'Land of the Lost' the complete 1974 television series

Man - used to love that show. Some really good sci fi. I saw it in the mid-late 90s though. Did they remake it or as I seeing reruns?

ETA - they did remake it in 1991 - but I didn’t see it then. I saw the original ones by the looks of it. Neat.

They turned that awful Will Ferrell movie into a television series?!?!

ducks

Loved the show as a kid. But didn’t they have a reoccurring theme of someone always spraining an ankle, thus forcing them to run slowly? It definitely made the slow Sleestak shuffle seem more ominous.

Years ago I read somewhere that those Sleestak masks were horrible to see out of. It was because of this that the early actors moved slowly to avoid stumbling into each other. Thus the shuffling walk. There were also only three costumes. They’d film the Sleestak multiple locations around the caves and in the passageways. In editing the cuts they worked to make you feel like there were dozens of them.

Around the same time as this show, wasn’t there one about astronauts returning to an earth that had depleted its resources and finding humanity to be living in independent villages with tech either of stone age caliber or super advanced? Does anyone on this thread remember that short lived show at all?

Fortunately it bombed enough not to displace the real Land of the Lost in the public consciousness, but I’ve seriously run into Gen-Y folks who were surprised that the Addams Family was a TV show (or for that matter that they started as New Yorker comics, but that’s obscure even among fans of the show).

That might have been . . . oh, fudgenuggets. "Earth 2?’ “Ark 2?”

Did it have a talking chimp?

Ah, here we go:

3 Likes

One of Helen Hunt’s first roles was a guest spot on an episode of Arc 2.

This is a great deal… $12 for the whole series… but I will point out that the 2004 Rhino DVD release had a lot more material for the Land of the Lost enthusiast; commentary tracks with the actors and writers and such.

Now that one freaked me out a little. I remember being creeped out by the Sleestaks on LotL but my lasting impression of the show is how much Cha-Ka annoyed me.

But my feelings about either show weren’t strong enough to force me to change the channel, or get up and find something better to do. I look back more fondly on some of the commercials from back then (like this one), but that’s how they getcha.

2 Likes

I haven’t been able to find it on YouTube, but in 1981 or so, some Krofft puppets were on Oral Roberts. This was around the same time they were on The Barbara Mandrell Show.

Obligatory The Onion article:

2 Likes

Land Of The Lost/HR Pufnstuff/Shazam/Isis. I’m old, but I’ll put that up against any Saturday morning lineup in the past 30 years.

2 Likes

Marilyn Manson’s “Dope Hat” (from their first and imo best album, Portrait of an American Family) has samples from and lyric refs to Lidsville. I had a Lidsville lunchbox when I was a kid. And who can forget Drugachusetts?

2 Likes

Wow. I’ve met tons of people that remember the show, just not anybody that ever admitted to liking it, even as a kid. I did like the dinosaurs though. Because dinosaurs are eternally cool.

“Downstream” is a total mindf**k and worth watching. The family decides to try rafting out of the Land of the Lost since, hey, we got here by water, right? As they drift down the lazy river, they say goodbye to their friendly dinosaur and enter a cave. There they find a confederate soldier who has been trapped there since the civil war. He’s lost his mind and holds the family at gunpoint WITH A TORCH AND CANNON!! The real Colonel Kurtz moment comes when he talks about the times when was starving and had to resort to eating Sleestak!!

“They don’t come around much anymore…”

1 Like

WESLEY was my first introduction to people who only have one name, like Fabian. I also remember thinking how weird it was that they would fall down a waterfall into some hidden place but there’s clearly sky, weather, etc. - how could it really be “lost” like that? Like that was the thing that destroyed my verisimilitude, not the aliens or any of the other million things that were problematic.

Here’s a cool set of pics of an original sleestak costume that was recently restored: http://www.therpf.com/f45/enik-land-lost-restoration-custom-mannequin-display-105675/

1 Like

I was enthralled with this show when I was a kid! I always regretted that I never got to see the ending and see how they got home. Fast-forward to my adult self living in San Diego and I am with a pal at a party when I notice an Oscar statue from 1960 on the mantle, with the name of the host, Gene, on it, a pleasant and interesting old fella. Holy Crap!

I take a renewed interest in the friend of my pal. He had one the Oscar for special effects on the film Time Machine and went on to work on (among other things) Land of the Lost.

The only thing I could think to talk about after that was to ask him how it ended. :smiley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Warren

When this show was on there was quite a bit of construction going on in my neighborhood, with bulldozers and other large equipment often left unattended for us kids to play on. (Somehow I doubt that would ever happen today.)

Oh how I loved pretending the bulldozers and other earth-movers were dinosaurs…but deep down I wanted to be a Sleestak. I’d still love to be one for Halloween.

I worked at that location for a while on contract for CNN. A guy in my section had an original map of “Sid & Marty Krofft World” hanging on his wall, that must have been there from Day One. Fantastico.

Cant believe no one mentioned this guy