I was not even two years old in mid-September of 1965, so I have no memory of the premiere of Lost in Space on network TV sixty years ago. I vaguely remember watching an episode here and there from the final season in 1968, but that’s the extent of my connection to the show’s initial run.
My clearer memories are from the early to mid-1970s, when the local UHF independent station in northeast Ohio (WUAB, Channel 43) ran syndicated episodes of the show every weekday afternoon. It was an after-school ritual that I adhered to until sometime around the fifth grade.
There aren’t many American kids raised on TV in the ‘60s and ‘70s who don’t have at least a basic familiarity with Lost in Space. Created by Irwin Allen, it was based on the intriguing premise of a family in space, on a perilous journey that takes them hopelessly off course, forced to rely on their own courage and resourcefulness to survive. It was a futuristic riff on The Swiss Family Robinson, the 1812 adventure novel by Swiss author Johann David Wyss.
At the head of Allen’s extra-orbital family were John and Maureen Robinson, played by Guy Williams and June Lockhart – formerly of Zorro and Lassie fame, respectively. Don West, the pilot of the saucer-shaped Jupiter 2, was played by Mark Goddard, previously seen on Johnny Ringo and The Detectives a few years earlier.
And then there were the Robinson kids: Judy (Marta Kristen), the blonde-haired, blue-eyed older sister whose character development was practically nonexistent over the course of three seasons; Penny (Angela Cartwright), the occasionally petulant but ultimately kind-hearted middle child; and Will (Billy Mumy), the youngest and most precocious of the three.
Aside from the ship itself, the family’s most sophisticated piece of equipment was a walking, talking mechanical unit known only as the Robot. Operated from the inside by stuntman Bob May and voiced by Dick Tufeld, the Robot was a barrel-shaped affair with upper and lower appendages in the form of accordion arms and legs. Its primary weapon was a high-voltage charge delivered from the claws at the end of each arm.
But the Robot wasn’t the real casting anomaly. That distinction belonged to Dr. Zachary Smith, the “Reluctant Stowaway” (per the title of the very first episode) played by Jonathan Harris, a veteran character actor and a scenery chewer of the highest order. Smith was the military physician assigned to oversee and confirm the family’s fitness for the mission prior to launch, but he got trapped aboard the Jupiter 2 moments before liftoff, which set the story’s perilous trajectory in motion.
Things got off to a good start with a solid ensemble cast, a sleek futuristic sensibility (this version of “the future” was actually 1997), and excellent visual effects. But like the mission itself, the show veered off course by the end of the first season – not by accident but by design, and with the blessing of the show’s producer.
The shift in focus and tone was the result of Harris’ strategy to maintain job security. He admitted as much in interviews years after the show went off the air. He was added to the existing cast after the fact (with “Special Guest Star” billing) and edited into the original pilot after it had already been filmed but not yet aired. Smith was written as a saboteur whose unplanned extra weight at launch time contributed to the ship’s errant flight path. He was created to be the enemy within – an ever-present human villain, creating an additional layer of danger on top of whatever alien adversaries and galactic perils the family might encounter.
But Harris, convinced that his character would be written out of the show, started rewriting dialogue on the fly and restructuring entire scenes that featured himself, Mumy and the Robot. After a few episodes, Allen caught onto what Harris was doing – and in a surprising turn, the producer told the actor to keep doing it. Over time, the modifications gradually transformed Smith into a whiny and manipulative comedic villain and positioned the Smith/Will/Robot trio as the focus of the show, pushing the rest of the cast to the margins.
The result was a weird hybrid of sci-fi adventure and intergalactic absurdity. By the second and third seasons (now in color after a black-and-white start), the plotlines got more bizarre with each episode: a traveling space zoo; Smith as a long-haired hippie; a perilous journey through an oversized version of the Robot; a planet populated by human-sized, walking, talking vegetables. Through it all, Smith spent most of the time whimpering about the pain in his “delicate back” and hurling alliterative invectives at the Robot. More than one cast member admitted years later that they often fought to keep a straight face when the cameras were rolling.
After a while, even at the age of eleven or twelve, I could see it for what it was. And it was kind of bonkers.
Thirty years after the show went off the air, Hollywood tried a big-screen adaptation in 1998. The cast included A-listers William Hurt and Mimi Rogers as John and Maureen Robinson, and Gary Oldman as Dr. Smith – along with some clever cameos by several cast members from the original series. But much like its predecessor, the movie got off to a good start and then lost its way about halfway through.
More recently, Netflix launched its own three-season reimagining of the series in 2018. This was a more serious take on the franchise, with a legitimate story arc for each member of the family and a gender-swapped Smith played by Parker Posey, whose interpretation of the character is more manipulative and more of an existential threat to the Robinsons. The Robot, meanwhile, is an alien entity that the family encounters on their travels and cautiously befriends, even when they’re unsure of its motives. It utters very few words throughout the series but plays a pivotal role in the resolution of the story arc in the final season. (And yes, it occasionally says, “Danger, Will Robinson.”)
The Robinsons of 1965 were still lost at the end of three seasons and 83 episodes, but they’re in good company to this day. The show’s enduring appeal may be just another nostalgia trip back to the ‘60s, but if it is, it’s a trip that adheres to the most basic definition of nostalgia – a mashup of the ancient Greek words nostos (“a return home”) and algos (“pain”). Over the course of several centuries, the word came to mean “homesickness.”
There’s a reason why this bit of etymology is relevant. Sixty years after the Jupiter 2 left the launch pad and drifted off course, the original Lost in Space still enjoys an army of nostalgic fans who pay no mind to the absurdity of it all because it steers them back toward something in their past that’s safe and comfortable and enduring.
We keep checking in on the Robinsons and their goofy odyssey decade after decade because, just like them, we ache to reconnect with a familiar place that feels like home.
Oh, the pain.