Get your own Free HomepageMeanwhile, over in Hollywood, film director and producer Irwin Allen
was at his busiest during the early 1960s. Beginning the decade with the
release of a remake of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World in
1960, he made a bigger hit the following year with his feature film
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. When DuBois and Spiegle were
birthing the Space Family Robinson comic, Allen was wrapping up his
film version of Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon, and
gearing up to bring Voyage to television.
After a successful launch of the Seaview on ABC during the
fall season of 1964, Voyage joined SFR in the Gold Key
Comics lineup.
Meanwhile, subtle changes were taking place as a few continuity
matters shifted around during the first dozen issues of SFR as DuBois injected a more serious tone into the writing.
Craig and June, depicted as greying at the temples in the early issues
of the comic, lost the grey without explanation. The proportion of the
height of the towers to the main section on the Space Station changed,
making them taller. Early issues referred to "the Spacemobile" in the
singular, but after the Robinsons were lost in space, it was established
that the Space Station carried a complement of two Spacemobiles. Often,
Spacemobile Two represented the "cavalry," as Dad and Mom would arrive
in it just in time to pluck Tim and Tam out of harm's way.
But, across town from Gold Key's Beverly Hills office, some even more important changes were in the
works, seemingly unbeknownst to the SFR crew. Word was leaking out in the
Hollywood trade press that Allen's next project for TV was going to be
something called Space Family Robinson.
It didn't appear that Allen was at all aware of the comic. His focus
appeared to be on emulating his peers in Hollywood, and his conception
of Space Family Robinson seemed to be inspired more by a
combination of Disney's version of the Wyss novel, intertwined with
imagery of the current US space program and further reinforced with
visions from most of the classic space flight pictures of the 1950s.
Allen was obviously more mindful of going about his own projects, with
sidelong glances at the work of Walt Disney or Ivan Tors, than he was of
anything that might be going on in the comics or SF publishing
industry.
Irwin's Robinsons resembled the Wyss Robinson family more strongly than
their comics counterpart, especially in their original TV pilot version.
Instead of only two children, the TV Robinsons had a quartet of young
people, rather more like the Swiss Robinsons' four sons, only with a
gender change for half. And, instead of having a situation like that of
the eldest son, Fritz, falling for a love interest, Jenny Montrose, who
appears late in the novel, Allen spun that relationship around and made
the girl the Robinson's daughter instead. Also, the TV Robinsons came to
to be bound to a single planet most of the time, echoing the situation
of the Swiss Family, while the comics' Robinsons would visit a new solar
system every issue in their ongoing search for the way back to
Earth.
As Dan Spiegle related in a interview about a decade later in the comics
fanzine Alter Ego, there could have been a wonderful donnybrook of a
lawsuit filed by Western Publishing against Allen's production company
and the 20th Century Fox studio, but wiser heads prevailed. Gold Key
already had the license for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and
was sure to get the rights for future Allen series, so a deal was
struck.
Another interview with Dan Spiegle from 1972 can be read here at Dan Gheno.com. It's a virtual reprint of the original as it appeared in Graphic Story World, with excellent contemporaneous photos and art samples.
By the time it hit TV, Allen's new show was entitled Lost in Space. Right
after it premiered in September of 1965, Gold Key was poised to make
changes, and the comic title became Space Family Robinson: Lost in
Space with #15, the issue scheduled to appear just after the series
premiere. And, in those episodes of the first seasons that opened with
the familiar Dick Tufeld narration, his copy referred occasionally to
the "Space Family Robinson," as much a plug for the comic as an internal
reference. Finally, two additional characters were added to the TV
series that would not only ensure stronger differences between the two
Space Families, but also prove to be viewer favorites later on: the
sinister Doctor Zachary Smith, and the Robot.
Allen and Fox never bothered Gold Key about doing a LiS comic
with the TV Robinson family, but apparently everyone was satisfied with
the arrangements, and the comics company gladly went on to do Time
Tunnel in 1966, and Land of the Giants in 1968.
It appeared that the LiS writers did eventually become aware of
the Robinson family in the comics, and it seemed that SFR
had some exerted some slight influence on its TV counterpart after all,
particularly when the show was revamped for its third season. That was
when the TV Robinsons started with their "planet of the week"
wanderings, and the Jupiter 2 was suddenly revealed to have had a
Spacemobile-like "Space Pod" hidden in its belly the whole time ...
And it also appeared that the presence of the TV series had some effect on what went on the comic, too. Up until the time LiS debuted, SFR stories tended to be self-contained, single issue affairs, but after the TV competition appeared, Connell & DuBois introduced a continuing story arc. It was reminiscent of the TV Robinsons' First Season encounter with Alonzo P. Tucker, the 19th Century UFO abductee played in pirate garb by Albert Salmi, in that the major protagonists of this continuing story were a party of 12th Century English subjects, preserved in suspended animation by the aliens that had abducted them from Earth eight centuries before.
This group, led by a vassal of King Richard the Lionhearted named Sir Thomas Haldane, accompanied the Robinsons for a few issues. The formerly hostile aliens befriended the Earth people after Craig and June saved one of their number who contracted a terrestrial virus infection ... the common cold ... and the Robinsons were given the gift of a hyperspacial "phase-shift" drive, programmed with Earth's approximate position as its destination. The Robinsons did indeed find themselves back in our home solar system in short order, but apparently something jostled the controls on the phase shift drive during the "jump" through hyperspace, because they also found that it was our solar system in prehistoric times.
Several adventures spanning space and time followed before some of the English folk were returned to their own time, and others in their group were settled in a colony on another world. The Robinsons eventually found their way back to the 21st Century ... only to be lost in space again through one final unscheduled jaunt through hyperspace, a sort of parting shot from that cantankerous phase shift drive, which at that point had been relegated as scrap to a storage locker on the Station, but was still able to be jostled into operation using its built in power source. With luck like this, who needs Doctor Smith?
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