Season 1 of Lost in Space is awesome

Sheltie

Fratty and out of touch.
MeTV has begun showing reruns of Lost in Space from the very beginning. I've never really seen any episodes from season 1 because most television stations are reluctant to show black and white reruns.

Season 1 is awesome, even up to par with Star Trek! Dr Smith is an nefarious genius saboteur determined to sabotage the Robinson family, instead of the blithering idiot he evolved into in seasons 2 and 3. The plots, though still geared towards children, are actually fairly intelligent and interesting.

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nivek

As Above So Below
A few months ago I was watching random Lost in Space episodes, season one is enjoyable still, I remember watching it as a kid...Some time ago I read about why they changed the persona of Doctor Smith but I cannot remember the reasons given lol...They really made him out to be a complete imbecile after season one, especially in season three, it was as campy as the 60s Batman was, remember the space hippies lol...

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Sheltie

Fratty and out of touch.
The Great Vegetable Rebellion turned me off to Lost in Space for a long time. Easily one of the silliest eps. Season 1 of the Netflix version was really good but I no longer have Netflix so I haven't seen any of season 2.
 

August

Metanoia
I bought them on dvd , 3 seasons. The first is in B/W but then they go to colour. I think the fists season was more serious then it got crazier with Will, Smith and the Robot taking over in season 2 and 3. It really ended up more being a space fantasy than regular sci fi action adventure. I laughed in the Great Vegetable Rebellion when Dr Smith got turned into a stalk of celery.
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Sheltie

Fratty and out of touch.
I get the impression the budget got smaller in seasons 2 and 3 also because they always seemed to take place on those cheap sets. The earlier episodes featured more outdoor scenes and they would drive around in the chariot and stuff.
 

August

Metanoia
I get the impression the budget got smaller in seasons 2 and 3 also because they always seemed to take place on those cheap sets. The earlier episodes featured more outdoor scenes and they would drive around in the chariot and stuff.

I think the writers on the show run out of ideas from them all. They never spend to much time in space anymore. But I still find it very colourful and entertaining . Plenty of weird characters and aliens . I personally liked this episode All That Glitters where Dr Smith turns penny into a lump of platinum. Teach him a lesson not to be such a greedy guts.
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Sheltie

Fratty and out of touch.
How Smith-centric Was Lost in Space?



One of the common criticisms made of Lost in Space is that from the middle of the first season onwards, individual episodes focused increasingly on the character of Dr. Smith, with Will Robinson and the Robot often figuring prominently. Whether or not this movement to more episodes featuring Smith “ruined” the series is open to debate; it is, after all, a matter of personal opinion. Lost in Space enjoyed quite respectable ratings for its entire run; the third season ratings did drop, but not dramatically—the show was still a hit. Since television programming is a business run to make money, artistic value or dramatic quality are strictly ancillary—if gritty, dark drama is popular, that is what is on the air; if broad comedy is what pays, then do that.

Dr. Zachary Smith was consistently among the most popular characters in the series throughout its run. Batman is regarded as a key factor in determining Lost in Space’s move to a campier style in season two; network pressure stemming from the popularity of Star Trek led to another basic format change with season three (and, incidentally, rendering it a continuity nightmare) and the focus was then on travel to many new worlds. These two influences may account for some of the more ludicrous Smith-centric episodes in season two, and their relative paucity in season three.

So how many episodes centred around the character of Dr. Smith? About 30 of the series’ 83 episodes were clearly ‘buddy’ stories. featuring Dr. Smith, Will, and the Robot having an adventure. Most of these (about 18) occurred in the second season—over half of season two episodes, in fact. Only about five episodes in the first season were of this type, and the number in the third season fell dramatically. Add to this about a dozen more where Smith is one of the central characters to the plot, and he is one of, if not the only, featured cast member in over half of Lost in Space episodes.

Although Will often functioned as Smith’s foil in many of the stories, several, particularly earlier in the series, also featured Penny quite prominently. Don and Smith were paired up in “Fugitives in Space” and “The Space Primevals.” The Robot, however, is the Doctor’s most consistent companion throughout the series, from the very earliest episodes, in fact.

As noted above, Dr. Smith was a popular character. To a large extent, this was probably due to Irwin Allen sanctioning and even encouraging Jonathan Harris’s rewriting his lines in an attempt to develop the character. Bill Mumy later observed in an interview that he and Harris developed a very good chemistry together that allowed them to do scenes in one take. Taking the bottom line into consideration, this led Allen to use scripts with more and more screen time for the pair because not only did the audience like it, it saved money.


What is my personal opinion about Lost in Space becoming a vehicle for Jonathan Harris? Well, as a child watching the series, I didn’t particularly like him, but as an adult, I can appreciate the work he put into his craft in creating the character. Perhaps more importantly, as an adult, I realise that the show was a property produced to make money. It did that for Irwin Allen. Although artistic values were present, the show was not being produced for public television—it wasn’t aiming to be Masterpiece Theatre.
 

August

Metanoia
This is interesting . In both the pilot and the first show, the spacecraft is shown going through an asteroid field, with the rocks bouncing off the craft and flying away aft of the ship. Newtonian mechanics would have the rocks flying off in the direction they were redirected after the hit, not falling off to the rear of the ship. This indicates that the model of the ship was placed in a vertical mount and the rocks were dropped onto the model in a gravity field.
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Sheltie

Fratty and out of touch.
I've read that hardcore Trekkies go to the desert to visit the site where Kirk fought the Gorn in The Arena.
 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
What's amazing is, I work with a guy who is like Dr. Smith so much that his mom must have watched that show while carrying him. Very intelligent and well spoken within his narrow area of expertise. In every other possible way he is a huge drag on everyone and constantly rescues failure from the jaws of success. And, I really believe he is unaware of it, the dude is truly a dim bulb aside from his narrow work specialty.
 

Jacketon

Adept
'Lost in Space' had the best and most consistent season with the 1st one. It had a darker and more sombre tone than the campier nature of the succeeding two seasons, with a real maturity, some suspense and sense of mystery and wonder. Yet it also didn't forget to be fun and full of adventure while treating its stories with intelligence and wit and its audience with respect. The monsters were mostly impressive in design and there were some memorable ones, likewise with the staging of the encounters with them, which were suspenseful and sometimes funny. The 1960s was a great decade for television, 'The Addams Family', 'The Munsters', Doctor Who', 'My Favourite Martian', 'Batman', 'Star Trek', 'Bewitched', 'I Dream of Jeannie', 'Dark Shadows', 'I Love Lucy', 'McHale's Navy', 'Green Acres', 'The Avengers', these are just a few examples of very good to classic shows from that decade. Overall 'Lost in Space' was an uneven show but a very entertaining one and a very good one at its best.
 

nivek

As Above So Below

I liked the two part episodes of The Keeper, the alien had many of those creatures locked up in his ship until Doctor Smith set them all free to rampage the planet they were on...

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