Talking Netflix’s Lost in Space with executive producers Jon Jashni and Kevin Burns
Lost In Space launches to Netflix this Friday! We caught up with executive producers Jon Jashni and Kevin Burns to learn more about the new Robinsons (and their alien robot).
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The beloved Robinson family is back and headed to space in the new Lost In Space series premiering on Netflix this Friday, April 13! Executive producers Jon Jashni and Kevin Burns were both huge fans of the original series in the 60s, and spoke with us about their love for this timeless family story and why bringing it into the modern era was a dream.
“It was a show that as a kid, growing up in the 1960s during the whole space program, and we hadn’t yet gone to the moon, I thought this would be my future. I thought I would be John Robinson, and my kids would be Will and Penney and Judy, and I thought this would be the way we were going to live,” Kevin Burns said. “When you revisit it — and we’re taking nothing away from it because we’re hugely supportive of it and fans of the original — you look at it and go, ‘Well, it’s of its time.’ It was limited by the effects you could do in those days. They took what they could make the best of, which was imagination, and that’s what they used for that show.”
For Burns, watching the new series brings him the same excitement he felt when watching the original as a young boy. “We have 53 years of incredible ability to realize that imagination… I wanted this to be the show, that when I was 10, I thought I was watching,” he said.
Jon Jashni shared that when he used to watch reruns of the show as a kid, he imagined that he was part of the Robinson family. “Not to make Kevin feel older than me, but I caught the bug in syndication,” Jashni said. “I felt I was Will Robinson. That’s the beauty of it, that it’s timeless and that these are your avatars, and the idea that together as family, you can survive anything proves… it just shows how timeless a concept it is.”
Reimagining the show involved changing not only the technology and effects, but also a modernized story with higher stakes, additional families, and more complex relationships between characters (including the robot). Having spent over a year in development with the project, Burns and Jashni had a lot of time to experiment with the story and feel of the show. “We had seen how it should not be done, and we had a couple of opportunities to do it where we were not happy,” Burns said. “So in the first meeting we had with Matt and Burke, it was like here’s what we think you need to do: ‘They have to be called Robinson, it has to be Lost In Space, there has to be a robot, there has to be a Dr. Smith, there has to be a chariot, there might be a space pod, but you can do that in season 3 just like they did before’.”
But the biggest discussion while the series was in development? The robot.
“Because everybody loved the original robot!” Burns said. “I love it; we have it. We actually have the original, but it’s like a gum-ball machine met a vacuum cleaner and they had a child. And it’s beloved and it’s charming, but it was supposed to be earth-made.” Viewers will find out in the pilot episode that the robot Will finds has supernatural abilities beyond what a human could create. “The decision was, make it an alien. That way we don’t know what it can do, we don’t know what it can’t do, we can give it a backstory, we don’t know where it comes from,” he said. “But we wanted it to be a boy and his robot, which the original was too… But to bring Lost In Space back in a way that is so perfect for our time and still makes you excited to be a kid again? That was a dream.”
Next: Which fan-favorite Stranger Things character is coming back for season 3?
Lost In Space drops on Netflix this Friday, April 13. What are you most excited to see in the reboot? Let us know on Twitter @HiddenRemote!