Updated: October 03, 2025

To celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the premiere of Lost in Space on September 15, 1965, I made a tribute video using my collection of props, sets, and dioramas that I've built over the years. For the last 15 years, since I built up a replica Jupiter-2 flight console in a basement room, I've also been building up replica props from Lost in Space. As the props became larger, I ran out of room in my basement and needed a larger space to display them. At the same time I wanted to find an old building to use as a stage to film an unrelated series called Cosmic Cat. As it turned out I was able to buy an old closed theater building in my town that was perfect for my films and gave me a space to display my Lost in Space props and sometimes I worked them into my stories. Along with building sets and props specifically for my Cosmic Cat series, I continued to make more Lost in Space props and even some partial sets from the show, like the underground city, cave, and even the Wish Upon a Star, and the Derelict Spaceship.

This summer as I realized that the 60th Anniversary of the show was coming up, I wanted to do something special for it and filmed a tribute for it using my sets and props. I thought it would also be fun to recreate and film some of my favorite scenes done as a parody. This lead to a flurry of more prop building to work into the tribute to meet the deadline of September 15, 2025, some of the props were only finished the day before I needed to film them, like The Invader's from the 5th Dimension heads and The Keeper's cage. It was also an incentive to finish my Robot, which was finished right before filming started. To keep the tribute from getting even longer than it turned out to be I combined scenes from several episodes into just once scene. In some cases actual props from the show were used, like the Time Merchant's control panel, and the crushed helmet visor from Island in the Sky. I already had some existing footage of my miniature taken at Red Rock Canyon and on a frozen pond in our local park. For a couple of scenes I did use some previously built dioramas as well. The rainstorm was also just reused film from of my Cosmic Cat episodes. I've left everything set up at the studio for now and even though it's just a small semblance of the original set, it's still fun to walk around it and let my imagination take me back to when I first watched the show. I do have a website. cosmicfilmsstudio.com in case you want to check out all the dioramas, sets, and props that I've built over the years. And of course this is the vido of my Lost in Space World video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgA2CHyF_WI&t=1609s

Bill Hedges