JOURNAL: CHILDHOOD MEMORIES...OF LOST IN SPACE

I don't know if combining Forbidden Planet with Seinfeld and Gilligan's Island is exactly on target, but there are elements of all three. I was in second grade when this show premiered, and I never missed an episode. The stories were always interesting to me, and even at age eight the character of Dr. Smith absolutely captured my imagination. There are aspects of this fellow that are so very interesting - here is a guy with a great deal of education who never seems to have learned anything from the mythology he is always reciting to everyone, as in "All That Glitters", my all-time favorite episode. He didn't remember the tragedy of King Midas when he was making his wish? His greed and his cowardice override any mental advantage he may have. He is truly the George Costanza of space exploration - whenever he stumbles upon a piece of good fortune he has to milk it for all it's worth until the whole situation turns on him. Then there are the children - Will and Penny. No matter what Dr. Smith does they still like the guy, and he does a lot. He bargains with aliens to take Will's brain for their experiments instead of his, and in another episode turns Penny into platinum, although he does feel remorse about the latter deed. In fact, the children are Smith's only friends. He is merely tolerated by the adults, and for good reason.

There is the "innocence and chastity beyond reason" element that was part of Gilligan's Island and is part of this show too. Despite the only natural and healthy attraction between Major Donald West and Judy Robinson, we are to believe that nothing really happens between the two for years on end. Also like Gilligan's Island, although the group's first priority starts off as finding a way to return to earth, eventually they settle into a kind of domestic tranquility and seem to make peace with their situation of being "lost in space".

Of course, rewatching this series over forty years later, it is not quite as great as I remembered it, but it is still great fun and Smith is still a fascinating character. It's also interesting to see what people in the 1960's thought earthly civilization would be like in 1997. It's humorous yet somewhat tragic to see the optimistic viewpoint people had of the future in the 1960's pertaining to human nature. What the series' creators couldn't foresee is that today people are much more like Zachary Smith than the Robinson family - at least the people in charge of things are.


The show makes you feel you are apart of the action. You get sad when the show gets sad, you feel happy when Robinson's are happy. You feel angry at Doctor Smith when he is up to his old tricks. The show has empathy for other forms of life they come across. It allows you to see things from their point of view and not just humans! This show is pure fantasy. It's pure imagination. That's why you shouldn't care if it's camp or not! The show, although was serious in the first few episodes, Irwin Allen obviously wanted to have fun and make people enjoy the adventure


I can still remember the horror and fascination of space in the mid-1970s, which at the time was completely new terrain. Giant blobs, tentacled creatures, plastic ray guns, laser beams - it didn't matter what tricks the producers employed, it was all NEW STUFF as far as I was concerned. Of course, if you compare the props, effects and plots with today's sci-fi, you'd probably burst out laughing and scoff at how primitive it was back then. When you were 5 years old and you sat in your parents' living room, hunched over a black-and-white TV set, scared out of your wits, yet thrilled to bits at the harrowing adventures of the Robinsons. You buy it because maybe even at that young age, you had a crush on Penny Robinson (Angela Cartwright) and you want to try and grasp that feeling again, which at the time was also NEW STUFF to you. So this is first and foremost a trip down memory lane and it won't appeal to anyone who never watched the show as a kid.