When one thinks of Saturday morning kids’ shows from the 1970s, the ones that come immediately to mind are the animated offerings, your Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! or Super Friends. Perhaps one of the live-action offerings, which were few and far between, may come up as well, like The Secrets of Isis, Shazam! or Land of the Lost. But in all fairness, putting Land of the Lost in the same category as The Smurfs is short-sighted at best. With Netflix announcing a reboot of the series, and all episodes now streaming on YouTube, it’s a perfect time to look at one of the smartest, and strangest, groundbreaking offerings in television history.
The Marshall Family Find Themselves in the ‘Land of the Lost’
Stylized Land of the Lost title with the ocean and an island behind.
Image via NBC
Land of the Lost begins with the Marshall family – father Will (Spencer Milligan), daughter Holly (Kathy Coleman), and son Rick (Wesley Eure) – finding themselves in a strange world, brought there by a dimensional portal that opened as they were swept down a 1,000-foot waterfall back on Earth (or are they still on Earth…). Fortunately, the family is adept at survival skills, and, after taking shelter in a cave they claim as their own, they craft the things they’ll need to survive. How long they’ll need to survive, though, is dependent on them finding a way back home (or three seasons, as it were).
It could be a little trickier than anticipated, mind you. The land is filled with danger in the form of dinosaurs, with one, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, particularly troublesome and challenging them so frequently that they bestow it the moniker “Grumpy.” But there are far tamer dinosaurs as well, herbivores content to leave the Marshalls be, except in the case of a young brontosaurus Holly “adopts” as a pet, affectionately naming it “Dopey.”
Dinosaurs, the mean ones at least, aren’t the only hazards they are forced to confront. The Sleestak, a race of reptilian humanoid/insectoids, are decidedly hostile (and bear a similarity to… wait for it), as are a host of other fantastical beasts. Among the strange geography and alien technology (we’ll get there to), they find friends, a race of primate-like creatures called the Pakuni, a superstitious, skittish lot but agreeable, especially Cha-Ka (Philip Paley), who they grow close to. Week after week, the Marshalls continue their search for a way home, while bringing the exotic, imaginative world of the Land of the Lost to viewers at home.
‘Land of the Lost’ Is Groundbreaking Television with a Stellar Creative Team
What separates Land of the Lost from its Saturday morning kin is its deep mythology, which it comes by honestly. The series, the brainchild of Saturday morning legends Sid and Marty Krofft, who also developed Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and H.R. Pufnstuf, boasted some serious fantasy cred with its writers. David Gerrold, a former Star Trek: The Original Series writer who the Krofft brothers turned to guide the show, recruited sci-fi authors and fellow Star Trek: The Original Series writers, including Larry Niven and Norman Spinrad. In an amusing aside, Gerrold recalled he also approached Harlan Ellison, who wrote “The City on the Edge of Forever,” one of Star Trek: The Original Series’ best episodes, declined but as a joke, “[Ellison] submitted two-thirds of a brilliant outline, but refused to give me act three unless I bought the outline without it.”
The intent was to create a realistic fantasy world, one that kids would accept and understand, without dumbing down the concept. Wesley Eure says that they never talked down to kids, but “made kids rise up to the occasion, talking about time doorways and matrices and complex concepts of sci-fi.” Additionally, there were Pylons, metallic obelisks that control the time portals and the environment of the land, and are larger on the inside to house matrix tables. Deepening the mythology even more, the Pylons were thought to be created by the Altrusians, ancestors of the Sleestak. Furthermore, linguist Victoria Fromkin was brought on board to create a unique language for the Pakuni, the first-ever artificial language created for television. Pretty involved for “just” a kid’s show.
Technically, while ironically primitive, the dinosaurs and other creatures were brought to life through the tried-and-true stop-motion animation method. That in itself isn’t groundbreaking (1933’s King Kong owns that distinction), but how the series brought the stop-motion together with the live action certainly was. As Eure explains in the previously cited interview, they used chroma key (blue screen) to film the actors to combine with the animation in post-production. But because the animation was on film, and the actors on videotape, it was costly to do so, putting the future of the series in jeopardy after filming only one episode. But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and some of the best technicians in Hollywood got together and figured out a way to meld both in real time. Groundbreaking, but more importantly, cheaper. Was the effect seamless? No, but what it lacked in finesse, the live-action footage combined with the stop-motion animation gave Land of the Lost a distinct charm that gets lost in the CGI of today. And that, in a way, is perhaps the smartest thing that the groundbreaking, strange little Saturday morning kid’s show ever did.