"Mr. President, the status control on Jupiter II: as of this moment, the space craft has passed the limits of our galaxy. It's presumed to be hopelessly...lost in space." - Mission Control in "The Reluctant Stowaway"
Lost in Space: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Producer Irwin Allen was the king of mayhem. In the 1970s, he produced several wildly successful disaster movies, including The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Short on sense but long on action, these classily trashy films have become cult favorites. Before producing these films, however, Allen perfected his techniques for turning high concept into low art on television as the writer/creator of several "classic" (using that term in the broadest possible sense) shows, including The Time Tunnel, The Land of the Giants, and perhaps his most beloved TV creation, 1965's Lost in Space.
In the far distant future of 1997, the residents of overpopulated Earth are forced to explore the possibility of colonizing space. The Robinson family - Professor John (Zorro's Guy Williams), Dr. Maureen (Lassie's June Lockhart) and their three children, beautiful Judy (Marta Kristen), sensitive Penny (Angela Cartwright), and precocious Will (Billy Mumy) - is chosen to explore the far reaches of the Alpha Centauri system for a habitable planet so that other families may follow. They are to travel aboard the Jupiter II (picture a flying lemon meringue pie) along with pilot Don West (Mark Goddard) and a friendly robot named, imaginatively enough, Robot (voiced by Dick Tufeld). Their mission goes horribly awry, however, thanks to Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris), a foreign spy who tries to destroy the Jupiter II but becomes an accidental stowaway instead. While he does not stop the Jupiter II, his treachery does manage to send it into the path of a meteorite shower, cutting the ship's communications to Earth and sending it careening into an uncharted planet. There, the group must try to figure out a way back home while fighting off the elements and an endless parade of alien visitors.
The imagery and effects presented in the series are endearingly quaint, from the crew's silver asbestos oven mitt jumpsuits (reminiscent of Jiffy Pop containers) to the above-mentioned meteorite shower that seems to be made up of crumpled balls of aluminum foil. The "spectacular" creatures the Robinsons encounter are also quite amusing. The costumes worn by the various aliens and life forms would not pass muster at a preschool Halloween party. Penny even befriends a chimp she names Debby that appears to be wearing a spider-like pipe cleaner sculpture on its head. The crew encounters a family of hillbilly aliens who travel in a flying backwoods shack and a werewolf that resembles a hacked-up hairball IN THE SAME EPISODE.
Of course these bottom-of-the-barrel techniques and goofball storylines add charm to the series. Plus, while its sets do look cheap, they also display a great deal of imagination and style. For example, while the interior of the Jupiter II often looks like cheap cardboard, it does contain several small details that lend it a timeless elegance, like metallic picture frame-esque ladder that leads from one level to the other. Some of the show's special effects (like the giant the family encounters or the scene in which the Chariot, their terrestrial vehicle, becomes caught in a whirlpool), are simplistic but surprisingly effective.
While many elements of the series are appealing in a cheese-ball sort of way, there is no denying that many of the episodes - especially the earlier ones - are excruciatingly slow. Although the plotlines are generally wrapped up by the end of each hour, each episode ends with a new cliffhanger which serves as a teaser for the next show. In the early episodes, each segment of the show has a serial-style cliffhanger leading into every commercial break. This would seem like a plus since, in theory, cliffhangers should help to promote suspense and propel the plot. In practice, however, the early episodes seem to be built around the cliffhangers in connect-the-dot fashion, as the episodes lurch from commercial break to commercial break with sleep inducing padding in between.
A look at the extras included on the final disc of this set provides an inadvertent explanation. The main extra is "No Place to Hide," the series' original unaired pilot episode. The episode is action-packed and filled with adventure.but there is no sign of Dr. Smith or the Robot. The series was revamped to include those characters, but to throw out the footage filmed for the pilot would be a tremendous waste of money. The producers instead took the pilot, cut it into segments, added scenes with Dr. Smith and the Robot, and came up with "new" episodes. It is an ingeniously thrifty idea, but the unfortunate result is that one action-filled episode became five watered-down ones.
The unaired pilot gives us a fascinating glimpse at what the series might have been had the producers stuck to their original idea. While it is interesting to wonder whether or not that scuttled idea might have produced a stronger show, it is practically impossible to think of Lost in Space without the smarmily evil Dr. Smith, the Norma Desmond of space travel. With his Kohl eyeliner and smugly self-satisfied grin, Jonathan Harris takes the character's officiousness to comic heights. Harris is perhaps the only actor who could infuse dialogue with equal parts pompousness, subservience, terror, and superiority.all while talking to a beagle he suspects is a shape-shifting alien. His girlish shrieks of fear are laugh-out-loud funny - and luckily they happen in almost every episode. Much has been made lately of the rise of gay culture on television in shows like Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Queer as Folk. Vanity Fair even devoted a cover story to the phenomenon a few months back. Dr. Smith is a happy reminder that gay television characters have been around for quite some time, even if only in coded - and possibly unintentional - form.
Guest stars in the first season include Warren Oates, The Day the Earth Stood Still's Michael Rennie, Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot, Michael J. Pollard, an incredibly young Kurt Russell, and Hogan's Heroes' Werner Klemperer.
The twenty-nine episodes that make up the first season are divided onto eight discs. The DVD menus perfectly capture the mood of the series by presenting a static representation of the show's title sequence. Each episode is divided into twelve chapters.
