Is "Lost in Space" Worth the Trip?

Baby Boomers remember Lost in Space  (1965-68) fondly for its crazy plotlines and endearing characters: the Robot, the blustering gay-vague Dr. Smith, cute-as-a-button Will Robinson.

But you really had to be about eight years old to enjoy it without noticing that it was Gilligan's Island in space: seven stranded castaways and steady stream of visitors, space pirates, space gypsies, space hippies, and miscellaneous weirdos, who could help them get home,but don't.

There have been a number of remakes, pastiches, and sequels: a 1973 animated movie, with different characters, except for Dr. Smith; a 1998 movie stunt-casting Matt LeBlanc as pilot Don West; a 2004 movie that loses the family in the midst of an alien invasion; a 2015 sequel that gets the Robinsons back to Earth; and the latest, a reboot series on Netflix.

Is the latest worth the trip?

I've dipped into several episodes.

The campiness is gone. 

 The humor is gone. 

The aliens are gone, except for the Robot, who looks like a man in a space suit.  

The strange new worlds are gone.  The Robinsons and other survivors are stranded in Yosemite National Park (actually several provincial parks in British Columbia).

 What's left is Lost: the castaways struggle to survive, forming alliances, promoting hidden agendas, driving around in their runabouts, having conversations about the importance of family.

The heterosexual nuclear family is everything.  

No gay characters, no gay subtexts.  The bumbling, gay-vague Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith has been replaced by the tough, no-nonsense Parker Posey. 

I saw Victor Dhar and Vijay Dhar in the cast, and dared to hope that they were a gay couple.  Nope, father and son.

No beefcake, hardly any men.  The original had some cute guys to look at, John Robinson, Don West, and for the kids, Will Robinson..  The remake does cast several hunks: Toby Stephens (top), Raza Jaffrey as Victor Dhar  (second photo), and Ignacio Serricchio as Don West (below).

But what you see on screen is mostly women and a little kid (12-year old Maxwell Jenkins as Will Robinson).

Discussing the importance of family.

Executive producer Ken Burns has also produced: How Playboy Changed the World;  Holly's World; The Bunny House; The Girls Next Door; Bridget's Sexiest Beaches; and Inside the Playboy Mansion.

So I'm guessing that gay characters and beefcake are on the bottom of his list of priorities.

Right next to creating an interesting plot.

The Bisexual M&M

I really dislike advertising mascots who belong to the group that is being eaten.  There's something grotesque and ghoulish about sentient beings proclaiming how good they taste after being killed and cooked.

The scariest of the bunch are the M&Ms, sentient, three-foot tall versions of the candy, three male (red, yellow, blue), two female (green, brown).

They are eager to participate in human society.  But every time they make friends, get jobs, get invited to parties, or in this case, go on a date with William Levy (top photo), they discover that their human "friends" actually want to eat them.

The M&Ms follow stereotypic gender roles, with females distinguished from males by their eyelashes and lipstick.  And there are occasional homophobic jokes, as in this commercial when the Orange M&M (Eric Kirchberger) discovers that a pretzel person will be going inside him.

But there has been at least one M&M commercial with a bisexual text.  The Brown M&M (Vanessa Williams) is at a party, when her friend warns that she should stay away from the cruising Kristen: "She'll devour you!"

The savvy Brown M&M hooks Kristen up with the Red M&M (Billy West), who is shown being dragged off to what he hopes is a night of sex.

So the Brown M&M is into both men and women.  So is Kristen.  Or maybe she just has a fetish for pieces of sentient candy.

I don't know if Rob Pruitt, who plays the Blue M&M, is the same Rob Pruitt as the artist, but the artist (the naked one with the panda on his penis) is gay.

See also: Scary, Heterosexist Ads of the 1960s.