User Reviews

I use to religiously watch this incredibly off-the-wall quirky'n'kooky children's TV show every Saturday morning as a kid growing up in the mid to late 70's. Stalwart widowed forest ranger dad Rick Marshall (excellently played by the firm-as-granite Spencer Milligan), his whiny son Will (teen pin-up hunkling Wesley Eure) and spunky daughter Holly (adorable pig-tailed cutie Kathy Coleman) are absorbed through a mysterious time portal into an exotic and dangerous primitive world populated by ferocious dinosaurs, savage cavemen, vicious humanoid lizards called Sleestaks, and other such otherworldly beings. The trio are terrorized by Grumpy the Tyrannosaurus Rex, befriended by Cha-Ka the simpleton furball missing link, and try their best to leave this alternate universe. Of course, they run across plenty of bizarre beasties such as Medusa and the Abominable Snowman. Rick was eventually replaced by the equally gutsy Uncle Jack (rugged Ron Harper), but the show never lost its strangely beguiling and captivating sense of zany oddball fun, with the crude herky-jerky stop motion animation, chintzy sets, endearingly shoddy special effects, offbeat plots, likable main characters, and a simply spectacular spirited hillbilly bluegrass theme song all adding immensely to the hugely entertaining weirdness. An awesome vintage 70's time capsule of lovably ludicrous lunacy.

After I saw the extremely awesome Land of the Lost movie for a 2nd time, I wanted to see the series that it was based on. I was new to the series, and I thought it was pretty good! They have good plots, cheesy special effects, and much more. On a routine expedition, Marshall, Will, and Holly meet the greatest earthquake ever known. They are transported to the Land of the Lost, and try to find their way back home. Throughout the season they must deal with a T-Rex named Grumpy, befriend a Pakuni named Cha-Ka, escape the Sleestak, seek Enik's help, and meet a friendly dinosaur named Dopey. During the 2nd season the Marshalls are still trying to get home, and throughout the season they must deal with Sleestak, the Zarn, help Cha-Ka steal a dinosaur egg, survive powerful storms, and deal with blackouts. During the third season, Rick Marshall is transported back to Earth due to an earthquake, the same time his brother Jack comes looking for them. The earthquake causes new creatures to awaken. All the Pakuni, except Cha-Ka are gone. Cha-Ka speaks English. Their home in the Land of the Lost is destroyed, and they are forced to find a new place to live. During the course of this season Will turns invisible, the Sleestak tamper with the sunlight, they meet Medusa, go aboard the Flying Dutchman, stop an Abominable Snowman, Cha-Ka turns evil, and much more! I highly recommend LAND OF THE LOST: THE COMPLETE SERIES!!!

p.s. When Ifind out about the ticket to see the Land of the Lost movie, I used it, and saw it for a 3rd time on June 23rd! I took my mom, but she didn't like it as much as I did. I got two free LAND OF THE LOST posters. I wanted the one with Rick, Holly, and Will in the raft, with Grumpy behind them, and the people of the theatre also gave the one with Will Ferrell running and Grumpy is busting out of the poster! I already put them up in my room.

I ran across a marathon of this show on the Sci-Fi Channel today, obviously a tie-in for the new Will Ferrell movie. I was 9 years old in 1974, and my goal on Saturday mornings was to watch kids' shows from breakfast to lunchtime with as few gaps or interruptions as possible. There weren't a lot of options, so I tended to gobble up anything that was on. As I sat through three episodes this morning, all the bad memories came flooding back.

This was it--the breaking point! This was the show that was so consistently, irredeemably stupid and boring that I began to think maybe there were ways of spending my time that were preferable to watching TV at any cost. The concept was cool, but there was never a payoff where it mattered--on the screen. Each episode was five minutes of plot stretched over a half hour, filled in with running/hiding from dinosaurs, yammering dialog about trite sibling rivalry, and the repetitive gibberish of the annoying little missing link named Cha-Ka.

I turned to the Internet after I could stand no more, wanting to find out if the refugees ever made it home or if some of the arcane motifs were ever explained and/or explored in depth. The answers were no and no, respectively. To my greater disappointment, though, I found that most of the commentary on the Web was singing the praises of this cheap tripe, calling it deep, groundbreaking, well-written, yadda yadda yadda. Don't be fooled! It's garbage.

Advocates point to the list of respected sci-fi writers who contributed scripts. Who cares? Again, the quality (if it was there in the scripts at all) didn't make it to the screen. That's all that matters. I don't care if Shakespeare wrote it, junk is junk.

These fans also excuse the laughably awful special effects as being pretty good for the time the show was made. Really? This was 1974, for Pete's sake. Star Trek had premiered seven years earlier. Other shows like Space: 1999 and UFO were mesmerizing my young imagination. But, say the fans, this was a Saturday morning kids' show. They couldn't get a decent budget, they did the best they could! Baloney. Look at Dr. Who, for example. Super low budget and plenty of cheese, but variety and inventiveness made it come alive in spite of its limitations. Land of the Lost had no variety and very limited inventiveness.

I think the lack of quality can be better explained by the names on the show. As I said, this series was the awakening of my critical judgment as a consumer of entertainment. Before Land of the Lost, I got excited whenever a show was promoted as a product of Sid and Marty Krofft. They were great! How did I know that? The TV told me so, so it must be true. As I began to realize that Land of the Lost was garbage, I looked more closely at their other shows and saw that they were all utter mindless dreck. The Kroffts were ripping me off, turning out goof-ball cheese in vast quantities for a quick buck.

Let me give another example of how they skated by on creating big expectations without ever fulfilling them: the opening credit sequence for H.R. Puff'n'Stuff was one of the coolest things I ever saw. A little boy like me! A magic boat that takes him to a strange land, a wild storm, a talking flute! WOW! The show itself? A bunch of dumb gags and low-rent physical comedy done by guys in retarded Muppet ripoff costumes. I kept tuning in wanting to see the story in the credits, but never getting it.

The Sleestak looked very cool; their costumes were the only thing that really worked, except maybe sometimes the look of the pylons and the gems. Their hissing and their bug-eyes were genuinely scary, at first. But then I caught on to the fact that they never really seemed to accomplish anything. Ho-hum--it's the Sleestak again! Thanks, I guess, Sid and Marty, for helping me to realize that not everything on TV was great by virtue of simply being there. Now I hope some people can begin to realize that not all nostalgia is good nostalgia, either. Sometimes the passage of time turns coal into a diamond. In this case it reveals it for the manure it always was.

Well thought out background story continued throughout the series. The Altruisans built a "pocket" universe to live in. Safe from everything, they controlled what entered and left. What happened?

They had time travel, dimensional travel... Manipulated great energies and forces by use of the pylons which were controlled by the position of color coded crystals... but yet they vanished... Only to leave the remains of their once great race, the Sleestax.

The Marshall family "fell" into this pocket universe. Each episode they deal with daily survival, food, water, and monsters... and discovering how this world works to find a way home. They were also a family dealing with the usual joys, tears and fears families deal with. It was a good balance between the science of the "Land of the Lost" and human stories.

While Enik, the last Altruisan, unable to remember (or never having known) seeks ways to discover what happened to his people. The character of Enik was only in a few episodes but it did set the tone for a mystery of a "lost race" and were some of the best episodes.

It was sad to seen this show end, it was one of the few highlights of Saturday morning TV. If this show had been given a bigger budget and an hour time slot it could have been a prime time sci-fi series.

I caught a marathon of this show on SciFi a few months back.

I'm pretty sure I caught the gist of the show.

First--The Acting.

Awful. I remember Marshall being a particularly bad actor. They couldn't say a line without looking like idiots. I remember the episode where Will gets zapped by a yellow crystal. That was some of the worst television acting I've ever seen.

Also, those little monkey people are very bad actors as well. What were they?... Pylons?...

Second--The Scripts.

Bad again. Almost so bad it's good, but it's... not. Every episode ended in a cheesy unfunny joke. And the dialog was always choppy, poorly said, and corny.

Third--The Special Effects.

Ha... the shows one redeeming quality...

These are indeed so bad they're good. From puppets to claymation reused from every episode, these are indeed the worst special effects I've ever seen.

You should also expect a lot of still-image backgrounds, bad picture control, and picture-in-picture graphics.

Fourth--The Stories

I'll be honest. Most of the stories are not bad. Although... I remember once... A caveman miner is lost in the land, and when the gang walks in his cave, he holds a match over his cannon and says "Freeze!" or something like that... lol!!!

And, of course, the stories eventually got tired...

Fifth--The Characters

Marshall, Will, and Holly were immaterial. Their characters were stale, bland, predictable. Will was a intellectual, the children were typical brother and sister, and the monkey people were annoying.

Overview--

The show is not good.

Still... with it's bad acting, cheesy characters, low budget special effects, and lazy stories, it has an undeniable charm...

And that is why I will watch it the next time there is a marathon on SciFi. That is why I will watch it. It is worth watching, with all the awfulness included, if only for the camp value. Watch it. Appreciate the bad music. The special effects. Watch it, and remember...

The original 1970s Land of the Lost seems to be a very special memory for the great majority of those who were pre-schoolers/grade schoolers in the 1970-1980 period, despite a few annoying downbeat reviews. In my own case, I recall LoL being one of my favorite memories of Saturday mornings in the '70s, one of the best "live action cartoons". Others of that sort were Shazam, Isis, Ark II, etc., but LoL outdid them all, and yes, I have seen the DVD releases as an adult - the defects are obvious, true. The acting could have been better(although I always found Kathy Coleman very good as Holly - were there any of us guys who didn't have a crush on her?) No doubt the dinosaurs were a big part of the attraction for many(I assume the creators of the land of lost brought them there at some point before their civilization fell), the Sleestak, and so on. Enik was often a fun character as well(played by late Walker Edmiston), who was from the period when the "Altrusians" were civilized, and built the land - sort of a traveling dimensional-door repairman, I guess, who became stranded in the land's future himself. The episode with the remains of the Revolutionary War soldiers stuck in the memory, esp. when the Sleestak revive near the climax, the Pylon Express was another good one. For the record, the Krofts were noted for being penny pincher's when it came to just about everything, special effects included. Then, any 1970s-era live action sci-fi Saturday morning series has cheesy effects by todays standards, for crying out loud, people! True enough, the 3rd season wasn't as good when Ron harper replaced Spencer Millgan - Rick Marshall(Milligan) fell through a pylon-dimension dorr during an earthquake) and Uncle Jack(Harper) came in to replace him while searching for the family. Harper was a good actor, but let down by lower-quality scripts('though I did enjoy some of the mythological aspects like bringing in Medusa). The songs Will sung that final season were indeed awful, though...

The mid-2000's DVD release in 3 volumes has a number of interviews, and commentaries which are missing on the later single-set re-issue, so try to get those, if possible. The 1992 TV remake despite great effects is a quite bad series, one which didn't last a full two seasons - not issued on disc, but I would say avoid it in any case.