SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON - Introduction

The Unofficial SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON Home Page

is respectfully dedicated to the memory of

Gaylord DuBois
1899 - 1993

Introduction

You know how it goes. When you're talking about yesterday's visions of the future, and you happen to be living in the era a particular vision concerns itself with, the prophetic and silly tend to rub elbows with each other. And sometimes the silly is taken as the predominant feature ... So here were are in the first decade of the 21st Century, and it ain't cool to admit liking things like this. It's much more hip to say you like Babylon 5, or even Star Trek, or practically anything else, in order to avoid making the confession.

And yet ...

In April 1998, The remarkably successful initial release of New Line Cinema's new feature film version of Lost in Space also marked the end of the recordbreaking run of James Cameron's Titanic as the new Number One box-office champ. This adds yet another one of those odd footnotes to the long history of LiS, that reads something like "the unsinkable Titanic finally sank ... after a collision with the Jupiter 2."

Such is the staying power of those lucky Robinsons. Lucky, in the sense that they could always overcome the immediate threats posed by their ongoing adventures, and sometimes against seemingly impossible odds. But on the other hand, their luck always fails them on one stroke: the simple rediscovery of their way back home to Earth has always seemed to elude every incarnation of the Robinsons since 1962.

The new film introduced yet another in a series of "Space Family Robinsons," the second incarnation of the classic TV series' set of characters, and the third commercial version to date. With it, a distinct new generation of LiS fans will be entering the scene, about to re-discover the venerable history behind this highly popular premise of "The Swiss Family Robinson tranplanted to the Space Age." As the newbies eagerly set out in search of LiS collectibles, they'll undoubtedly begin to ask many questions about the various peculiarities they encounter as they study the Lost in Space mythos. Hopefully, the pages at this site will begin to answer most of the pertinent questions about all these various and sundry Robinsons, particularly these very common ones:

Who came first: Space Family Robinson or Lost in Space?

How come the '60s Lost in Space comic didn't feature the same Robinson family as the one seen on TV?

So the Space Family Robinson in the comics came along first ... did they inspire Irwin Allen to create Lost in Space?

We know that the TV Robinsons weren't brought home to Earth in the last episode of the series. Did the comics Robinsons find their way home when the comic was cancelled in the late '70s?

There are a large number of Lost in Space sites on the Web, and a few of them include information about the comics' Space Family Robinson. This alternative site was created by unabashed fans of both Space Families, partly for nostalgia's sake, but also in hopes of making some new friends for the Robinsons of Space Station One.

In the wake of the new film, there is going to be no shortage of information about LiS, so we will be limiting our content to those aspects of the filmic Robinsons that relate most directly to the Robinsons of the comics. We will also avoid duplicating information at length that's already thoroughly covered on other sites featuring SFR, and provide links to those sites that add further to the data we offer here.

We must also offer a caveat that you bear with us. In order to get this site online in a timely fashion, we've had to compromise a bit more than we would have liked. The informational text here is still in a very preliminary form, and lacking in HyperFootnoting and documentation because, for one thing, we don't have a complete set of SFR on hand, and in other areas, we're still in the process of locating sources and contacting and/or interviewing people. With that in in mind, we beg your gracious pardons, and hope that you'll treat with our historical text as more opinion than fact. Should you find particularly serious errors or distortions in our facts or delivery, please do e-mail us and bring it to our attention. And your input is especially welcome if you feel you can write better copy than ours ... there's always room for improvement there, too!

We also welcome our visitors' personal imput, whether in the non-fiction form of older fans' reminisces about either Space Family, or opinion pieces. Fan fiction, poetry, and fan art will also find a niche here. We hope to create a place where a fair and open cross-section of fannish taste and opinion about SFR and LiS can be found, along with the sort of essential information you'd expect to find on a site calling itself the "Unofficial SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON Home Page." We hope to hear from those who liked the comics better than the TV series, or vice versa, and from those who couldn't decide, and those who think neither Space Family Robinson could measure up to Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, and even those who just don't get any of it, but are curious enough to wonder ...

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