Fifty-five years ago today, March 6, 1968, Lost in Space ended its run on CBS. It was created and produced by Irwin Allen, filmed by 20th Century Fox Television, and broadcast on CBS. The show ran for three seasons, with 83 episodes airing between September 15, 1965, and March 6, 1968. The first television season was filmed in black and white, but the remainder were in color. In 1998, a Lost in Space movie based on the television series was released.
Though the original television series concept centered on the Robinson family, many later storylines focused primarily on Dr. Zachary Smith, played by Jonathan Harris. Originally written as an utterly evil but highly incompetent would-be saboteur, Smith gradually becomes the troublesome, self-centered, incompetent foil who provides the comic relief for the show and causes most of the episodic conflict and misadventures. Smith was not in the unaired pilot, and neither was the robot. In the unaired pilot, what causes the group to become lost in space is a chance encounter with a meteor storm, but in the first aired episode, Smith's sabotage and unplanned presence on the ship set the ship off course into the meteor field. Smith is thus the key to the story.
In the unaired pilot, the ship was going slow enough that the crew wondered if they were on Mars, while in the first aired episode, just seconds of hyperdrive caused them to be lost, unknown light-years from Earth. Gret posted on Facebook Clasic TV.
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