ust in time for the arrival of the Lost in Space movie, New Line Cinema has straightened out the kinks in its The Lost in Space Galaxy Web site and brought the online production up to speed (although it has been posted for a while, much of the site hasn't been operational until now). Visitors to the site can choose between a straight HTML version or a Shockwave version, both of which have substantially the same content, but presented in different forms.
The site is broken up into five main sections called Dr. Smith's Evil Asteroid, Create Your Own Planet, Harmonic Planet, Penny's World, and The Science Planet. There are also subsections that include Mission Control, 3-D Game, Get the Robot, LIS Databank and Supplies. The majority of the main sections are spin-offs from the LiS movie itself, offering users a variety of Shockwave games to play, factoids to discover and even rants from Penny Robinson, but few details from the movie itself. Two of the sections, the Harmonic Planet and Create Your Own Planet, are devoted entirely to interactive Shockwave games.
In the subsection area, Get the Robot allows users to download a desktop version of the famous LiS robot, Mission Control serves as a site index, and the 3-D Game area is as billed--it's a 3-D game powered by the Cosmo plug-in, although a 2-D HTML version is also available. The LIS Databank has information about both the TV series and the movie, while Supplies is an online store where consumers can purchase products ranging from T-shirts to videotapes. There is also a link to the Lycos search engine, which might seem incongruous to visitors who don't know the site is co-sponsored by Lycos.
Games? Bah!
The Galaxy is one of the larger movie-related Web sites to come along in quite a while, offering a wide range of activities for surfers looking to kill a lunch hour. The trouble is that most of the things to see and do on the site, while nicely designed, are boring. The Shockwave games are primitive affairs that some visitors might find amusing to play once but that few will come back to. The Penny section is essentially the diary of the Penny Robinson character from the movie, but again there's nothing too substantive here. Dr. Smith's Evil Asteroid has a few amusing tidbits (his Shockwave game is based on hunting down and killing the Robinson family, which might hold a macabre fascination for some), but it too suffers from a lack of truly interesting content.
The trick to this site is finding the areas that are worth visiting, and the first place to start should be the LIS Databank. This is undeniably the best section of the Galaxy, because it focuses on the LiS movie and TV show (it's linked to New Line's extensive LiS TV site). Taken on its own, it's actually one of the best LiS sites on the Web, with tons of pictures, fun facts and behind-the-scenes details about LiS in all of its forms. The Shockwave-driven Download Module is particularly well done, and it claims to offer the largest number of LiS images available anywhere online. Another section worth a visit for the consumer-oriented crowd is Supplies, which is a quick and convenient way to buy LiS merchandise.
All in all New Line would have been better off skipping the tie-in sections and focusing more on the movie itself, which is what most users are probably interested in anyway. Fortunately the LIS Databank takes up a lot of the slack in this respect, and it's well worth a visit.
