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Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Goddard

"I appeared on a show with Jonathan Harris on it-the Bill Dana show-even before Lost In Space. Someone gave me a tape of it in the past year, but in all these years we hadn't remembered"

About this Quote

Memory is supposed to be an actor's currency, but Mark Goddard is pointing out how unreliable the ledger really is. The line lands with a casual shrug - "someone gave me a tape" - yet it quietly dramatizes what television does to a life: it records everything while the people inside it forget most of it. A performance can be preserved with near-clinical fidelity, only to resurface decades later like an artifact that contradicts the story you thought you were living.

The specific intent is modest and almost conversational: Goddard is marveling at an early brush with Jonathan Harris, a name forever fused to Lost in Space, before either of them were locked into that shared cultural reference point. But the subtext is richer: careers don't always feel like narratives; they feel like a scatterplot. TV history, in retrospect, gets edited into a neat origin myth - "before Lost in Space" functions like a timestamp and a hierarchy of relevance - while the actual experience was just another gig on another set.

There's also a soft melancholy in "we hadn't remembered". It's plural, communal forgetting, suggesting how collaborators can share a past without retaining it, because the industry trains you to move on immediately to the next job. The tape becomes a time machine with no nostalgia filter: proof that the past happened, even if it no longer lives in anyone's mind. In a culture obsessed with receipts, Goddard reminds us that documentation isn't the same as meaning.

Quote Details

TopicNostalgia
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Goddard, Mark. (2026, January 16). I appeared on a show with Jonathan Harris on it-the Bill Dana show-even before Lost In Space. Someone gave me a tape of it in the past year, but in all these years we hadn't remembered. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-appeared-on-a-show-with-jonathan-harris-on-88562/

Chicago Style
Goddard, Mark. "I appeared on a show with Jonathan Harris on it-the Bill Dana show-even before Lost In Space. Someone gave me a tape of it in the past year, but in all these years we hadn't remembered." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-appeared-on-a-show-with-jonathan-harris-on-88562/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I appeared on a show with Jonathan Harris on it-the Bill Dana show-even before Lost In Space. Someone gave me a tape of it in the past year, but in all these years we hadn't remembered." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-appeared-on-a-show-with-jonathan-harris-on-88562/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Mark Goddard

Mark Goddard (born July 24, 1936) is a Actor from USA.

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