A bulletin has just reached my desk about yet another half-century anniversary. Today marks 50 years since the premiere of the original Land of the Lost (1974-76). How fortuitous that it happens to fall on a Saturday! (For you young ‘uns, Saturday mornings used to be when all the kids shows aired, scheduled that way because it was the one day when there was no school or church). Today is also three days before the birthday of Spencer Milligan (1937-2024) who played the dad Rick Marshall, and who passed away earlier this year. A perfect synchronous storm that’s liable to send you swirling through a time tunnel!
Land of the Lost was basically an entrant into the “Lost World” genre retooled for kids. I’m overdue to do a post on this mini-genre which consists of stories in which, through whatever unlikely circumstances, humans find themselves face to face with extinct civilizations and/or species, usually dinosaurs. The genre dates all the way back to the silent movie days; today it’s prime pillar is of course the Jurassic Park series. The Jurassic Park franchise (I’m guessing) stifles any contemporary efforts to tell similar stories, in spite of the fact that the premise dates all the way back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle. For a little direct context, in 1974 there had been a screen version of Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, surely one of the inspirations for this series, or at the least an indicator that it could be successful.
The premise is that Rick (Milligan) is white water rafting with his kids Will (Wesley Eure) and Holly (Kathy Coleman) and they are transported through some portal to another place. It is perhaps another planet or another dimension, as opposed to a time door however since, in addition to the dinosaurs they encounter, there happens to be a race of malevolent lizard-men called the Sleestak, as well as a race of little monkey-people called Pakuni, one of whose number, Cha-Ka (Philip Paley) becomes both the family’s guide and their pet. The family makes their home in a cave high atop a cliff face, and are frequently menaced by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which they repel with a sharpened log they call the Flyswatter.
The show was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft and a marked move away from the team’s previous fare, which had combined puppets and plush costumes to create psychedelic, humorous programming (more on their oeuvre here). David Gerrold, who wrote the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of Star Trek, largely developed the world of the show. Kathy Coleman as Holly reminded me a lot of Kim Richards, then a major star of Disney films. I’m sure I mixed them up at the time. The two male actors had frizzy perms, probably styled by the same person who did Robert Reed and Barry Williams on The Brady Bunch. The actor who played Cha-Ka was obviously a little boy, and we observed as much at the time, with something like ridicule. But I’ve never talked to anyone of my age or thereabouts who was not TERRIFIED of the Sleestak. I have no idea why — the costume was pretty cheesy, but there was something about the fact that the creatures hissed rather than spoke, and moved very slowly like zombies. The Sleestak were the stuff of nightmares.
Milligan left the show after the first two seasons over a salary dispute and was never heard from again, and (in a plot development even less plausible than the premise for the show itself) was replaced by Ron Harper as Rick’s brother Jack Marshall. Not only were the odds of the dude’s brother walking through the same dimensional portal and winding up at the same time and place infinitesimal, they surely had to be millions of times smaller than ANYONE walking through ANY dimensional portal, EVER! Harper, by the way, had just come from co-starring on the Planet of Apes TV show, so he was well known to this cub reporter. Harper also died this year, btw, just a couple of weeks before Milligan. Some sort of pact, gentlemen? What dimension are you in NOW?
In 1991, the Kroffts remade the series yet again, with Timothy Bottoms as the dad. As for the 2009 movie with Will Ferrell, like nearly all such nostalgic reboots, it was attrocious, not worth taking about. Dimensional time doors of this magnitude and generational import do not open twice.