R.I.P., Maureen Robinson

I am late to the game, but I still wanted to honor actress June Lockhart, who went to that great freezing tube in the sky last week on the 23rd (photo above from the pilot episode of “Lost in Space”). As Dr. Maureen Robinson, she was just about the coolest TV mom that any kid could want for their own. Aerodynamic red hair, intelligence, compassion, and a rockin’ bod — she had it all!



With Guy Williams, the two portrayed an ideal set of parents that raised their three children with the perfect recipe of love, discipline, and encouragement.



Readers of this blog know that she also had a supporting role in Shirley Temple’s teen film, “Miss Annie Rooney” (1942) as Stella Bainbridge, a snooty little thing who gets tossed aside when rich boy Marty White (Dickie Moore) meets Shirley.



The face says it all…left in the dust.



Also in the movie were Noel Neill (Lois Lane in “The Adventures of Superman”) and Shirley’s stand-in, Mary Lou Isleib.



Yup…left in the dust. How can you compete with Shirley?



In the book, Lost (and Found) in Space 2, Bill Mumy had this to say about his TV mom, June:

June is a brilliant woman. Super smart. She devoured books and newspapers like I devoured cheese and crackers. June kept our fertile young minds awake by playing word games with me and Ange [Angela Cartwright] whenever there was a lull in filming and we weren’t in school. Password, Scrabble, Boggle. What people don’t really know about her is she’s a rock ‘n’ roll gal. Truly. They think of her as this perfect, traditional, family values mother on television. But June is a bold and rebellious rocker.

Angela Cartwright chimed in:

Wordsmith… game player… yoga enthusiast…extremely intelligent with a wicked sense of humor and a very distinctive laugh. Every year since I have known June she has sent birthday and Christmas card wishes to me and my family. June loved a good time. She always knew what was going on in the world and in outer space thanks to her voracious reading habits and NASA contacts. In my opinion she was a perfect Maureen Robinson. Strong, wise, smart. America’s favorite mom is a potpourri of contradictions.

This clip of June on a 1970 episode of “The Virginia Graham Show” shows June pushing back on the obnoxious Graham about homosexuality with both intelligence and wit.



A class act. You will be missed, June.

See more “Lost in Space” photos at my main website.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, June!

Yesterday was the 99th birthday of beloved actress, June Lockhart. While she had a number of memorable roles throughout her long career (starting in 1938 with “A Christmas Carol”), she will always be Maureen Robinson to me. From 1965-1968, she played everyone’s favorite space-age mother on “Lost in Space.” Unlike many of the other early TV-moms, Maureen Robinson had a career as a doctor, often challenging and pushing back (successfully!) against some of the stubborn males in the show. ALWAYS with love, though!



In the first episode, she passes out when her body is re-animated from the Jupiter 2’s freezing tubes. It would be one of the few times that her character was helpless.



She brought a warmth, strength, and dash of comedy to all her roles. It was somewhat disappointing that the campy Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris) overshadowed the central heart of the show, Maureen and John Robinson (Guy Williams). When that occurred, a promising drama about the space family Robinson descended into a silly hour of having to listen to Harris’ character mug, moan, and eventually have to be rescued. My caption for the photo below would be Harris telling Lockhart and Williams:

OK, here’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to ad lib my role and endear myself to producer Irwin Allen, while you two will end up in the background. Got it?



Below is a behind the scenes shot from the Shirley Temple movie, “Miss Annie Rooney” (1942).



Seated at the table, you can see the back of June’s head at left, then Shirley, and Dickie Moore. Gloria Holden and Jonathan Hale are in back.



June’s character, Stella Bainbridge, is a snotty young rich girl and rival to Shirley. Dickie Moore’s character, Marty White, refers to her as “an old drizzle puss!” Here she is in a screenshot from the movie (far left), looking disapprovingly at Shirley’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks character, Annie Rooney.



Miss Annie Rooney wins out in the end. Marty’s parents, played by Hale and Holden, are won over by Annie’s dance moves. The drizzle puss is left out.



Before June and Shirley made “Rooney,” they attended school together. As June recalled in a Time article written when Shirley died in 2014:

I was at Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles and in 1941, Shirley joined as a freshman. It was her first school experience with other students because up until that time she’d been tutored on the set at Fox. Her contract had run out, so she had the opportunity to go to a real school and interact with the girls. We wore uniforms at Westlake and she integrated very easily into the student body once she learned about uniform compliance. It turned out that I being a junior at the time was one of the people on the committee that had to watch them all go into morning assembly and I had to make sure that the skirts weren’t too short, and that there was absolutely no lipstick and no rouge. So once Shirley got the hang of having to take off her lipstick and rouge every morning, she was fine. But of course, this is something she’d been so used to all her life. She was very charming about it though. I joined the military drill team at Westlake and was a captain, so she joined too and we both agreed it was really great fun—we’re talking early war here, 1941. We agreed that it was really rhythmic movement, with dance steps, to a military tempo. So she had no problem getting the hang of that. The next year, we made a movie together, Miss Annie Rooney. I played the snotty girl and she was, of course, the leading lady. And Dickie Moore was in it, and he gave her her first on-screen kiss—a most chaste kiss. We were the only two Guild Members at school and to have a chance to work together that way was really nice. But she was a good student, I remember the principal telling me about her—she was working when we were taking our chemistry tests, so she had to do them later, and she graduated with her class but my memory of it is that she had to come in alone and take her chemistry test in the lab—which she passed with flying colors.

June also had a minor role in the Judy Garland film, “Meet Me In St. Louis” (1944). Her character, Lucille Ballard, was an off-screen villain for most of the movie. Once she is introduced, we realized it was all a figment of sisters Esther (Judy) and Rose Smith’s (Lucille Bremer) imaginations.



It is Lucille who plays matchmaker and selflessly gives up her date so that Rose can be with the one she loves.



In real life, June was hardly a drizzle puss or a doormat. Bill Mumy, who played her son Will on “Lost in Space,” called her a “rock and roll goddess.” You can see what he has to say about her at the 40 minute mark of this video:



I hope that June had an incredible birthday yesterday!

See more “Lost in Space” photos at my main website.

Temple Tuesday: Lois Lane and Maureen Robinson

In the 1942 film “Miss Annie Rooney,” Shirley Temple plays a teen from the wrong side of the tracks who catches the interest of a young man (Dickie Moore) who comes from money. Lots of money. He decides to go against his parent’s wishes (Gloria Holden and Jonathan Hale) and invite her to his birthday party. When she arrives, Mother is not pleased that the arrangements for twelve will now have to squeeze in another. AWKWARD! The snooty girls at the party look down on poor Shirley until she teaches the old drizzle-pusses how to dance.



Recognize anyone in these photos?



On the far left is Noel Neill, best known as Lois Lane from the 1950’s “Superman” TV series. The girl on the right in this shot is Shirley’s stand-in, Mary Lou Isleib, who finally got a few seconds of screentime.



Noel with George Reeves, as we best remember her:



On the far right of the previous shot is June Lockhart, wearing a somewhat ill-fitting dress and looking extremely bored.



Some twenty years later, June would play the smartest sexiest space mom ever, Dr. Maureen Robinson, in “Lost in Space,” shown here with TV husband Guy Williams.



NOBODY made science (and silver lame) look as appealing as June!



See more teenage Shirley Temple photos at my main website.

Temple Tuesday: All in the Details

Shirley’s second attempt at a “comeback” after her childhood career ended was 1942’s “Miss Annie Rooney.” While it was a bomb at the box office, today it holds up as a cute glimpse into teen life of the 1940s, and of course Shirley is nothing less than charming. The movie was touted for Shirley’s first on-screen kiss; it wasn’t on the lips though. This is as close as Dickie Moore gets:



When wrong-side-of-the-tracks Annie (Shirley) goes to Marty’s (Dickie) high society birthday bash, she is snubbed by the other teenage girls in the powder room.



Recognize the gal on the left?



It’s none other than June Lockhart of “Lost in Space” fame. She also attended school with Shirley at Westlake.



The other trio of girls snubs Shirley, too. Recognize the gal at the center of the trio?



Noel Neill, best known as Lois Lane in the “Superman” TV show, shown with George Reeves (aka Superman).



The girl at the right of the trio is Mary Lou Isleib, Shirley’s good friend and stand-in, in a rare on-screen (but uncredited) appearance with Shirley.



Apparently Dickie Moore was not capable of dancing the jitterbug with Shirley. The solution for the shoestring budget production was to have a dance double who wore a very obvious rubber mask. Look at the edges!



Another shot of Mary Lou on the left; you can still see some of those Shirley-curls that she had to sport for years!



The last shot of the movie shows Shirley holding Dickie Moore’s hands. See her bracelet?



Shirley either snuck this in or the production company didn’t care that it spelled out “Shirley” and her character was named Annie. Here’s how the bracelet looked when it was auctioned off from Shirley’s personal collection a few years ago:



She also wore it in the glamorous publicity stills shot by George Hurrell:









See more teen Shirley Temple photos at my main website.

Screen Gem Saturdays: Lost in Space—still my fave

Picture this: the cheesiest of props…ham acting…juvenile (sometimes) scripts, and the most heart-warming sentimental drivel this side of whatever planet you care to name. And yet, it still remains one of my favorite shows. Irwin Allen sure knew how to stretch a dollar, and often enough it shows on “Lost in Space.” With a fantastic ensemble cast and just about every kind of alien imagineable, LIS has achieved a legendary cult status that continues to grow. The initial pilot was very serious in tone, and any laughs were strictly unintended. Dr. Smith, played by eternal guest star status Jonathan Harris, began on the show as 100% evil, with very few (if any) redeeming qualities. Realizing this could mean a short shelf-life for his character, Harris injected a bit of camp into his character and it paid off in spades. Unfortunately, by the 3rd season, the entire show degenerated into a campfest and lost any grounding that it originally had. Even so, it was a lot of fun. And I still love to watch it!

Didn’t every kid wish they could have their own Jupiter 2?



And I’m sure that most kids wished their parents were as cool as Maureen & John Robinson. The things she could whip up with a few alien ingredients! She put Betty Crocker to shame—and knew how to use a laser to boot!



Who could forget the dashing Major West (played by Mark Goddard), who had the extremely watered-down "relationship" with Judy Robinson:



This photo shows Bill Mumy, who portrayed Will Robinson, with his stand-in. Yup...a female stood in for the young Mumy who eventually did a comic-book version of the classic 1960’s Irwin Allen TV show. Stand-ins do a lot of the grunt work; dressed in similar costumes, they make sure all of the lighting is correct before the star steps on the set.



See more “Lost in Space” photos at my main website.