[X] My Assistant

[nprev]

YouTube sure is great for finding lost memories. Anybody else remember this theme song?

Loved it as a kid, but can't even watch it as an adult. They were supposed to be on a 50-year journey to Alpha Centauri in the pilot (in suspended animation, no less), but after that damn Dr. Smith sabotaged the Jupiter II they couldn't stay in space for more than 20 minutes without crash-landing on a planet with a habitable atmosphere & (often incredibly comical) aliens to boot. Can't decide to this day whether they should have hung Smith or given him the Nobel Prize in physics for about ten years in a row...

[RedSky]

Musically... I liked the original theme better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hOJ4NI4dKo...ted&search=

(The new theme sounded too much like "The Time Tunnel"... another Irwin Allen sci-fi farse fest.

[nprev]

Yeah, I can agree with that. That later version really ramped up my adrenalin level at the age of 6 or so, though; I naturally associated it with the Gemini & Apollo countdowns. (Hey...how the hell did I get so old? )

[dvandorn]

I will point out that *both* "Lost in Space" themes (first season and second-third season) and the "Time Tunnel" theme (plus many, many other TV show themes) were written by a prolific but under-appreciated composer of the time.

Guy by the name of Johnny Williams.

About a decade later, he changed the "Johnny" to "John," wrote the score to "Star Wars," and embarked on a career that has netted him more Oscars than most men have pairs of underwear...

-the other Doug

[RedSky]

Yes, I watched Lost in Space, too. But even at 10, I thought a lot of the large papier mache alien heads just a bit too much to take seriously. Then, on the opening of the first episode of the last season, I did have a brief interest again: That's when they first dropped the "Pod" out of the J2... and it looked like a little stylized copy of the Apollo Lunar Module.

When I was 6, this is what got me hooked on spaceflight (though I could have done without the Lazoon):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-1AMrSzN40

[nprev]

(All right...RedSky might actually be older than me! ) Very cool, man; thanks!

Noticed that Gerry Anderson was the producer...wow. This guy exerted a truly seminal influence; he surely deserves a good-sized crater on the Moon or Mars as well as an asteroid named after him at the very least.

[Stu]

Bit before my time, the LOST IN SPACE TV series, but I didn't think the movie was that bad... (ducks quickly!)

I recently treated myself to the box dvd set of the incredibly under-rated 90s series SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND. Don't care about the science, which was frequently bad; it had Shane (sigh...) Vansen blowing Chigs away in one of the coolest space fighters ever built.

Kristen Cloke...

[RedSky]

(All right...RedSky might actually be older than me! ) Very cool, man; thanks!

Yeah, looks like I have a few years on you.

You're right about Gerry Anderson; I'm sure he inspired a lot of kids to get interested in spaceflight and science... from Supercar (1960), XL5 (1962)... the Thunderbirds.... to Space 1999 in the 70s.

I loved the XL5 closing theme. I remember it even getting a bit of radio play in the US back then. I just found the "real" full version. I'm glad they didn't use the bittersweet last verse on XL5; I think it would have demoralized me as a little kid. But now I can appreciate it as a realistic grounding truth for the long past hopes and ambitions of a child, but fulfilled today by web sites like this one.

http://sfwriter.com/fireball.mp3

[ustrax]

Kristen Cloke...

Special delivery for Mr. Stu...

[nprev]

I freely admit that I love to bust on Lost In Space's hoky take on science. The episode with the talking P.O'd giant mutant veggies from the hydroponic garden seemed (how to put this delicately?) incredibly stupid even at the age of six. However, they did hit some interesting ideas, albeit rarely.

There was one late season episode in which Will (and that damn Smith, of course) somehow get minaturized & end up inside the robot. In there they're harrassed by the robot's tiny little laser-equipped internal maintenance sub-bots; in fact, IIRC, the robot explained that they were his analog of white blood cells. Bearing in mind that this was the '60s, you have to wonder if this episode might have inspired some of today's nanotechnologists who are trying to develop medical applications.

This might prove one thing: the worst science fiction show is of infinitely more value to civilization than the best celebrity gossip program!

[RedSky]

I freely admit that I love to bust on Lost In Space's hoky take on science. The episode with the talking P.O'd giant mutant veggies from the hydroponic garden seemed (how to put this delicately?) incredibly stupid even at the age of six. However, they did hit some interesting ideas, albeit rarely.

Wow... I actually think I remember that! Wasn't that the one with some guy in a carrot suit going around shouting "Moisture! Moisture!" and Smith would have to hose him down.

I liked it (from a spaceflight point of view) when they finally started flying again in the 2nd season. (Had to get the AstroGator working). I forgot what that fuel was they were always drilling for. (No, not dilithium) Then, I really liked when they finally sprung for a full sized mock-up of the J2 with lower deck, landing legs extended and all. It was the episode where they thought they landed on earth (Smith was estatic) but turned out to be a planet of crazy robots. Still, the full scale J2 was neat.

[nprev]

Yeah...the J2 was cool, and I especially liked the pod (which seemed to mature as the Apollo LM became more publicly familiar at the time). The show really did seem to have a hefty production budget (in fact, IIRC, Lost In Space outspent the original Star Trek per episode); pity they didn't use some of it on better scripts...

Of course, this probably would have involved pitching Smith out the airlock sans suit at some point, which would have pleased my dad immensely. Sometimes Smith would piss him off so much that he'd get up & turn off the TV, mumbling curses under his breath!

[dvandorn]

There is an original version of the Lost in Space pilot that does not include the Smith character at all. Many portions of it were used in the pilot that eventually aired, but in the original, the Jupiter 2 simply encountered an asteroid field while the crew was in stasis, went out of control, and the Robot (IIRC) awoke the Robinsons. That pilot went on through the crash-landing and the trek ahead of the storms that ended up being used in the third or fourth episode, as aired. The original pilot had an *awful* lot of narration in it that wasn't in the aired version, either.

OK, so I have *way* too much minutae packed into this tiny little brain of mine...

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Glad you got it, DV...thanks!

Didn't know that; looks like it was originally intended to be a serious SF series, but that damn Smith (TDS henceforth) & the kid kind of hijacked the plot threads.

Oh, well; it is what it is, and I'd be lying if I said that this series wasn't a big early influence on my life in a very positive sense. We only had one TV channel in southwest Montana at that time, so Lost In Space was my default window on what could be...truly a gift, and I am grateful.

[edstrick]

Irwin Allen really never had a clue... clueless and unclueable... about the difference between Science Fiction and SciFi/Skiffy. Very few people in Hollywood ever have, though the situation has improved SOMEWHAT in the last 10, maybe 20 years.

Given that, he tried repeatedly with some success to produce televesion Science Fiction series for TV in the 60's with greater success than anybody other than Roddenberry. (Anthology series like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits are different). Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was lame, but watchable and Time Tunnel was even better. Land of the Giants was just dumb, and Lost in Space made me cringe as a young teen. The Idea had so much potential, the Reality was stupidified to death.

My nomination for the all time worst science fiction series, defined by the lowest achievement-to-promise ratio ever, is the STARLOST. It was created by Harlan Ellison and originally planned to be a big budget BBC/20'th Century Fox collaberation, building an extended story-arc like Babylon 5 did a full generation plus later. It devolved into a shoestring budget video series, filmed in Toronto Canada by a local soap-opera company, with some of the later scripts (after Harlan's introductory few scripts) literally written by Canadian high school students (to provide legally required Canadian content), as there were no Canadian scriptwriters able/available/whatever to do the job.

Harlan was so (expletives deleted.. about 20 meg of them) that he forced them to use his "going down in flames" screenwriters pseudonym "Cordwainer Bird" as the created-by and/or script-by Bylined. Flipping them the "bird"

I watched it and I wept.

Ben Bova novelized the debacle with the title "The StarCrossed", with names and details to protect the innocent from the lawsuits of the guilty.