"Danger! Danger Will Robinson!"

After years of successful adaptations based on The Swiss Family Robinson, a story written in 1812 about a family of castaways in the South Pacific, it was time to give the mythical clan a set of more adventurous surrounding. This occurred in 1965 as the Robinson Family entered the realm of interplanetary travel, on the hit television series, Lost in Space. The only thing missing was the treehouse.

Debuting on CBS, Lost in Space was produced by Irwin Allen (the eventual mastermind of such disaster films as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno.) He set his family of adventurous astronauts, the Robinsons, along with a robot companion, out on the Jupiter II spacecraft to colonize the distant planet of Alpha Centauri. Trouble immediately arose in the form of Dr. Zachary Smith, a spy hired by an unfriendly foreign country to sabotage the mission. Unfortunately, Smith wasn’t the most adept espionage agent and managed to get himself stranded along with the rest of the family, which consisted of patriarch John, his wife Maureen, and their three kids, Judy, Penny and Will. Also along for the ride was Jupiter II pilot, Major Don West, of whom eldest daughter Judy had a noticeable crush on. Her siblings were far more interested in intellectual pursuits, rather than battling raging hormones – especially young Will, a precocious egghead.

It was a good thing that young will was so smart, because Dr. Smith had no intention of abandoning his sabotaging ways anytime soon, and often, Will was the only one smart enough to figure out his ill-conceived plots to put the family in danger, such as reprogramming the family robot to kill all “non-essential humans” or, in other words, everyone but Dr. Smith. In reality though, Dr. Smith was the least of their worries. There were more than enough alien life forms and life threatening crisis to keep the Robinson Family plenty busy as they tried to stay alive. Whether running out of food or dealing with a severe global cooling problem, it took every bit of ingenuity to not only try to escape their planet, but merely survive.

Irwin Allen quickly had a television hit on his hands, one that nicely complimented his other hit series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He would add Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel and a more traditional version of The Swiss Family Robinson (complete with treehouse) to his television resume before turning his destructive mind towards the big screen and garnering the well-earned nickname as “The Master of Disaster.”

Lost in Space followed the adventures of the Robinson family for three seasons, before going of the air in 1968. It earned an even bigger, more loyal fan base, however, in the many years that it ran in syndication. And rather ironically, the series, which took place in the futuristic year of (are you ready for it?) 1997, would finally get a big screen motion picture adaptation in 1998, only a year after all of this space-aged drama supposedly played out in the first place. Our civilization hasn’t quite made the technological leaps that Lost in Space depicted 30 years ago. But hey, at least we are well-equipped to build one outstanding treehouse.