Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Shakespeare . . . Lost . . . in . . . Space!

"The Space Creature." By Irwin Allen and William Welch. Perf. Guy Williams, June Lockhart, and Mark Goddard. Dir. Sobey Martin. Lost in Space. Season 3, episode 10. CBS. 15 November 1967. DVD. Twentieth-Century Fox, 2008.

This was the first—and it may be the last—episode of Lost in Space that I've ever watched. My attention was called to it by the same reader who had found allusions to Shakespeare in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

In this episode, upon the disappearance of Dr. Smith, Robot (who has his own Shakespearean connection, being designed by the designer of Robbie, the Robot, of the Tempest-related Forbidden Planet) holds the ice bag Dr. Smith had on his head earlier and gives us part of Hamlet's Yorick speech:


I don't have much to say beyond that—except to note that this is one more instance of the pervasiveness of Shakespeare in modern Western culture.

Links: The Episode at IMDB.


Click below to purchase the complete series from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

3 comments:

DangerDanger said...

Wow. I have just watched a replay of the original Lost in Space series and was amazed to hear another quote from Shakespeare, courtesy of the robot "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow."
Wow.
Seems like there's more than I remember to this kids' show...

kj said...

It looks like that's Season 1, episode 13. I'll try to track it down.

Thanks for the tip, DangerDanger!

kj

kj said...

Actually, it seems like it's Season 1, episode 3 ("Island in the Sky"). Still working to track it down!

kj

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest