Another Great, Scarce, Out of Print, Original Japanese Laserdisc Box Set!

LOST IN SPACE

TV Series
Volume 2

CLV Bilingual
Digital Sound
Japanese Import Laserdisc

Original Japanese Issue!
Excellent Condition
Catalog # PILF-1995

Lost in Space Volume 2

Irwin Allen's Lost in Space classic TV series complete season 1 on   8 LD's from Pioneer covering the first season.  B&W, CLV, NTSC. LDs were made for the Japanese market but will play just the same on any US LD player. The first two seasons have been aired in Japan and were dubbed at that time, so the LDs are bilingual, English on the right, and Japanese on the left audio channel (select which your hear with your LD player and a single language comes out of both sides),  Each box comes with a full color booklet, blueprints and lots of great material. Was not released in the US in LD format, will not be issued in DVD anytime soon.

There is an entire filmography for Allen presented in the wonderful booklet that accompanies the Japanese import release on the FoxVideo label, Lost in Space Box Vol. 2 (PILF-1995, �41,200), and although it is in Japanese, the titles and dates are in English. The box itself is also wonderful and fans will find it difficult to resist.

The science-fiction TV series, which was based upon the novel, Swiss Family Robinson , and the comic book, Space Family Robinson , with more than a passing similarity to Forbidden Planet tossed in for good measure. The box contains eight platters.

The booklet is also terrific, even though the text is mostly in Japanese. It includes schematics for the show's vehicles, filmographies for the cast and production personnel, and a segment on the Japanese magazine tie-ins from the Sixties. Each episode runs 52 minutes.

Vol.2 picks up with the second 14 episodes (#16 & #17 form a single narrative, which may have been why the disc producers avoided breaking them up), followed by the show's original pilot (a real treat for fans--we'll speak about it more in a bit) and then the second episode from the third season (#61), which, like #60, is in color. The picture quality on both box sets is the same. The two color episodes look great, with bright, vivid hues and accurate fleshtones. The monaural sound is digital and bi-lingual.

The best episodes, however, are featured on Vol.2 . The opening two-parter features Michael Rennie as The Keeper , who wants to add a pair of humans to his inter-galactic animal collection. The two episodes share little more than a premise, however, as each narrative can pretty much stand by itself. Albert Salmi, whose career has begun to fascinate us after we saw him opposite Paul Newman in Bang the Drum Slowly on The Golden Age of Television Volume Two (Nov 95), plays a 'space pirate' in episode 18, which is fairly similar to the Warren Oates episode. In Ghost in Space (#19), the heroes think an invisible creature is a ghost they have raised at a seance. The following three episodes, War of the Robots (#20), The Magic Mirror (#21) and The Challenge (#22) represent the highpoint of the first season. In Robots , the good robot is replaced by an evil rival until the two have it out.

Michael Ansara and a very young Kurt Russell are a king and a prince from another world who are undergoing a leadership ritual in The Challenge . The fun in the episode, of course, is to watch Russell spar with Mumy, but Ansara--who looks like a bald Billy Crystal--is also enjoyable and ends up having a fencing match with Madison where they wear goggles that look like Zorro masks. When we first saw Magic Mirror in our youth it left a very strong impression upon us, but it was not until this viewing that we discovered the episode has a well-disguised but clearly deliberate sexual undercurrent. We were also surprised to discover that Michael J. Pollard was the guest star, giving one of his typically spacey but highly effective performances as a young boy who is trapped inside a mirror world, where he and Cartwright are chased by a 'hairy beast from below' in a world cluttered with Freudian objects. Other episodes include The Space Croppers (#25) in which Mercedes McCambridge becomes the object of Harris' romantic attentions because he thinks her ship can take him back to Earth; All that Glitters (#26), a Midas-type fable with Werner Klemperer as a sort of storm trooper; and the final episode of the season, Follow the Leader (#29), which uses a favorite Allen plot device when Madison's character becomes possessed by an alien warlord. The episode does not have a cliffhanger teaser and ends strongly.

In the color episode, Visit to a Hostile Planet , the heroes make it to Earth, landing in rural America, but discover they have gone back in time to 1947. The episode is overly jokey and, at the end credits, though they're back in space, they're still in 1947. The black-and-white 45 minute pilot, No Place to Hide , which was directed by Allen himself (and has a Bernard Herrmann score!), contains sequences that were later parceled out in the first five episodes, thus explaining curiosities (there is an ostrich creature mentioned and glimpsed on one episode that is never seen again) and revealing the process by which the series was formulated. Neither Harris nor the robot--the series' two most popular components--were included, and it is obvious that the show would have been much duller--and would have died much more quickly--without them.

This is an ORIGINAL Japanese issue, high quality laserdisc box set which has been long out of print and is NOT available on DVD. Retail was 41,200 Yen (Approx. $400. at today's conversion rates.)

$325.00