‘Lost in Space' Star Reflects on His Cult Classic 1978 Novelty Song: ‘Has Been Very, Very Good to Me'

In the 1960s, Bill Mumy was a prolific child actor, appearing in everything from Bewitched to Perry Mason to The Munsters before landing a main role as Will Robinson in the sci-fi series Lost in Space.

But by the late 1970s, Mumy set his sights on a career in music, becoming one half of Barnes & Barnes, the musical duo behind one of the weirdest novelty songs ever: "Fish Heads."

Penned by Mumy and his friend Robert Haimer, "Fish Heads" featured nonsensical, high-pitched lyrics about "roly poly fish heads." The quirky 1978 song was a staple on the syndicated Dr. Demento radio show, and the accompanying music video was directed by Bill Paxton. Rolling Stoneonce ranked "Fish Heads" at No. 57 on its list of the top 100 music videos of all time.

In a June 2026 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Mumy, 72, revealed that because his parents wisely invested his money from his years as a child actor, he was financially free to pursue his passion for music as he got older. His childhood fame also opened a lot of doors for him, including the opportunity to record "Fish Heads."

"You never know what's going to click with the audience, right?" Mumy said in the CBS interview. "I mean, you can have 300 songs that are very soulful and perhaps melodically interesting, and it's ‘Fish Heads' that resonates and becomes locked in the id of society for 40 years."

Mumy clarified that he was grateful for the success of the novelty song. "‘Fish Heads' has been very, very good to me," he shared. "'Fish Heads' has been very good. You know, it's been on The Simpsons. It's been a bunch of commercials. It's been in a lot of films. 'Fish Heads' has definitely bought a few guitars."

Mumy credited his late music partner Haimer for coming up with the "roily poly fish heads" line during a lunch outing.

"We had just been jamming. He's playing piano, I'm playing guitar, and we're making up funny songs because we both liked ‘50s horror comic books and the Three Stooges and that kind of stuff. And it's just a release of excess energy," he said. "And we went out to lunch, a restaurant on Pico Boulevard in West LA… and got a fish dish and it came with the fish head on the plate kind of coiled up and giving you a little stare back before you got your knife out. And he said, 'Roly poly fish heads. Let's eat them up. Yum.'"

"So he basically came up with that chorus, and it's a very primitive nursery rhyme kind of a melody," Mumy continued. "It doesn't go a lot of places. It's like three chords that just keep repeating themselves. And so we went up into my recording studio, and at the time it was just a little four-track recording studio, and I sat down and I wrote all those verses out."

Mumy previously told The Television Academy Foundation that Barnes & Barnes began as "a little secret release of excess energy" between him and Haimer.

"Barnes & Barnes was just a little something Robert and I would do at our houses with our little two-track machines originally, as like you know, goofy stuff, teenage kind of stuff," he said. "We started it when we were 16, and it was never really meant to be shared. But over the years we wrote and recorded a lot of goofy little songs."

"Robert was a huge fan of the Dr. Demento radio show…so he was like, ‘I'm going to send in a couple of these Barnes & Barnes songs, let's pick a couple of them and do them right,'" Mumy recalled. "So we cut a few, ‘Fish Heads' was one of them, we sent it into Dr. Demento, and honestly, you know it is the most popular song in the history of his radio show. It became an immediate hit."

Mumy also revealed that it was his idea to do "the Chipmunk chorus vocals," and that he had to fight Haimer "tooth and nail" on that one.

The Lost in Space alum also noted that all credit for the music video went to Paxton, who was completely enthusiastic about the project.

"[He would] not take no for an answer, took his own money, flew to New York, he said to us, ‘I'm gonna get ‘Fish Heads' on Saturday Night Live," Mumy revealed. "And I thought, well that's not going to happen. …And sure enough, it ran two weeks in a row, they ran it twice, not a rerun but in two different episodes. And it ended up being entered into a lot of film festivals and it got garnished a lot of attention, and to this day we make a surprisingly good amount of money off ‘Fish Heads.'"

Related: ‘Lost In Space' Star Reunites With TV Siblings 58 Years After Series End

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This story was originally published June 17, 2026 at 5:10 AM.