Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Lost in Space Day: "The Space Croppers"


In “The Space Croppers,” Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris), Will (Bill Mumy), the Robot (Dick Tufield) and Penny (Angela Cartwright) are confronted with an alien werewolf while burying a time capsule of the Jupiter 2 settlement.

Professor Robinson (Guy Williams) and the others have difficulty believing in such a creature, but Smith soon encounters proof.  While working on a water pipeline, he encounters a group of space-hillbillies.  The group includes Keel (Dawson Palmer), who can turn into the wolf, and space-witches Effra (Sherry Jackson) and Sybilla (Mercedes McCambridge).

While these space hillbillies plan to unleash man-eating plants on the unsuspecting world of the Robinsons, Smith makes an attempt to romance and marry Sybilla, so she will take him home to Earth…





Twenty-five episodes in, and Lost in Space gives us space hillbillies. 

These outer-space beings fly about in a spaceship that looks like a moon-shine still, and threaten the Robinsons’ with a dangerous harvest of carnivorous plants.

The issue in terms of plausibility, of course, is that hillbillies arise from a certain location on Earth, and the demographic that settled there.  Hillbillies are of and from that particular region.  Their culture arises because of the geography and because of demographic history. 

So what factors account for a race of space-going hillbillies?  What set of circumstance gave rise to them, on a cosmic scale?

Sadly, Lost in Space doesn’t tell us.  This is a key difference between Star Trek and Lost in SpaceStar Trek, on separate occasions, postulates a theory about parallel world development and about a race of aliens seeding the universe with endangered races (The Preservers), thus explaining the presence of familiar human cultures throughout the galaxy.

Lost in Space merely tosses out space traders, space croppers and so on, without explaining the universe that gives rise to such familiar-seeming characters.

And again, without an explanation, Lost in Space actually diminishes our heroes, the Robinsons.  Why?  Well, even dopey Space Hillbillies are not denied intergalactic space travel! They zip around the universe in their ships, coming and going as they please.

But the Robinsons?  No such luck. 




These good people, these scientists and explorers -- the best and brightest Earth has to offer -- are stranded on a planet, and not given access to fly the universe of hillbillies, pirates, traders, income tax, and so on.

One wonders, why don’t any of these aliens ever offer to help the Robinsons?  Why don’t the Robinsons ask for help, either?   

At a conceptual level, “The Space Croppers” reeks.  It’s all silly juvenilia. Think about it for more than a minute, and you realize how implausible and half-baked it is.

“The Space Croppers” is a half-thought-out story that does nothing to explain to audiences exactly what kind of universe the Robinsons inhabit.  The execution is slightly better, thanks to Sherry Jackson and Mercedes McCambridge in amusing guest roles. 

In a bad story, like this one, one feels relieved that Jonathan Harris is present to chew-up the scenery. 

At least in this case, Dr. Smith’s antics distract one from the utter lameness of the narrative.



Next: “All that Glitters.”


2 comments:

  1. Spurwing Plover12:47 AM

    And the Space Ship of those space age hillbillies had those big speakers on the sides that played music

    ReplyDelete
  2. And Star Trek gave us Space Salt Vampires and even though it was the last of its kind, they just decided to kill it rather than just give the poor ugly thing Salt which it needed to survive. aND JUST how many exact Earth like planets are out there in the Star Trek universe? They ran into so many exact copies of Earth right down to tricycles that kids used. Was there any explaination for this? Never. How about the Spaxe hippies? Or treating ESP as if its fact. How about the great energy barrier surrounding our galaxy that gives people fantastic ESP powers? The most erregreous was the whole planet based on 1930s mobsters that the planet was based out of a book about Mobsters...so this book about Mobsters told the people there how to dress, and talk with Earth like mobster slang? Star Trek had enough holes in itself to fly a starship through.

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