Monster of the Day #1140

Updated on April 17, 2015 By Ken Begg 18 Comments


Man, just from looking at the monsters you’d think this was a much better show than it was. Still love the Seaview, though.

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  • Flangepart

    Jar-Jar Binks with armor.

    Yeah, the wee beasties were fun.

    Nice eye placement though…
    “OW!”
    “What happened?”
    “Smacked my left eye on a low hanging planter.”

  • bgbear_rnh

    With all the intrusions the Seaview encountered, you would think that submariners in WWII would have never been as functional and deadly as they were.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    The problem with all of Irwin Allen’s stuff certainly wasn’t the craftsmen he used. Ben Nye (who I assume made these creatures) was a talented guy, especially working within the budgets he had.

    The problem was always the scripts. I started watching “Doomsday Island” and got bored really quickly, ultimately just skipping through to get to the monster scenes.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Agree, my childhood memory was that Richard Basehart was a dull actor, no dimension and then you see his earlier work and realize that he was quite talented. Just watched “La Strada” last week. It was the show that made him seem bland.

  • Flangepart

    Yeah, made me wonder what Gypsy ever saw in him.

  • These monsters are starting to make me regret never having seen a single episode of the show. The problem is, that while I find his disaster flicks terribly entertaining (i.e. often they are most entertaining when terrible), all of Irwin Allen’s TV series just sort of leave me cold, so I don’t tend to seek the ones I missed.

  • Gamera977

    Same here, I’ve seen the movie but never the TV series. I’m going to have to check the series out now.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I have to say that I have some fondness for ‘Lost In Space’, goofy as it was. Of course the comic bantering of Dr. Smith and the Robot helped a lot.

  • Ken_Begg

    Anthony Mann’s He Walked By Night in available on the web. Basehart plays a killer, and is really effective. The film itself is sort of the proto-Dragnet and really quite good, as you’d expect from Mann.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Off-topic, but I just got an email from Monsters In Motion (models, props, DVDs, soundtracks, etc) that the Mexican “Ship of Monsters” is now available on DVD with English subtitles.

    Those monsters were previously “MoD”s and I found myself intrigued enough that I’m considering spending a bit of my (non-existent) money.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Jonathan Harris was a treasure. There will never be another like him, and he will be missed forever.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Thanks for this heads-up! Any word on the price tag or where it’s available?

  • Eric Hinkle

    Yeah. I read about him on Wikipedia and was rather surprised to see that he was married for 64 years.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    MIM had it for $15, but they are not usually the first in line…I suspect someone’s “Archive” line. Still, it’s in their catalog and not bad price-wise…

  • bgbear_rnh

    Very good film, A+. Another gem is “14 Hours” where he plays a suicidal (most likely homosexual ) man standing on a ledge.

  • The Rev.

    We saw that at T-Fest last year and it was wonderful. Sadly, we didn’t to finish it due to technical issues. I also forgot to ask Ken to show it while I was up there for B-Fest. Dammit.

  • I think any fondness I have for Lost in Space is mostly due to my nostalgia filters making me think it was better than it was. Rewatching episodes the last few years as they turned up on MeTV has convinced me that it often wasn’t very good (or often very interesting) either. I rather prefer the early B&W episodes for their more serious take, than I do the endless Technicolor adventures of a boy and his pet robot that seem to make up the bulk of the color run. Jonathan Harris was always worth watching though. He’s often the only redeeming feature of an episode.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Same here, though it was also a favorite of my dad and he rarely got to laugh very much, so I watch it and remember him.

    And he loved poor(?) old Dr. Smith too, though from what I’ve read the other (adult) actors hated the show once it became ‘The Wacky Misadventures of Dr. Smith and his Robot Sidekick’. As the actor for Major West put it concerning the infamous ‘Space Carrot’ episode, “Seven years of Stanislavski acting school and I end up wrestling a guy in a carrot suit.” Heck, the guy who did Professor Robinson retired to Argentina and got out of acting altogether after the show ended!