Danger, Will Robinson

Hi kids. Today we get Lost In Space. The show first appeared when I was an infant, so I know it from re-runs grown stale but not yet retro. Never was a huge fan, but there were time-slots in the viewing day when it beat the alternatives, and there was nothing else to do. In college, it seems like the Weird Uncles (me and my housemates) enjoyed it immensely for a while, there being over 80 episodes from it's mere three seasons, running in syndication over and over, replicating the strange DNA of the show for decades after it was canceled. Just as it's stray broadcast waves still seed the universe with some inkling of what we earthlings expect from interplanetary contact. (Ray-guns and wrestling for the most part, with occasional cuteness.)

Maybe it still appears somewhere in TV land, but I haven't set eyes on it since the '80s, have not heard Dr. Smith launch some crazy scheme for him and the boy, or hurl a good insult at the robot. Some day, I'll netflix the show and remind myself of what exactly happened when the earth family Robinson was marooned in space, but why wait for data? Fuzzy recollections and IMDb are enough for now.

As I surfed through the actor profiles, I had to abandon my usual modus operandi: mocking the cast. I fall into snarcasm all too readily, but instead of finding has-beens and fools, I was faced with a collection of folks who went on to solid careers in and out of Hollywood, people who actually seem decent by normal standards (which may make them uncomfortably saintly in the entertainment industry, so I can see why none became blockbuster stars).

So, in no particular order (don't believe that, don't ever believe it when people claim that), here are the players:

The Star. Guy Williams was born Armando Something-or-other, but don't hold the name change against him. "Passing" was a widespread strategy not just for African-Americans in those days, but for all the others whose hyphenated-Americanity held them back; only by going from Italian to Anglo was he able to land the part of the Spaniard, Zorro. Armando recognized Lost In Space as the beginning of the end, and instead of going back to the kind of humiliating roles that somehow held promise to a young Guy--Bonzo's replacement Reagan, or Michael Landon's second banana--retired with his family to Argentina to live out life in a land he loved.

The Star's Wife. June Lockhart played the help-mate, her biology PhD applied to cooking and making space feel homey. Kinda like how she started out as Lassie's kid's mom, and to this day plays the familiar familial female. Without her, TV grinds to a halt.

Second Banana. In a strategic mis-maneuver that proved invaluable to the attentive writers of Star Trek, the premise of Lost in Space left the show without a continuing flow of yeomen to die on-planet, and the lusterless character of Major Don West was never killed, allowing Mark Goddard to collect a paycheck for three years. On the down-side, mid-1960s social mores did not allow him to diddle the only available female, so he did very little. He's spent many years since working with troubled kids, which seems like a way better investment of time.

Only Available Female. Marta Kristen studies acting, gets some parts, and lands a role on a prime-time show. In which she gets to do nothing. Eldest of the Robinson kids, but too old to be the sweet one and too blonde and female to be the brainy one, "Judy" lasted all three seasons because it was awkward to kill her off, and because network execs like her gams. She's spent many years since working with her own progeny, unfettered by stardom, which seems like a way better investment of time.

The Weird Girl. And now we enter the child actor zone. Angela Cartwright was the cute little kid on Danny Thomas's show (his own kid was busy working on her look for That Girl), and then one of the musically-talended, Nazi-evading, von-Trappes. My fuzzy recollection is of her character Penny having a pet chimp/alien, dreamily uttering lines that sounded like Alice in Wonderland (weirdly childish or else seriously drugged), and being less hot than the maddeningly under-scripted Judy Robinson. After a "Make Room for Daddy" revival in the early 1970s failed (no kidding), she slipped through the looking glass and became a photographer.

Rounding out the Robinson family is the boy, Will, but we'll get back to him later.

Because first there's the character responsible for getting them lost in space, foreign agent Dr. Zachary Smith, whose attempted sabotage of the mission ends up with the ship off course and himself as unwilling stow-away. Instead of being killed immediately, he is saved, if only to provide a steady stream of zany plot lines. Played by another fake-namer, Jonathan Harris (nee Jonathan something too-Russian-and-Jewish for the '60s), the character was described then and now as flamboyant, campy, and effete...basically the arsenal of code words for "gay." But Dr. Smith, far from being gay (Major West received not so much as a longing glance asskance), was more of an ambiguous pedophile (back when such things were not frowned upon by stalwarts of American morality such as the clergy and football coaches). Dr. Smith's schemes always seemed to involve him and the boy sneaking off. By all accounts, Harris worked hard to breathe life into a character initially imagined as nothing more than a sniveling saboteur, good to revile for a few episodes before feeding to an alien of some sort.

Instead, tireless work by Mr Charasuchin-Harris yielded a character of thespianish grandiosity that gave the show a season or two more than it otherwise deserved. His conniving, mincing, rodential character concocting shcemes to get home or get rich, barking at the robot all manner of insults too clever to have been the work of the network hacks writing the episodes. It is a little known fact that the line "nattering nabob of negativism," which idiots attribute to Spiro Agnew and effete snobs to speechwriter William Safire (or by my fuzzy memory to Pat Buchanan), was originally uttered by Dr. Smith to the robot, who had objected to one of the good Doctor's wacky plans. For this, Jonathan was rewarded with nothing but type-casting, so much so that he pretty much moved into voice-over work.

The Robot. I'm pretty sure Robot was Japanese design, first to crack the post-war prejudice that "Made in Japan" meant crap (that's right, young people, people really did think that, before they actually got Japanese electronics, cameras, cars, and....robots). He was chaperone to the questionable jaunts of Dr. Smith and his youthful friend, perhaps the only one who prevented a Coach Sandusky situation from unfolding. Now you now why Robot was always saying "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Speaking of whom:

Will Robinson. Of all the cast, perhaps William Mumy's odd moniker offered the most excuse to change his name, but even as a kid was self-confident enough not to. In fact, he even kept the Will part. Smartest one on the ship (prequel to W. Stryker?), he also turns out to be a renaissance man in real life. He's written and recorded music (some on, yep, Renaissance Records) and scored movies and TV. He's responsible for the immortal "Fish Heads," and has written scripts and comic books ranging from the Marvel - DC superheroes to Trypto the Acid Dog. He's done a shitload of voice-over work, including Ren and Stimpy (but then, so has June). And he's married to the same person he was way back when, and has two kids who do not appear in tabloids. Damn!

So yeah, I'm glad I took the time to find out a little about the stars of this ill-fated galactic journey, even if I never got around to reviewing the show.