Zachary Smith

Zachary Smith

Lost in Space is a science fiction TV series 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 TV season was filmed in black and white, but the remainder were filmed in color. In 1998, a Lost in Space movie, based on the TV series, was released.

Though the TV series concept centered on the Robinson family, many story lines focused primarily on Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris) who is a medical doctor, originally an utterly evil would-be killer who became a sympathetic anti-hero by the end of the first season, providing comic relief to the TV show (and causing most of the episodic conflict). Smith was not in the unaired pilot and neither was the robot. A meteor storm in the unaired pilot put them off course. In the first aired episode, Smith's unplanned-for extra 200 lbs of weight put them off course so that they encountered the meteors. In the un-aired version, they were going at such a relatively slow speed that they wondered if they were on Mars. In the pilot, just seconds of hyper-drive and they were lost, unknown light years from Earth.