How Many Robots Are There?
Lost in Space never provides a full head count for the amount of robots in action throughout the series. In the climactic scenes of the seasons 2 and 3 finales, however, there appear to be at least dozens of robots and maybe even hundreds. Ultimately that should be more than enough firepower to eradicate the human problem from their interstellar neighborhood as robots are very powerful.
Though we don’t know the exact number in play, there are a handful of “main” robots that the Robinsons and Alpha Centauri colonists have encountered and named. The first is, of course, Robot himself. Then there’s the series antagonist SAR (or “Second Alien Robot”). There’s also Scarecrow, a robot the jerks aboard the Resolute enslaved to harness interstellar travel. In the show’s final episode, Penny Robinson befriends a robot she names Sally.
All in all, that’s a lot of robots with names for actors to keep track of…particularly when the robot might not be physically in a scene with them. Though Robot is portrayed by a performer named Brian Steele in an actual suit, the other robots could be a combination of practical and digital effects.
“We did a scene this season where we end up being able to contact the kids through Robot and Scarecrow,” Maureen Robinson actress Molly Parker says. “Our Robot is a brilliant performer that we can relate to. But this one was all special effects. So what they had instead was this guy in a gray body leotard with this huge, Kool-Aid guy head. It had green dots all over it. I had to have this scene of talking to my children and then hugging it.”
According to showrunner Estrin, the task of keeping the various robots distinct comes down to equal parts writing and special effects work.
“One of the hardest things to do with CGI is body language,” he says. “We pay a lot of attention to how to make Robot, SAR, and others feel completely different even though they look the same. We have to convey that through the change in their faces and how they carry themselves. It’s not just like Scarecrow is gold and SAR is brown. They each have a different tenor in their mechanical whirs.”
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