Okay. That’s evil!
“Say, little buddy. Look at the bottom of this cliff. Is that a recuse ship?”
Robert Kinoshita who designed the robot in this series and the film Forbidden Planet has gone dead.
OK, I know this thread is a zombie, but I don’t care.
As a child I adored this show and am not ashamed to admit it. I remember that my family got a color TV after the color episodes started. So I had the pleasure of seeing an episode that I’d seen in B&W in color rerun.
And one of my clearest memories of June 8, 1966, is watching an episode of Lost in Space, and being very annoyed that the local station kept interrupting it with tornado watch updates. Then those watch updates became a warning and a tornado, which would later be rated as an F-5, slammed through town(Topeka, Kansas) Thank God it just barely missed the hospitals and the capitol building, but it did destroy or damage much of Washburn University. Bill Kurtis, the news anchor and film journalist, got his start after being the on air person for the local TV station. He stayed so calm and reasonable.
My favorite character was actually the robot. I was too young to pine for Major West, and Will was just my age. I watched a rerun a couple years ago, and the episode was about a father and son who were participating in a manhood ritual for the son. I kept thinking, “okay, I know that kid, he looks familiar, who is it?” Suddenly I realizec OMG it’s Kurt Russell!
Oh wow, and Michael Ansara was the father.
Both, basically.
The evolution went like this
1: Diabolical foreign agent out to murder them >
2: Treacherous stowaway >
3: Cowardly bumbler >
4: Swishy old queen
Okay, since this thread has been revived I would like to point out it was “Crush, Kill Destroy” and it was said by an android.
Sorry for the Spanish captions but the audio is in English.The android was IDAK - Instant Destroyer and Killer, played by Don Matheson from “Land of the Giants.” Don’t get me started. I warn you. WARNING! DANGER!
Dr. Smith was portrayed as the worst kind of nelly queen. Untrustworthy, shrill, backstabbing, unwilling to lift a finger. I always thought at some point gay activists would complain about it.
The only way Smith would breed with one of the Robinson’s daughters, is if he found June’s turkey baster.
In the very first episode, Smith was evil: he sabotaged the Jupiter 2, expecting everyone to die, and only went on the trip because he couldn’t leave in time. And in the early episodes, he was an out-and-out villain.
However, by halfway through the first season, the character had changed to the scheming bumbler he’s known as today.
One of my favorite episodes/scenes. Dr. Smith has drank something out of a small cask (I think he thought it was whiskey). They determine it is a volatile explosive and so Doc Smith goes to lay down and take a nap so as not to jostle things around. The next scene Will turns a corner around a rock and the robot has a clamp on each of the sleeping doctors feet connected by wires back to an old timey generator-in-a-box with the T-handle, ready to push the plunger. Unfortunately Will stops the robot from detonating the doctor. After that, the robot was always my favorite character.
No, not fish bait! Listen to Blassie, dude:
One day we cut one up for fish bait.
Learned our lesson just a little bit late.
Soon as the geek hit the drink, the water turned red.
Next day, sure enough, all the fish were dead.
So any actions that occurred that explains his change in-universe, like something that happened to him causing brain damage?
If not, I propose that he was always a bumbler, but was brainwashed by the Russians or someone to do what he did. As time went on, the brainwashing wore off, as it needed to be renewed over time. It would also explain why his plan seemed suicidal.
The best thing Dr Smith did for the Robinsons was inadvertently save their lives. The third season episode “Time Merchant” says that him being on Jupiter II prevented them from being destroyed by an uncharted asteroid.
Likewise, it started out as a rather serious SF show for the time, until the writers heard the Call of the Camp, and then came the space cowboys and giant talking carrots.
The first season is worth checking out, you’ll see.
And he did it because he was in the pay of a foreign government – unnamed, implicitly Soviet – and the first time the Jupiter 2 encountered an alien habitat/artifact floating in space, Smith assumed it was something of his masters and tried (pointlessly) to make contact.
Continuity nitpick: In the first episodes Smith is clearly an M.D.; he medically examines the Robinsons before they board. In a later one, he encounters some aliens and, vain fellow as he is, lets them think “doctor” means M.D. when his actual doctorate (as Robot tries to interject, but is silenced) is in environmental sciences or something. (Which pleases them because they need a brain surgeon to save their leader. “If our leader dies, your life will also be ended.” I forget how it ends. Don’t know why they wouldn’t have their own brain surgeons, if they know what brain surgery is.)
No, that’s a different episode. In the one, Will is transported (I forget how) to a small town in America of his own time and spends the whole episode trying to make contact with Mission Control, who would be very anxious to hear from him (I think he’s under a time-limit and will automatically be transported back), and everyone he meets has at any rate heard of the Jupiter II and its mysterious loss, though they won’t believe Will is Will. In the other, the whole ship is transported (IFH) to an small American town in the late '40’s or early '50s, when the flying-saucer craze started. Everyone’s concern is to get away and back to their own time, except for Smith, who wants to stay, start a technological revolution and get rich. They’re both B&W, IIRC.
Well, the thing about Smith, you see . . . I don’t know how to break this to you . . .
:o Been repeating myself. Didn’t realize this thread was a Space Zombie.
Be stronger! Suspend disbelief! It’s really no problem, maybe a container the size of a keg can only contain a few grams of neutronium (the rest being a mechanism to keep the neutronium suspended in a force field, because how else would you carry it around, it would fall right through your hand) and that’s all they need! See?! 
Of course . . . we are talking about a show where, even in the more serious first season, the ship encountered a comet, and the threat the comet presented was its . . . heat. Because a comet is a small star or something.
So, maybe the writers just didn’t really know what neutronium is.