First of all, Hi to all of you from a new member-- It's great to see a site devoted just to Penny here! She got all too little time to really shine in the series, I think... but then each moment with Penny is perhaps the more precious for it, & you can never have too precious a Penny moment!
On the topic of accidents on set, LIS did have a few that I've heard of-- along with the inevitable near-misses & bloopers too, of course.
Marta Kristen had a couple of pieces of hot plastic land in her eye in "The Great Vegetable Rebellion". That's how the fake snow came out of the snow machine. I believe she went on working for the day, so thankfully no emergency, but she did have the 'burned' eye checked at the hospital later, so definitely a cause for concern.
Angela herself was bitten by Judy the chimp once-- I assume not too badly, or we would have heard more about it...
Still shocking, though-- there I thought Penny's natural sweetness endeared her to animals & humans alike! Not to mention aliens, androids, & nebulous cosmic forces. Though they do say working with animals & children is one of showbiz's biggest drags.
In her interview with LISA (LIS Australia, who have many interesting interviews on their site), Angela intimates that this could have been a factor in why they started writing the primate perpetrator out of the show-- but then Judy the chimp was the only one of the cast to return to the old CBS time-slot the year after the 3rd season, in Daktari, so she was obviously regarded as a risk worth taking on.
Maybe just not up so close to a young girl's face anymore, though-- as I recall, her main pal was Clarence the cross-eyed lion this time, so any biting that was going to be done would probably not have gone her way.
And, of course while it didn't happen on set, Mark Goddard was in a motorcycle crash just 2 days before shooting started on the main series. So for the beginning of Season 1 he was in a lot of pain with a case of road-rash down one side & a cast on-- I believe on his forearm or wrist, since they had to give him extra large gloves, as well as make his suit a little larger. They say those 1st-season spacesuits were very stiff & uncomfortable too-- poor guy.
Mark was to have another brush with danger in "The Anti-Matter Man", when, wielding a torch against the caged Guy Williams, he came close enough to the flame himself to singe his false beard.
But the real doozy happened to Bob May on the set of "The Space Trader" in full Robot gear-- at 300 pounds, no trivial thing to be caught in whem it goes out of control. The Robot was rolling up the ramp to the Jupiter-2, being pulled along cables, which was how they did his smooth rolling motion, & someone accidentally stepped on a cable. By some fluke of physics-- the winch taking up slack, & a 'slingshot effect' when they (Mark Goddard, apparently) stepped off the cable again-- the Robot flew up in the air, doing a complete 360 degree flip (!) before coming down. Bob was knocked out in the crash, with the motorcycle batteries inside hitting him in the back on impact. The crack prop team had the busted-up robot repaired in record time, & Bob finished the scene like the trooper that he is. The top part of the robot alone weighs 250 pounds, & he used to walk that around pretty regularly for his costume, so we're talking about one tough cookie here.
For a great account of this story as only Bob can tell it, read the interview here:
www.kaos2000.net/interviews/bobmay/ On a related note: has anyone else noticed how enthusiastically Angela flung herself around the decks of the Jupiter-2 for all those scenes when there's turbulence in space? I'm glad she didn't do herself an injury. It's quite plain from watching them that she, of all the cast, was really forcing herself right off balance & making those little emergency checks-- & the whole scene-- look really real. Talk about throwing yourself into your work!
