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GENEALOGIES

                                             March 9, 2022



An old bit in "Mad Magazine" I remember puzzling over
as a kid made fun of the creativity on display in         The puzzle was that
developing elevision shows, presenting a genealogy        some of the earlier
diagrams and lecturing about it in the style of the       shows in the
King James version of the bible.                          genealogy were ones
                                                          I'd never seen (and
   "And Hogan's Heroes begat McCale's Navy"               still haven't).

(Or was it vice-versa?)


                                      This is actually a pretty common
                                      phenomena in popular arts of all
                                      sorts, which can often seem like
                                      they're  drowning in excessively
                                      imitative and derivative works.

                                      It can also be taken another way, a
                                      collective endeavor trying many
                                      small variations to find out whwat
                                      works by a process of evolution.

                                      And the high arts may like to claim
                                      they value radical creative breaks
                                      with the past, but that's as much
                                      posturing as anything else: there
                                      are no works that owe *nothing* to
                                      what was done before.

                                           And all of that is a common
                                           theme I return to often

                                                   TWISTING_SHADOWS

   I began thinking about the
   genealogies of television
   again when thinking about
   the old "Lost in Space".

     Young readers will probably have trouble grasping the
     sheer quantity of dumb on display in this show, where a
     middle class family of the 1950s is somehow given control
     of an interstellar spaceship, and they somehow screw up
     and get evidently permanently "lost" blundering around
     from planet to planet without ever getting their bearings
     for a return to earth.

     The cast of characters was evidently lifted from
     a show like "Father Knows Best" (e.g. the Mom
     character played by June Lockhart, one of the
     drippiest drips of this rather drippy era).

     Also on hand was Dr. Smith, an odd
     addition to the crew...
                                                       DR_SMITH
     And there was also the closest thing                                                  
     to a positive feature of the show: the                ROBOTISM
     Robot ("Danger, Will Robinson!").

     And come to think of it, I'm
     unfamiliar with "The Swiss
     Family Robinson", but this was
     probably conceived as "Swiss
     Family Robinson in Space".            Just as Star Trek was sold as
                                          "Horatio Hornblower in space".
       Ah: evidently it was an      
       indirect link-- there was a               By the way, this network
       Charleton comic called "Space             *turned down* "Star Trek"
       Family Robinson" that Irwin               because they liked the "Lost
       Allen though was cool.                    in Space" idea better.
                       
       There's a certain similarity in      
       the "Lost in Space" premise and      
       the show Time Tunnel, which is      
       essentially a "lost in time"           Oh: these were both
       idea, where our heros keep             Irwin Allen shows,
       getting randomly kicked form one       "Time Tunnel" was a
       time to another without any way        few years late.
       to return to their present.     





     And as I've heard Harlan Ellison comment
     at one point about television execs:
     "That's how they think: 'Let's get David
     Jansen on the road again!' "

        David Jansen had starred in "The
        Fugitive", a murder suspect perpetually
        on the run from the police while trying
        to find the real killer.




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