“Irwin Allen’s Swiss Family Robinson”

Based on the classic Johann David Wyss novel, Swiss Family Robinson was Irwin Allen’s second-to-last television series (Code Red in 1981 was his last). Unlike the successful science-fiction shows he produced in the 1960s (Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), Swiss Family Robinson was poorly received by viewers and barely lasted a season. Mostly forgotten today, it is occasionally mentioned in relation to Helen Hunt, as one of her early television roles.

Cast Image

Although his credits go back to the 1950s, Irwin Allen career really took off in the 1960s with the release of the film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in 1961. A television version premiered on ABC in 1964, beginning a lengthy association between the writer/producer and television network.

Three additional science-fiction shows would air on ABC throughout the decade: Lost in Space premiered in 1965, The Time Tunnel in 1966 and Land of the Giants in 1968. Of the bunch, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was on the air the longest, from 1964 to 1968 and The Time Tunnel the shortest, from 1966 to 1967.

A pair of big budget feature films in the early 1970s (The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno) brought Allen new fame, but he was never able to recapture it either on the big screen or the small. He turned his attention primarily to television, producing more than a dozen made-for-TV movies between 1975 and 1986.

Two of these telefilms would spawn weekly series: Swiss Family Robinson in 1975 and Code Red in 1981. He also produced a sequel to The Poseidon Adventure in 1979 and one or two other feature films. When he died in 1991, however, Irwin Allen had left his mark on both television and film, with fans new and old around the world.

Shipwrecked!

Written by Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (its English title) was originally published in 1812 and has been edited and added to greatly over the years. The story deals with, as the title explains, a Swiss family that is shipwrecked a la Robinson Crusoe and must fight to survive.

The popularity of the novel has led to a wide variety of adaptations in other media, ranging from feature films to comic books to television shows. The earliest film version, a serial from 1925, is a lost film and may no longer exist.

In 1940 the first feature film version was released, followed by a 1958 television version on NBC and another feature film version, this time from Disney, in 1960. And then, on April 15th, 1975, ABC aired a two-hour made-for-TV movie that was Irwin Allen’s take on the classic tale [1]. Martin Milner (of Adam-12 fame) starred as Karl Robinson, patriarch of the family, and Pat Delaney played Lotte, his wife. Willie Aames and Eric Olson played Fred and Ernie Robinson, respectively, and Helen Hunt played Helga Wagner, a young girl who was shipwrecked alongside the Robinsons.

On the island, they meet Jeremiah Worth (played by Cameron Mitchell) a cantankerous old sailor who was himself shipwrecked some seven years before the Robinsons showed up. Together, the group must deal with dangerous pirates and an even more dangerous volcano (how could an Irwin Allen series not include a volcano?).

When ABC released its fall schedule for the 1975-1976 schedule, Swiss Family Robinson was included, airing Sundays from 7-8PM opposite The Wonderful World of Disney on NBC and Three for the Road on CBS [3]. All three shows were defined as children’s programming in order to fulfill requirements set by the FCC to give the network’s an additional Sunday hour of television (the prime-time access rule).

The network promoted Swiss Family Robinson, along with Mobile One and Barbary Coast, as the ABC “world of adventure.”

The weekly series premiered on Sunday, September 14th, 1975. TV Guide listings indicate that the second episode aired on following Sunday, September 21st while the episode list contained in Television Drama Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle: 1975-1980 by Larry James Giankos states that the next episode would not air until September 28th, 1975 [4].

Lotte Robinson

From the very start, Swiss Family Robinson faced heavy competition from NBC’s Wonderful World of Disney, which had aired from 7:30-8:30PM the previous season and ranked 18th in the Nielsens. NBC moved it to 7PM to go along with the FCC’s guidelines for Sunday programming.

For CBS, Three for the Road was its Sunday-night “children’s programming,” but some 40 CBS affiliates declined to show the series, opting instead to continue airing local news programs [5]. Thus, there was little chance Three for the Road would manage to last for thirteen episodes, let alone the entire season.

However, CBS stuck with Three for the Road through the end of November, having nothing better to replace it with that local affiliates would like. Then, the network came up with an idea: move 60 Minutes from 6-7PM on Sundays, replacing Three for the Road and giving local affiliates the 6PM hour for local news (which is what ABC and NBC did). And on December 7th, 1975 60 Minutes premiered in its new timeslot [6].

Surprisingly, 60 Minutes performed quite well at 7PM, and alongside The Wonderful World of Disney, there was little room left for Swiss Family Robinson [7].

The series would air straight through early November before pre-emptions and repeats began. Between Sunday, November 16th, 1975 and Sunday, April 11th, 1976, Swiss Family Robinson was pre-empted seven times and repeats were shown four times. The final original episode aired on Sunday, March 28th, 1976. The two-hour made-for-TV movie that spawned the series was split into two parts and aired on successive Sundays on April 4th and April 11th, respectively. A total of nineteen episodes (or twenty according to TV Guide listings, which can be notoriously inaccurate) were produced.

Although the Robinsons had a relatively comfortable life on the island, thanks to a nifty tree house and the help of Jeremiah, much of their time was spent hoping and trying to find a way home. Ships — both pirate and British — were sighted occasionally, although the pirate ships were hardly a welcome sight.

Pirates and mutinous sailors were often causing problems for the Robinsons, as were hawks and monkeys, mysterious goings-on and unfriendly natives. The volcano from the made-for-TV pilot film erupted again in one episode and the Robinsons found the ruins of an ancient city in another. Other episodes involved Karl operating on Fred, who had appendicitis, and Helga thinking her supposedly dead father is somehow on the island.

Karl Robinson

A two-hour Christmas episode was aired in December, followed by a two-part episode in February focusing on famed pilot Jean Lafitte (played by Frank Longella) who had earlier hidden treasure on the island and came back to find it and offered the Robinsons a way back to America (they were American in this version, by the way).

Additional versions of The Swiss Family Robinson have aired in the years following the demise of Irwin Allen’s Swiss Family Robinson, including a Canadian television series that aired in 1976 and another television attempt produced for international syndication in the late 1990s (it may have aired on the PAX network in the United States). This series, which ran for thirty episodes, starred Richard Thomas of The Waltons fame.

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Last Updated June 26th, 2008