their absence at key moments. The original pilot's co-author, Shimon Wincelberg, wrote the teleplay for the new opener and outlined what would become the first five episodes.
The series' new five-part backstory opens on October 16, 1997, with the Robinson family and their pilot Don West preparing to blastoff on a five-and-a-half year voyage to colonize the Alpha Centauri star system. A saboteur, Dr. Smith, is trapped on board during liftoff, and when the mission's environmental control robot goes berserk, the ship becomes hopelessly lost in space.
After an encounter with what appears to be a derelict space ship, the Jupiter 2 crash lands on an uncharted world. There, the family struggles to survive in the new world's hostile environment, battling giants, earthquakes, raging seas — all the special effects menaces the original pilot threw at them and few more to boot.
Throughout, Smith butts heads with the Robinsons, attempting on more than one occasion to kill the family and hijack the ship, only to grudgingly realize that his survival is inextricably linked to theirs.
If the original pilot lacked a conflict — other than what pop culture critic John Kenneth Muir recently summed up as the series' "one core concept: the pioneer spirit" — the writers who refashioned the origin story went about creating conflicts galore.
What's more, the conflicts arise not just from external sources — the Robinsons against Dr. Smith or the Robinsons against the elements — but from within the group itself. Professor Robinson (Guy Williams) and Major West (Mark Goddard), as the scientist and military man, respectively, each bring skills to the table that make them uniquely qualified to lead the group, but also leave them with blind spots that could get everyone killed.
"You're in no position to give orders," Robinson tells West.
"Oh, but you are?" West says. "It's too bad there isn't judgment to go along with that self-confidence."
When the tension between the two finally comes to a full boil, each proves to be both right and wrong, a refreshing ambiguity the series could have further exploited but didn't.
Particularly gratifying is the effort the writers made to bring June Lockhart's Maureen Robinson to the fore and give her something to do other than — as was literally shown in the original pilot — just washing clothes.
"Don't you have an opinion?" she snaps at her husband when the group is debating whether to return to earth or press on.
"No, I don't," he says. "Not until we've checked every component inside out and know exactly how we stand."
"And then?"
"And then I'll let the computer make the final decision."
"And will the computer also take into consideration a man's love and concern for his family? Or has all that been put into cold storage for the duration?"
Later when the Professor's line breaks during a space walk, it's Maureen who suits up and rescues him.
"Lost in Space tends not to be remembered by fans for such triumphs," (Muir again) "perhaps because much of the time Maureen is also depicted engaging in stereotypically 'female' duties: doing the laundry and making dinner. That’s a shame, because there are incidents, peppered throughout the series, when the Robinson matriarch steps out of the 'subservient' wife figure and acts courageously, responsibly and with more than a little bit of ingenuity."
The retrofit was seamless and nearly every minute of the pilot wound up in the series. The characters are interesting, the story exciting and the special effects — those from the original pilot plus a terrific new sequence involving the derelict alien ship — are excellent.
The result plays as a stand-alone mini-series, the only time other than the two-part "Keeper" episode where the events of one episode affected the episode after it.
Pretty much the only person unhappy with the tone of the opening episodes was the actor playing the single-most interesting character in them.
"[Smith] was written as a deep-dyed snarling villain," Harris said, "and he bored the sh*t out of me — because there is no longevity in deep-dyed snarling villainy."
Deep-dyed snarling villainy is right! Wincelberg had envisioned Smith as a literal heavy (to be played by Carroll O'Connor, later of All in the Family) and before the opening credits of the very first episode have begun, Smith kills an armed guard and programs the Robot to destroy the spaceship with all hands aboard.
Hey, it could have been worse — Wincelberg originally had him killing a little girl!
"He knew from the very beginning," Bill Mumy said last year in an interview for the Archive of American Television, "that this snarling, nefarious spy/saboteur would be old quick, that the audience would just want to see him killed off. So he very quickly started turning the character into a comedic kind of Dr. Smith that we all love to hate."
"A series means you get paid every week," Harris explained. "That's very, very important."
Harris had made a career specializing in comedic villains, and he immediately set about transforming the character into something more to his liking.
"I would be called into Jonathan's trailer," Mumy said. "Jonathan would say, 'Let's go over the scene, I've changed all the dialogue!' And he did! He single-handedly created the character of Dr. Smith."
The changes came quickly. In the second episode, Smith first displays his cowardly horror of all things alien. In the third episode, we first see Smith's childish temper. By the fourth episode, Harris was playing him as lazy, effete and not above using children as human shields. In the fifth episode, he began bantering with the Robot, a byplay that would provide the foundation of the show's most enduring relationship.
"He became a funny character, the kind of guy who would say, 'let's you and he fight — I'll hold your coat,'" said Carey Wilber who wrote seven episodes of Lost in Space but who might be better remembered for scripting the character of Khan for an episode of Star Trek.
Irwin Allen soon confronted Harris about the changes he was making to his character. "I know what you're doing," he said, wagging a finger in the actor's face. "Do more!"
"And I did!" Harris said.
"He's the only actor I ever worked with on any show," Mumy said, "who had carte blanche — producer's approval — to write all his dialogue."
With that kind of license, coupled with an ability valued on a weekly television show to turn out scene after scene in a single take, Harris took over the show.
I can't blame either Harris or Allen. Television characters, like water, find their own level. Smith was what the fans wanted to see and Allen, in the business to turn a profit, was happy to oblige them. Like baseball in Bull Durham, acting may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.
"I loved that character," Harris said. "Of all the many, myriad characters I have played in my life, he surely is my favorite."
Many take as an article of faith that Harris ruined the show with his campy clowning, but that's a lazy kind of faith and, like Lost in Space itself, long overdue for a reevaluation.
The fact is, as much as I loved (and still love) the straight sci-fi adventure aspects of the series, fifty years later it's the comedic villainy of Dr. Smith and his long-running verbal jousts with that mechanical Jiminy Cricket, the Robot, that the culture has chosen to remember.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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