Land of the Lost Marathon

The Land of the Lost was one of many cheesy and cheap Saturday morning programs that I watched when I was a kid. Like several other similar Seventies programs by creators Sid and Marty Kroft, the show featured live actors negotiating sets that delivered all the Styrofoam boulders, costumes with visible seams, and puppets you could expect from a low budget children’s program. In the program, the Marshall family (Dad, son, and daughter) fall through a time-space portal while white water rafting and end up in a land of dinosaurs puppets, latex lizard men, and spray-painted pigs. As a child, I enjoyed Land of the Lost, as well as Sigmund the Seamonster, the Lost Space Saucer, The Bugaloos, HR Puffinstuff, and the Far Out Space Nuts (nice that Gilligan was able to find work, again).

Unlike most of these programs, Land of the Lost was intended to be a serious program. As an adult, it initially seemed like an unbelievably bad to create a movie from Land of the Lost. When I realized that the movie was going to be a parody of the program, then it seemed like a better idea. I have not yet decided whether I will see the movie. I suspect that I may have already seen the funniest parts of the movie through the movie trailers and previews.

The recently released film encouraged the SciFi channel to show a marathon of the Land of the Lost TV show. I couldn’t resist, and I like it more than I thought it would. The concepts for some of the episodes were interesting. As it turns out, popular adult science fiction writers had written some of the episodes. Larry Niven wrote an episode that focused on a time paradox and advanced a theory of conservation of matter through time. Theodore Sturgeon wrote an episode that featured the Pakuni (tailless monkey people) dancing around a pylon offering melons and getting modern groceries in return. (In the Land of the Lost, pylons are outhouse-sized pyramids that the protaganists could sometimes climb into and and fiddle around with glowing bits of plastic resembling stones on a back-lit checkerboard mounted on a Styrofoam pedestal.) Another interesting episode featured a parallel universe family that got trapped in a hunk of rock phasing between the two universes. The alternate dimension family had apparently been fiddling about with the stone checkerboards without reading the instruction manual or warnings first.

After a cast change due to a compensation dispute, the show really jumped the shark. All sorts of other travelers fell began falling out of the skies: the medusa, a balloonist, a cowboy and the Native American that cried when he saw the litter, the Flying Dutchman, the Abominable Snowman, and Richard Kiel. The one Sleestak (the lizard people) that had the decency to wear clothes seemingly became schizophrenic with a split personality.

I had hoped to find a video of the Abonimable Snowman being appeased with a piece of cake, but I guess I will have to settle on embedding the intro with theme song and intro

Related posts:

1. Last Episode of Lost OK by Me
2. 6 Top Philip K Dick Novels