SciFi/Fantasy

Lost In Space (original TV series)

The CBS science fiction series “Lost in Space” is one of my favorite cheeseball “the future is fabulous” television classics. I love that it takes place in the far-off future year of 1997, which is now a decade behind us. I still can’t take day trips to other planets, as promised by this show’s scriptwriters — but we do have Mars Rover explorer robots on Twitter.

“Lost In Space” ran for three seasons, with a total of 83 episodes aired between 1965 to 1968. The show was intended to be a space-age interpretation of the Johann David Wyss novel “Swiss Family Robinson.” In the show’s first season — which was black and white, later seasons were color — the Robinson astronaut family sets out to colonize the purportedly earthlike planet Alpha Centauri. Their pilgrimage is sabotaged by the evil Dr. Zachary Smith, who sneaks on board their spaceship, “Jupiter 2.” Smith hacks into their robot’s innards, and reprograms it to annihilate both ship and crew.

Things get complicated: Smith himself becomes trapped on-board the ship, and saves himself and everyone else by prematurely reviving the crew from a state of suspended animation which was to last about a hundred years. The ship encounters certain peril, and is suddenly saved at the eleventh hour, but the resulting damage to their craft leaves the crew… (drum roll here) LOST IN SPACE. Interstellar hijinks ensue, for three seasons. Over that time, Smith morphed from a dastardly villain into a bumbling, bummed-out buffoon, and in doing so, became the show’s most popular character.

Embedded here is “No Place to Hide,” the show’s very first episode from that very first season. In it, the Space Family Robinson rockets off into the great beyond. I love the crude special effects throughout, and the now-dated vision of what life in the ’90s would be like. I live in Los Angeles, and watching this, I can’t help but wonder which lot they shot this on — Alpha Centauri sure looks a lot like Burbank or Pasadena.

So, a question for all you would-be commenters: What is your favorite space-schlock ’60s TV series? If it’s LOST IN SPACE, what do you love most about it, and if another favorite, why? We’ve blogged a lot about similar science fiction shows from the late 1960s on Boing Boing, including the awesomely bad German series SPACE PATROL (”Raumpatrouille”), which has the best theme music ever.

Links to related Boing Boing posts:

Video: Crazy ’60s German TV robots und dance moves
Video, MP3: More Raumpatrouille kitschtastic ‘66 German sfTV