here are certain questions writers get asked a lot. "What the hell do you do
all day?" is one. "How the hell do you make a living?" is another. (The
answers, for those of you who asked, by the way, are "type" and "with great
difficulty.") My favorite, though, is "How did you get started writing this
sci-fi stuff, and for television?"
Well, I started writing sci-fi, particularly sci-fi for television, because
I was fed up with Lost in Space.
For those of you who came in late (there are some seats down here in front,
by the way), Lost in Space was a one-hour family drama that ran on CBS from
1965 to 1968. You can still see it on the SCI FI Channel now and then, and
don't pretend you haven't.
Produced
by Irwin Allen, now best known for disaster movies like 1975's The
Poseidon Adventure, Lost in Space was based on one of those natural sci-fi
series ideas that never seem to work: do a sci-fi version of Swiss Family
Robinson. In this one, a late-20th-century scientist named Dr. John Robinson
(in case you missed the connection) and his family were fired off toward
Alpha Centauri in a flying saucer-like ship called the Jupiter II.
Unfortunately, Dr. Zachary Smith had stowed away and somehow gummed up the
guidance system, and the Jupiter II and its crew became interstellar
wanderers.
Ray Bradbury talks about how, at the age of 13, he was so looking forward to
the movie King Kong that he was afraid he would die before it reached
theaters.
That is how I, at the age of 11 in the summer of 1965, awaited Lost in
Space. It was going to air Wednesday nights on WCCO, Channel 4 in
Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., at 7 p.m. I saw the promos and the ads;
I was set.
No love lost on Lost in Space
Then WCCO did a terrible thing to me. It pre-empted Lost in Space to run two
half-hours of local programming, one of them devoted to Bud Grant, head
coach of the Minnesota Vikings football team. (Time has mercifully robbed me
of the other program, but I think it had something to do with farm
implements.) Now, I was then and remain to this day a Vikings fan--in
spite of the fact that no NFL contender can win with a junior college
defense--but this was torture. Especially since WCCO kept running the CBS
network promos for the Lost in Space episodes it didn't air, so I could see
exactly what I was missing: a battle between the family and a gigantic
cyclops. Exploration of a creepy ghost starship. Being caught in a whirlpool
on a watery world.
Only when football season ended did I actually get to see an episode in
full, and I was pretty pleased. I happened to be the same age as young Will
Robinson, the boy in the family, so I happily daydreamed that I was stranded
somewhere in the galaxy with the extremely attractive Marta Kristen. (Was
she supposed to be Will's sister? I forget.)
I couldn't wait for the next season, which, unlike the first season, was
going to be aired in full color. (There was even a color teaser at the end
of the last black-and-white episode.) Alas, as the color episodes rolled
past, as the autumn of 1966 turned into a cold winter, I lost my love for
Lost in Space. In fact, I actively began to despise the show.
Now at 12 years old I should have been smack-dab in the middle of Lost
in Space's demographic. I had discovered sci-fi literature in the past year,
notably Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet. The Gemini program was rocketing
American astronauts into orbit every couple of months. The future of the
human race in space looked bright.
But the Robinsons stayed on one planet, where every week some villain
sillier than the last would show up, make mischief with the aid of Dr.
Smith, only to be foiled by Will and his robot, cleverly named "Robot." Dr.
Smith was a pain; the sets were cheap; the budding aerospace engineer that
was me could never figure out how all the stuff that was supposed to be
inside the Jupiter II actually fit; there weren't nearly enough laser
battles, and not nearly enough Marta Kristen, either.
What had happened, of course, is that the "real" Lost in Space of the first
season had proved to be too expensive, and not popular enough, so the
producers had made it cheaper by limiting the action to a single locale, and
hope to goose the ratings by throwing the stories to Will and that kooky
robot.
I didn't know any of this at time. All I know is that sometime about
February, I turned to myself and said, I can do a better television series
than this!
Battlestar's copycat bonanza
If Lost in Space put me on the path to sci-fi TV writerdom, it was another
series of questionable values which kept me there. I refer now to Battlestar
Galactica. I encountered this in September 1978. I had just gotten out of college and
was working as a night-time disc jockey at a radio station in Tucson,
Ariz., when this heavily hyped and, from the looks of its ABC network
promos, action-packed sci-fi series aired. Look, there's a giant starship.
Look, here are some rugged young hero guys. Look, here are a couple of
kick-ass space babes. Look, there's Pa Cartwright from Bonanza--well, the
actor who played Pa. Look, the whole bunch is on some sort of quest across
the galaxy, and bad machines are trying to kill them.
Galactica premiered to good ratings, which then began a terminal slide. I
cheered, because even though I should have been in the heart of the
Galactica demo, I quickly came to loathe it as thoroughly as I have loathed
anything on television. It was such an obvious copy of Star Wars, the movie
sensation of the previous year, that it took my breath away. Not that Star
Wars couldn't or shouldn't have been an inspiration: Star Wars itself seemed
assembled out of the pieces of classic sci-fi literature.
Battlestar Galactica just seemed like a bad copy. And at a reported million
dollars an episode! Big money for those days 20 years back. So it wasn't
production values that caused Galactica to suffer, or Lost in Space, which
was pretty costly for the mid-1960s.
What probably inspired me was their lack of inspiration. Both series
originated in that all-too-easy world of television rip-offs without adding
more than a stray original thought. Lost in Space never got beyond the awful
cliche of the plucky kid outsmarting the evil universe, and Galactica never
made me care that its heroes would get where they were going.
Within two months of the Galactica premiere, I was on the road to Los
Angeles, ready to make my fortune as a sci-fi TV writer, where I saw other
shows that gave me negative inspiration.
You'll note that I've cleverly avoided mentioning them here. ... after all, I
may yet need to work with some of these people.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a number of SF and
fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, including his new novel, Red Moon, to be published by Forge Books in January 2001.
