on a routine expedition

Did you know that Walter Koenig (who, by the way, told me Happiest Days was "delightful," Squee!) created the character of Enik on Land of the Lost? Did you know that Harlan Ellison wrote a story for the show that was never produced? Oh! Oh! Oh! Did you know that David Gerrold came up with a whole backstory for the eponymous land that makes sense?!

I didn't know any of this until I read the Land of the Lost Triviagasm at io9 last night.

When they announced it, I though io9 was going to be snotty, too cool for the room, and hideous (like most Gawker blogs, which seem to have have an attitude I outgrew in my twenties.)

They're proving me wrong (like my opinion counts, right?) with content that's consistently interesting and cool, and commentary that doesn't seem to fit into the smug, condescending, dismissive tone that seems to be the Gawker model. It's almost like they realized who their target audience is, and -- gasp -- actually respect and speak to that audience.

Speaking of Land of the Lost: did it scare the living daylights out of anyone else? I remember being scared by most of the Krofft shows, because they all seemed to feature kids who get separated from their parents and sent into a weird world from which they can never return, but Land of the Lost terrified me, even though the kids had their dad with them. Maybe it was because I was a young geek with an overactive imagination, but when I was nine or ten, it seemed to be the most plausible of all the Krofft shows.

Oh, and if you're a fan of the Krofft shows, you should track down a copy of Pufnstuf & Other Stuff. It's awesome.

Comments

[kristinalead]

Saturday morning was Krofft Superstars!! LOVED LOTL!!

Incidentally, did you notice on Wiki, one of the character's names was "Peter Koenig", a revolutionary war soldier? I completely forgot about that guy...

[Sean O'Hara]

The Sleestak scared the snot out of me as a kid, which made the DVDs of the show a major disappointment as I realized they were just guys in green bodysuits and awful masks. Now I daren't even rent the Jason of Star Command discs.

[PrincessWHN]

Land of the Lost was super freaky. The rest of their stuff was more drug-induced nightmare. That one seemed sorta plausible. I think that's why. If you found yourself surrounded by talking hats, I think you would just sort of assume that you'd been slipped drugs. But a lost world full of grumpy dinos is something my imagination allows me to think of as likely.

[ttrentham]

All of the Krofft shows were a little to hokey to scare me. I need to check out that book though.

I'm not surprised that io9 is good. I briefly met Annalee Newitz at the Lifehacker party at SXSWi last year. She seemed very cool and I subsequently started following some of her other blogs before she moved to io9.

[MntlWard]

The only episode of LotL that scared me as a kid was the one where Holly walks into an unusual pylon and there was some weird lighting effect and then she was walking around with that wand like some sort of non-cannibalistic living zombie. It was that weird light that scared me, really. I don't remember it well enough to recall what was scary about it, though.

[zadig]

How hard could it be to figure out a freakin' pylon, anyway? Can you say "trial and error," Marshall? You know if you screw it up badly enough the skylons will come to help. Jeez.

And if prehistoric humans were smart enough to drive mastodons off a cliff to kill them, why couldn't Marshall, Will, and Holly drive one of those TRexes off the same way? They could have eaten TRex burgers for months.

But Enik's angst when he found out that the sleestaks were (spoiler alert!) his much-degraded descendents instead of his primitive ancestors was a surprisingly deep emotional moment.

Great show. Thanks for the link, Wil. (Any relation to Will, and therefore Marshall and Holly?)

[JennyW]

I loved Land of the Lost and all those shows. Thanks for the interesting facts!

[jay b]

I still have nightmares about Sigmund the Sea Monster.

[JChampion]

If you've never looked up the details on KrofftWorld amusement park, do so. It had a very short life in Atlanta in the late '70s and was a place I wish I had visited.

The funniest thing to me about 'Lidsville' (besides the great Charles Nelson Reilly) is the opening theme song. I love that it just keeps going and going unlike today's 10-second TV-show themes. They packed every ounce of backstory into it, and just when you think it's over - nope get ready for introductions to every character. There's something very entertaining about songs that are so blatantly literal - kind of like "Trapped in a Closet," but for kids.

[Fish]

HR Pufnstuf and Mayor McCheese look so similar that when I was a wee lad I thought they were the same character. I always wondered why Mayor McCheese was the breakout star of the McDonald's commercials and got his own show.

[JChampion]

My mistake - "KrofftWorld" was merely my shorthand. The real name of the place was "The World of Sid & Marty Krofft" at the Omni Hotel.

[Ghost Girl]

I adored that show because my real life name is Holly, and you don't get many of those (aside from Holly Golightly, hubba hubba!)

But yeah, that show scared the living CRAP outta me as a kid. Now I watch it and just laugh, but when those Sleestaks come on, I must admit I still hide under my blankie.

[Cinexploits]

I remember those shows so well, and was later happy to learn they had been written by many of the folks whose stories I liked from Trek and paperback scifi novels.

I liked all those shows:

LOTL
BIGFOOT AND WILDBOY
ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNAGIRL
PUFUNSTUF
SIGMUND
DR. SHRINKER
and then of course, there were the Filmation shows which kicked an equal amount of Saturday Morning ass:
ARK 2
ISIS
SHAZAM
JASON OF STAR COMMAND and of course, SPACE ACADEMY.

I've seen the recent ISIS and JASON sets as well as LOTL and as "Kids shows" they hold up. Certainly no worse than TOMORROW PEOPLE .

[calaban9]

The Sleestak scared the shit out me too... There's some atavistic fear that their appearance (like big, black eyed aliens from movies) inspires.

[JohnB]

Best part of "Land of the Lost?" Theme sequence, when Marshall, Willy & Holly's raft rides STRAIGHT DOWN the waterfall, hugging it like one of those sticky wacky wallwalker octopus things from my middle school years.

[simpleton]

i love the third act of the Ellison story.
he assures: "I tie everything up neatly. Trust me."
now THAT'S writing!

[Dave]

Great, I just had to take a journey through wikipedia, I forgot all about that show!

And you do realize that a guy named Wesley played a character named Will, right?

[Katie]

I'm just going to pop in to be a nerd and mention that on our way to a traveling nurse assignment in San Francisco, my mother and I stopped in Las Vegas for a couple of days, and I got to visit the Star Trek Experience in the Hilton. Ok, so I didn't VISIT so much as I made friends with the Klingons and almost passed out from joy when I was beamed up and frolicked about for four frickin' hours while my poor mother got sloshed at Quarks, but back to the point. We aren't supposed to sit in your chair, BUT I GOT TO SIT IN YOUR CHAIR. There are buttons underneath so I had to be careful not to move around, but it was still amazing. More amazing than sitting in The Captain's chair? Definitely.

You'd be surprised how much fun a 17-year-old geekette can have in Vegas. Great day? Or the GREATEST day? Most likely the second one.

[Court]

Wil, you make me really happy. This is my first time to comment on your blog, though I've been reading it for quite awhile. The fact that you remember Land of the Lost increases your geeky coolness factor by oodles. I am very impressed.

"...greatest earthquake ever known..."

When I was a kid, the Sleestak never failed to scare me...and to remind me of the Gorn!

[antitrader]

Alright, Wil, I have been reading your blog for a long time (since well before typepad), and this is the first time I have been moved to post. We are the same age, and I often laugh at some of the same stupid things we have attachments to, like Land of the Lost.

So, my short story: Like most, the Sleestak scare the bejeezus out of me. One saturday morning after watching a particularly Sleestak riddled episode my mom asked to me to go downstairs and get the laundry out of the dryer, bring it upstairs and fold it. After getting to the bottom of the stairs, and about 3 steps, the water heater kicked on (as I learned much later in childhood).

Now, in the late 70's, water heaters aren't the efficient jobs we have now days. This bad boy made some noise, and it happen to sound just like Sleestak attacking. As it turned on, I absolutely froze in my tracks. My heart racing, I forced my feet to move just enough to dive behind an ancient bar that my dad was restoring, and I squirted under a large pile of rags, sitting like a stone for a good hour. As I cowered under the stained rags, sweating and crying, the heater kicked off and on, over and over. I couldn't scream for mom because THEY would hear me. I couldn't run, because THEY would see me. It didn't help that the tree outside the basement window was blowing shadows across the room at the just the wrong moments. Screwed, I say.

Through positive self-talk, and by figuring out the timing of the Sleestak attacks, I finally worked up the courage to lurch from the rags and make a run for it up the stairs. About 4 steps, the freaking heater turned on again, and as I ran screaming up the steps for my mom to save me I peed just a little. Fear and humiliation.

It took me (no kidding), 5 or 6 years before I could go down stairs without breaking into cold sweats. Even in High School, when I knew better, it still gave me the serious hebbie jeebies every now and then.

Damn Sleestak.

[Alan]

Land of the Lost terrified me, but I watched it anyway because of my fascination with dinosaurs.

But the fear didn't stick with me after the show was over. The movie Poltergeist was a different story.

Speed Racer and Johnny Quest were also playing on TV around that time. They didn't scare me.

[moonsammy]

I apologize for this being unrelated to the post, but think Mr Wheaton might get a kick out of the following video (anyone watching will understand why), which I'm surprised hasn't been seen here yet :)

So very wrong. Warning: kinda NSFW.

[ProudTexasWoman]

"Speed Racer ... didn't scare me."
For me, depends what you mean by "scare" -- I wasn't scared for myself, but I could be awfully scared for Speed when there were scorpions in his car, etc. I live in Texas and scorpions are a very real threat if you get out into East Texas especially. (Sorry to fellow copy editors - local custom demands a capital E even though the AP Stylebook would frown.)

Now I have the full DVD set of Speed(let's hear it for the box that plays the theme song, which is sadly the ONLY residuals benefit to any of the amazing four voice stars - and even then, only to [the admittedly deserving] Peter), allowing me to laugh and laugh at how much I took in stride stuff like constant deadly explosions of other drivers ... and apparently the U.S. versions of these shows already had highly sanitized violence at that! At first, my husband hated to watch with me, because he was watching from the first-timer, little-kid "let me get into this and don't point out all the absurdities" POV, while I was reveling in seeing just how blind I was and all the enormous holes in the plots I was willing to hop right over.

Was a big fan of G Force / Battle of the Planets as an 11-year-old, but from what I've heard, I don't think I'm ready to be a purist and watch the full-on Japanese versions. Also watched all the Krofft shows even though I didn't always like them, and was a devotee of "The Banana Splits," which is fun to catch on Boomerang from time to time; thank Heaven for DVRs!

P.S. re: the Twitter on "repainting my son's room from Pooh to superheroes" - that picture of the tot mimicking the Captain America stance yanked an audible "Awwwwwwww" from my lips.

[ProudTexasWoman]

Hey, Fish -- Turns out that the Krofft brothers successfully sued McDonald's over the similarity.

Another bit of trivia I found while researching the Koenig-LOTL connection to improve the Wikipedia article: Max Mutchnick is a good friend of the Kroffts and considers "Freddie the Flute" of H.R. Pufnstuf the first gay character on TV: "It was Freddie who made way for Tony Randall in 'Love, Sidney,' who made way for Billy Crystal on 'Soap,' who made way for Ellen DeGeneres." ("Mr. Pufnstuf, Your Table Is Ready," article on Sid Krofft's new West Hollywood club - NY Times, Dec 3, 2006)

Wil, Krofft would be tickled pink to know you're interested in the show, as he was quoted in another article as saying one reason there's interest in doing feature films for LOTL and Pufnstuf is the number of industry people who grew up with it.

[ShowbizPRgirl]

I loved LotL when I was a kid. That show, and Swiss Family Robinson, which followed immediately afterward, were part of my Saturday morning ritual. Gosh, I miss the days when shows for kids weren't so strategically plotted and analyzed by marketing and network industry execs, in an effort to produce the kind of bland, painfully safe and "educational" pablum that came in later years, such as the Smurfs, Care Bears, Muppet Babies and My Little Pony.

I also watched B-horror/sci-fi/fantasy films (Shock Theatre) every Saturday afternoon...at age 6, WITH my mother's permission.

It explains so much, considering what I now do for a living.

KJC

http://showbizprgirl.blogspot.com