Lost In Space: The Complete Adventures (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ethan Riley]

Never mind Lost in Space. I think "Miri" was the most utterly ridiculous scripted hour in the history of television. "Grups! Bonk bonk on the head!" indeed!

 

[Jack P]

I disagree with you about the silliness of an historian thinking he could create a "good" brand of totalitarianism. After all, there are a number of academicians who think the same thing can be done with Marxism. The silliness is him thinking he could make a "good" version of it, not the idea that someone could be that naive.

I wouldn't disagree with you on that, in that some historians would think there are "good" forms of autocracy/totalitarianism. It's just that such a historian I think would also be savvy enough to not directly copy the Nazi uniform, symbols etc. and all other trappings which reek of "convenient reuse of costumes props" for purpose of bringing us under budget.

 

[Carabimero]

My biggest problem with ST TOS was that whole Earth parallel thing that they did to save money. Episodes about the Romans and Nazis and the Greeks I could at least swallow. But Miri was too much, despite me liking Darby's performance. I just never believed an alien planet would look exactly like Earth. And to see the continents from space was almost as dumb as anything LIS ever did, IMO.

 

[Kyrsten Brad]

Brad here. Now that I've seriously upgraded my main Home Theater display (75" Vizio P-Series 4K, HDR, DV) and added the new UHD Blu-ray player (Sony UBP-700X), I'm looking at my library to see what I'd really like to re-watch. Of course LIS jumps to the forefront.

Back in the day when I was a pre-teen and caught LIS syndicated reruns on afternoon/evening on this newfangled thing called UHF TV, at age 10, I seriously was in love with Judy Robinson (Marta Kristen) as were most males my age. I thought Penny Robinson was pretty mucb a silly girl, at least until Season 3 when Angela Cartwright moved into her teens. Oh well....

I'm with the majority that the first six episodes of LIS in Season 1 were the best and I'll add in later episodes like Invaders From The 5th Dimension (which I remember terrified me as a 7 year old when I actually caught it on TV for the first time). As for Season 2, liked the introduction of color and the Robinsons getting back into space for a spell. The first few S2s were the best of that season but once they stupidly crash-landed (couldn't Irwin Allen just have them land softly for a spell to grow new food and replenish?), I got bored real quick with S2.
Season 3, much better though still too much the Dr. Smith Screws Up Everything Show.

So now I put together a watch plan on the new set for a spell until I decided to re-start downloading Space 1999 episodes from Amazon.

 

[Eve Babcock]

Definitely not a show I would binge on. It gets old real quick. That being said, I do get the urge once in a while to get "lost in space" with the Robinsons. Maybe once a week the way it originally aired is the way to go.

I agree 100%, I watch a few episodes and then stopped. It's really not my thing.

 

[BobO'Link]

Never mind Lost in Space. I think "Miri" was the most utterly ridiculous scripted hour in the history of television. "Grups! Bonk bonk on the head!" indeed!

My biggest problem with ST TOS was that whole Earth parallel thing that they did to save money. Episodes about the Romans and Nazis and the Greeks I could at least swallow. But Miri was too much, despite me liking Darby's performance. I just never believed an alien planet would look exactly like Earth. And to see the continents from space was almost as dumb as anything LIS ever did, IMO.

It's that episode and "The Way to Eden" that allow me to more fully enjoy LIS drivel like "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." At least those lesser LIS episodes weren't attempting to be serious.

BATMAN was a midseason premiere on ABC, starting in January of 1966. This was the preceding half-season to the time in September when all primetime shows on the three networks would be in color. That 65-66 season had LOST IN SPACE in black & white, and the two shows ran in the same time slot, Wednesday at 7:30 PM. In those pre-VCR days, I'm sure there was more than a few out there that would watch the big-buzz BATMAN and then switch over to CBS to catch up on what Dr. Smith was up to that week.

Make no mistake about it. Those families that had color TVs were besieged with neighbors who just had to see BATMAN on a color TV set. And with that success, a number of TV producers were urged by their networks to follow the BATMAN lead, thus their shows became gawdy colorfests - LOST IN SPACE among them.

I personally was not at all into BATMAN and continued watching LOST IN SPACE on a black & white set upstairs, and yet even I couldn't help but to marvel at the colors popping from the family room TV as I passed by on the way to the kitchen for snacks.

I had a greater dilemma... I had to pick which to watch the first 15 minutes of as we left for Wednesday night church at 6:45pm and both aired at 6:30pm (Central time). Batman won because I could watch the conclusion of the story on Thursday night and I read the comic and loved the character. I thought that first "season" of Batman was very good, similar to the comic, and not nearly as silly as it later became. "Debbie the Bloop," the "Space Monkey," had graced LIS by then. I thought that was rather silly and didn't like the "character." It made Penny even more annoying.

Mom had a friend who was home bound and had purchased a color TV. She found out I loved Batman and invited me over a few times to watch it in color. That was very neat. We didn't get a color set until after Batman left the air.

Batman is still in my "Top 10 Favorite TV Shows of All Time" list, at least the first 2 seasons. I'm not so much a fan of season 3. Lost in Space, while generally enjoyable taken in small chunks, is mostly a nostalgia thing.

 

[RobertR]

Mom had a friend who was home bound and had purchased a color TV. She found out I loved Batman and invited me over a few times to watch it in color. That was very neat. We didn't get a color set until after Batman left the air.

The only time I got to see Batman in color back then was when I saw the Batman movie.

 

[ScottRE]

Batman won because I could watch the conclusion of the story on Thursday night and I read the comic and loved the character. I thought that first "season" of Batman was very good, similar to the comic, and not nearly as silly as it later became. "Debbie the Bloop," the "Space Monkey," had graced LIS by then. I thought that was rather silly and didn't like the "character." It made Penny even more annoying.

Debbie was there from the start. She was in the unaired pilot and joined the series proper in the third episode. She vanished in the third other than a quick clip from year two.

 

[BobO'Link]

The only time I got to see Batman in color back then was when I saw the Batman movie.

I saw that too during the original run and thought it was too long. It often felt like an episode with filler, that often dragged down the pacing, to get it to movie length and had several bits that were quite silly. The whole running around with the bomb just never clicked with me as a kid and I always wondered just how the people dust wound up in such nice piles - where were the bits for the feet, hands, it should have been everywhere. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief with that plot device. Still... it was Batman and in color and has my favorite Catwoman, Lee Meriwether, as well as the Batcopter, Batboat, and Batcycle, even if their use felt mostly like filler scenes.

 

[RobertR]

I saw that too during the original run and thought it was too long. It often felt like an episode with filler, that often dragged down the pacing, to get it to movie length and had several bits that were quite silly. The whole running around with the bomb just never clicked with me as a kid and I always wondered just how the people dust wound up in such nice piles - where were the bits for the feet, hands, it should have been everywhere. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief with that plot device. Still... it was Batman and in color and has my favorite Catwoman, Lee Meriwether, as well as the Batcopter, Batboat, and Batcycle, even if their use felt mostly like filler scenes.

I was around 12 or 13 when I started looking at movies and TV shows more critically. I think I was 13 when I started reading movie reviews. Some of the movies and TV shows I loved as a kid still hold up for me. Others don't. Batman and the Irwin Allen shows are in the latter category.

 

[Nelson Au]

I think Miri was a super episode. Miri's planet being a duplicate of Earth never bothered me. But I can see why it might bother others. It helped them with their limited budget to re-use the Mayberry exteriors. For me, I have an issue with quantum mechanics and the likelihood of parallel universes. But it seems to be a common device to use to have duplicate evil versions of our heroes in LiS and in TOS. In the case of TOS, that made for a great episode.

 

[Carabimero]

Miri's planet being a duplicate of Earth never bothered me.

It didn't bother me when I was little. But when I grew up and became a writer, one component of it bothered me mightily (and still does). Just to be clear: I don't have a problem with the exterior locations of Miri. Not a big one, anyway. It's fun to see Mayberry.

My problem is the ridiculous shot of the planet looking just like Earth. And the explanation. In my opinion, Roddenberry's hubris is never evidenced more than here, believing he could call a spade a shovel and convince himself audiences would buy it. Generally I believe audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief, but not as much when arrogant, insecure writers point out shortcomings in their own work and try to explain them away.

Better writers use what David Gerrold calls "hand wavium," to simply distract the audience away from story problems.

 

[Jack P]

I had a bigger problem with the fact that somehow EVERYONE in the landing party (this is one of the few episodes were security guards don't get killed) managed to have their communicators stolen???

 

[ScottRE]

Weirdly, i get the impression the guards didn’t have any. This episode was one of the few early ones where it required a HUGE suspension of disbelief. Taken by its own rules it’s a chilling and involving episode. But the “duplicate” Earth is a cheat because they never follow up on it.

 

[RobertR]

My fondest memory of watching "Miri" is from 1977, when Grace Lee Whitney watched the episode with a number of us, and provided running commentary.

 

[ScottRE]

One of the things I loved about this episode was how the communicator calls came in. They would beep and then we’d hear Mr. Farrell’s voice calling Spock or the landing party. That made the most sense. What always bugged me, and this was common on most SF shows at the time, was how they would have this big boxy computer with two buttons, a tape slot and a bunch of lights. Yet they could look at it and get info readouts as if they were displayed. Lost in Space did it but Voyage was really guilty of it. Crane would look at two blinking lights and know paragraphs of info. Trek did this too. I get that it was “futuristic,” but jeeez.

 

[BobO'Link]

I was around 12 or 13 when I started looking at movies and TV shows more critically. I think I was 13 when I started reading movie reviews. Some of the movies and TV shows I loved as a kid still hold up for me. Others don't. Batman and the Irwin Allen shows are in the latter category.

I didn't even know there were professional critics until I started college. I grew up in a small town (~3,500 pop) and my parents never got any paper other than the local one. It had no such section.

I was a huge fan of the space program and devoured any article I could find on rockets, jets, space and more whether I fully understood them or not (my dad had subscriptions to Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, and other science/technology heavy type magazines - I read them all). I started reading SF around age 9 when I found my dad's collection. Asimov's "I Robot" was one of the first "serious" SF books I read. After working my way through his smallish collection, but an excellent selection of material, I read just about every SF/Fantasy book the local library had in stock (not much) and discovered the short story horror collections from Hitchcock. Reading that more mature stuff at a young age turned me into a huge critic of SF TV shows - although I'd suspend disbelief for those I really wanted to see and liked.

As a young adult that kept me from liking many series that have received some acclaim, calling them generic, unbelievable, and "popular tripe." I'd forgive things in Star Trek, most Irwin Allen shows (although it's quite hard on many of those), and most of the late 60s SF/Fantasy series that later I'd dismiss because of lame effects, science improbabilities, cliche' plots, poor production techniques, and more. If some "kid friendly" tripe showed up (especially putting in a kid just to attract younger viewers - I've always disliked that) I was out - completely. I'm still that way. That was the main reason I stopped watching the original Battlestar Galactica. If I were seeing it for the first time, and it weren't for nostalgia, I'd dismiss LIS outright for all those reasons, but I'll watch those discs now and enjoy almost every minute because of how I felt back in the mid-60s in spite of some of the misgivings I had back then.

 

[ScottRE]

Some shows, I absolutely know nostalgia plays in part. Lost in Space is one of them. I forgive a lot of episodes because of how I watched them as a young guy. I even held onto my DVDs because those prints a closer to the WTBS airings I fell in love with in the early 80’s.

Star Trek: that’s a complex issue. I will watch the blu-rays and will even watch the 2006 effects from time to time. When I do, I’m watching them with the eyes of 50 year old me. But very often I’ll watch a Laserdisc or VHS tape because that’s how I watched them growing up: poor resolution with the correct sound mix. So, during those times, it’s nostalgia, but Trek – for the most part – does stand the test of time.

One show I watch and forgive and it has nothing at all to do with nostalgia, is Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I didn’t discover Voyage until I was 24 in 1991. I went into that series with eyes wide open and loved it. LOVED IT. From pilot to final episode, I devoured that series. I still love it. Even the really crappy 3rd and late 4th season shows. Don’t understand why I forgive pirates and ghosts and sea monsters and random aliens attacking Earth every few weeks but can’t deal with magicians, pirates and androids dressed as Superman on Lost in Space (although I like the Toymaker episode a LOT). It’s probably what I said earlier: the format remained the same: the Seaview defends earth from attackers in a grim and serious manner. The adversaries may have gotten outlandish, but the characters never got comedic and the leads didn’t get overshadowed by a latecomer to the program – unless you count poor Chip Morton losing all the good stuff to Chief Sharkey.

 

[RobertR]

I didn't even know there were professional critics until I started college. I grew up in a small town (~3,500 pop) and my parents never got any paper other than the local one. It had no such section.

I was a huge fan of the space program and devoured any article I could find on rockets, jets, space and more whether I fully understood them or not (my dad had subscriptions to Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, and other science/technology heavy type magazines - I read them all). I started reading SF around age 9 when I found my dad's collection. Asimov's "I Robot" was one of the first "serious" SF books I read. After working my way through his smallish collection, but an excellent selection of material, I read just about every SF/Fantasy book the local library had in stock (not much) and discovered the short story horror collections from Hitchcock. Reading that more mature stuff at a young age turned me into a huge critic of SF TV shows - although I'd suspend disbelief for those I really wanted to see and liked.

As a young adult that kept me from liking many series that have received some acclaim, calling them generic, unbelievable, and "popular tripe." I'd forgive things in Star Trek, most Irwin Allen shows (although it's quite hard on many of those), and most of the late 60s SF/Fantasy series that later I'd dismiss because of lame effects, science improbabilities, cliche' plots, poor production techniques, and more. If some "kid friendly" tripe showed up (especially putting in a kid just to attract younger viewers - I've always disliked that) I was out - completely. I'm still that way. That was the main reason I stopped watching the original Battlestar Galactica. If I were seeing it for the first time, and it weren't for nostalgia, I'd dismiss LIS outright for all those reasons, but I'll watch those discs now and enjoy almost every minute because of how I felt back in the mid-60s in spite of some of the misgivings I had back then.

I ate up everything having to do with SF, space travel, or fantasy when I was a kid. I kept a scrap book with newspaper clippings from the space program for years.

 

[Tony Bensley]

One of the things I loved about this episode was how the communicator calls came in. They would beep and then we’d hear Mr. Farrell’s voice calling Spock or the landing party. That made the most sense. What always bugged me, and this was common on most SF shows at the time, was how they would have this big boxy computer with two buttons, a tape slot and a bunch of lights. Yet they could look at it and get info readouts as if they were displayed. Lost in Space did it but Voyage was really guilty of it. Crane would look at two blinking lights and know paragraphs of info. Trek did this too. I get that it was “futuristic,” but jeeez.

At least on BATMAN, the Dynamic Duo did take it a bit further with the computer card printouts. Discerning multiple paragraphs from two blinking lights? Good Grief!

CHEERS!