Exploring the Land of the Lost
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Land of the Lost news from around the world and beyond
LOTL70 = the three
seasons of the original Land of the Lost television series of the 1970s
featuring the Marshall family.
LOTL90 = the two seasons of the Land of the Lost television series of
1990s featuring the Porter family.
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The San Diego Incident Grumpy makes his way to the San Diego Comic-Con 2008! The original Grumpy head puppet...valued at $4000-6000! |
Saturday Morning Fever
Michael Avila writes at Newsarama about how Hollywood is attempting to cash in on our old Saturday morning favorites, including Land of the Lost. But, how likely are we, the fans, to enjoy these remakes based on shows that, he says, weren't very good to begin with? He argues that LOTL and other '70s/'80s Saturday morning fare do not hold up very well when viewed with adult eyes (and brains); we judge these shows by the childhood memories they evoke. He even quotes Timothy Burke, pop culture professor at Swarthmore College and co-author of Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up with Cartoon Culture: “Most of the shows we watched as kids only hold a lot of value for us because we watched them as kids...in the cold light of day, they're pretty awful, or the good, creative material in them are struggling to get out from underneath cheapness and bad dictates from anxious network flacks and hack producers.� I suppose Burke's remarks about the good struggling to get out from underneath the cheapness could be applied to LOTL. What do you think?
Read Avila's article: Hollywood's Got Saturday Morning Fever
Will the Real Phillip Paley Please Stand Up?
An interview with Phillip Paley in character as Chaka.
Now This Is How It's Done!
Unlike the bad retro TV article presented below (TV When?), this retroview, originally intended to be published in Cinescape before it went out of business, by John Kenneth Muir is very well done and contains information I'd not heard before about the original Land of the Lost via interviews with Allan Foshko, Linda Laurie, Herman Zimmerman, Michael Westmore, Walker Edmiston, Joe Kubichan, and Robert Lally.
| TV When? Here's another archival entry (courtesy of the wonderful Internet Archive) of another now defunct webpage. TV Now still exists, but the TV Then section by television columnist Steven Lance has gone the way of the dinosaur. In what is par for the course when writing for the internet, in this particular archived column, "Land of the Lost Dinosaurs", Mr. Lance makes a number of errors and typos that any true Lostie could have corrected for him. In the following excerpt, I've highlighted the errors in orange. Have I missed any? "During the show's very successful run Saturday morning viewers were treated to elegant, albeit short, scenes of animated dinosaurs. The main characters were, the Marshalls, Will (Wesley Eure), his sister Holly (Kathy Coleman) and their Dad Rick (Spencer Mulligan). They build a very Tarzan-like tree house to be safe from the reptilian inhabitants, doing frequent battle with a Tyrannosaurus Rex referred to as "Scareface" because of a huge healed over gash along the right side of it's head. Holly named a lovable baby parasaurolophus Natasha (Tasha for short) after her mother who didn't make the trip with them. In the second episode the Marshalls were befriended by a cute missing link type creature that was half ape and half human. Known as the Pakuni, the gentle Cha-ka (played by Phillip Paley) and his female companion, Sa (played by Sharon Baird) were befriended by the Marshalls. Later on in the series the character of Zarn was introduced. Like the Marshalls he too was lost in time. He may have also been in the wrong galaxy as he sounded an awful lot like Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. That's because Zarn's voice was provided by the former attorney to the Millionaire, Marvin Miller. Making matters worse were a species of humanoid lizards not unlike the Gorn from Star Trek named Sleestaks. These highly intelligent bipedal lizards, were more than intelligent, they were an advanced race that held the secret to time travel and the Marshall's way back. Walter Koenig, known to Star Trek fans as Mr. Chekov, once told me that in the episode he wrote that introduced the head Sleestak, Ekik, the name actually got corrupted by the producers. The original name he wrote was "Eneg," which is Roddenberry's first name "Gene" spelled backward. Walter's way of tipping his hand to the man responsible for his long and successful career. At the opening of the 1976/1977 season Rick Marshal made it out of the Land of the Lost only to be replaced by his brother, Jack (Ron Harper) the new father figure in the series. A year later they were all replaced on NBC's Saturday morning schedule on TV Then." Lance seems to have cut-and-paste LOTL70 and LOTL90 into a single Frankenstein monster of a show! And mixed up the devolved Sleestak with their high-brow ancestors the Altrusians. Not to mention confusing Enik with his twin brother Ekik. I've also found errors in other of his columns. What happened to fact-checking and proof-reading?Who is Scareface? I think he was in the Hellraiser movies. I didn't realize Sa was Cha-ka's "female companion." That explains a lot. I guess Cha-ka was getting a little pakuni when he'd go missing on those Saturday nights. And, c'mon, Holly named her pet dinosaur after her mother Natasha? Everyone knows her mother's name is Dopey. |
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Heavy Metal Memories Whole Pop Magazine Online (a weblog of pop culture of the past) used to have a contest called Heavy Metal Memories which gave a series of clues that were designed to help the reader identify the character associated with a mystery lunchbox (of the classic metal variety). This link from the Internet Archive reveals the contest they did about the Land of the Lost lunchbox. Taken all together, the clues are pretty easy for a true Lostie to figure out, although clue #3 referencing an '80s singer might throw you off a bit since the show was on during the mid-70's!
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| And while we're on
the subject of the LOTL lunchbox, in 2006 Hake's
Americana and Collectibles was the authorized
auctioneer of
Michigan Senator Phil Arthurhultz's vast collection
of lunchboxes, including LOTL. Oddly (it seems
to me), Alex Winter,
the General Manager of Hake's, commented "The
Senator even has a lunchbox for as obscure a show as
the Sid and Marty Krofft 1975 series, Land of the
Lost. This is truly an amazing collection." An
obscure show? C'mon, Mr. Winter...you just don't know! And one final topic on the Land of the Lost lunchbox. I've noticed that while there are a number of photos of the large, main panels of said lunchbox available on the web, the images on the sides are not to be found. So, I finally scanned all six sides of the one in my possession (obtained at the San Diego Comic-Con some years ago). The images can be found here. Enjoy! (By the way, does anyone know who painted the images for the lunchbox?) |
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Ear of the
Beholder Check out sleestakmusic.com for a doom metal band called Sleestak. Their home page features a Gigeresque Sleestak on it and you can listen to one of their songs, "Library of Skullls". And they even have a pitch to become the official band on the LOTL movie soundtrack. |
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I Loved You in Wall Street! Invest in the Land of the Lost movie at Hollywood Stock Exchange. It's not real money but when you sign up at HSX, you get $2 million Hollywood dollars to invest in various showbiz projects. Then you can trade and build a portfolio and win prizes. I haven't tried it so I don't know how well it really works, but it could be fun. |
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Enik Revealed! I like the movie Sleestak better than the movie Altrusian. Here he looks too "buff and horny"...but it might work. John Boylan protrays the legendary Altrusian scientist. I really hope they use a voice like the one done by the late, great Walker Edmiston when he protrayed the character originally. Huge shoutout to Eric Erpelding for providing the scan! |
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I Spa With My Little Claw Land of the Lost fans are turning up everywhere! Arrissia Owen Turner presents us with an article on the spa getaway opportunity of Glen Ivy Hot Springs, CA, where "an aloe vera and sea kelp concoction" in the grotto "will allow you to live out all your Sleestak/Land of the Lost fantasies!" Check out the article online, courtesy of Inland Empire Weekly. |
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See Spot Bite Robert Porter posted the following message on the Lost List a few years ago and somehow I never got around to including his observation on this page: "Okay, so I was watching "Fair Trade" on the season 2 DVD set and saw something subtle, but actually quite funny. I don't know if this was cut from the taped-off-TV episodes I've seen before, but I never noticed it before... Grumpy is chasing Spot around the jungle in the episode, which then leads to Grumpy's foot falling into the hole in the ground that the Sleestak have created. This, of course, gets Spot off the hook and you'd expect him to hightail it out of there. But no. In the scene just before Grumpy gets out of the hole, Spot can be seen lurking around behind the trees in the background. Suddenly he slips out from his hiding place, bites Grumpy on the tail, then runs off. Grumpy, in his frustration, finally gets out and starts chasing Spot again. I laughed so hard at this scene. Spot is quite the snarky little dinosaur, isn't he!" (By the way, Robert, where are you these days?) |
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Sleestak
Mary Elephant Robot Chicken rules! Nuff said. |
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He Who Laughs Last is Lost in the Land The Land of the Lost movie is in post-production. Directed by Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket) from a script by Dennis McNicholas (The Ladies Man) and Chris Henchy (Entourage), the film stars Will Ferrell as Rick Marshall, Danny McBride as Will, Anna Friel as Holly and Jorma Toccone as Chaka. Scheduled to be released June 5, 2009. Estimated budget was $100 million. It's being called an adventure-comedy and LOTL fans have long been upset at the casting of Ferrell which will likely turn the formerly sober and capable patriarch role of Rick Marshall into a bumbling buffoon. Still, Ferrell is reputed to be a big fan of the original show so maybe he'll want to retain some dignity to the character and cut back on his usual slapstick. Then again, Universal Pictures' website refers to the character as having "questionable smarts" and describes the Land of the Lost as "a place of spectacular sights and super-scaled comedy." Wonderful, just frakking wonderful. :( In the film, Rick Marshall is a disgraced paleontologist trying to prove his far-out theories about pre-historic life. Along with his research assistant, Holly and a survivalist named Will Stanton (that's right, Marshall, Will and Holly are no longer related) are sucked into a time-space vortex to the Land of the Lost where they encounter dinosaurs, Sleestak and Chaka. I actually don't mind the change to the family dynamic and the idea of Rick Marshall being a paleontologist (instead of a park ranger as in the show) is a neat idea. The Sleestaks also look very cool, instantly recognizable as based on the original creatures but with the costumes much more detailed and realistic; they also shoot spines from their skin instead of carrying those pathetic crossbow thingies they used in the series...hopefully their aim has improved as well! Visit my Land of the Lost Movie Page where I will frequently be adding links to articles and photos about the film. |
S&M Videos Now Available on MySpace.com
Sid and Marty Krofft now have an official online presence at world-famous myspace.com. The coolest part of their page are the Krofft Kwikies, 4-minute videos which highlight episodes of their stable of shows, including the original Land of the Lost! Hopefully some LOTL90 Kwikies will be added as well. Also, don't miss Sid and Marty's introductory video on the home page, shot on the set of the Land of the Lost movie...looks like a soundstage made up as caverns of the Lost City!
It's Time for Hee-Haw...in Space!
LOTL70 made the list of The Worst Sci-Fi TV Show Openings (in other words, the opening theme song/credits).
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He Loves the Pak Don't forget to rent the DVD of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back featuring Will Ferrell as Federal Wildlife Marshall Willenholly! There's even an action figure! Ferrell will go on to star as Rick Marshall in the Land of the Lost movie. |
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I Never Liked Disco If you haven't seen it, check out the music video of Everclear's "A.M. Radio" on YouTube. At about the 2:42 mark there are a few seconds of Land of the Lost footage featuring the stone logo, Grumpy and Spot! |
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