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I remember watching Land of the Lost, both the original ’74 show and the ’92 version on German television. I was not impressed back then, and to be fair, the special effects in both are special only in how pathetic they are.
It’s funny that with the passing of time (and watching it in the original language, mind you) the bad quality of the effects becomes endearing, and it becomes more obvious how well written and inventive at least the ’74 version of the show really was.
But then… the names of the script writers read like a Who’s who of science fiction in the late 60s/early 70s: Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon… the presence of Walter Koenig in that list makes it likely the Krofts just raided a local science fiction convention and shanghaied whoever they found on stage into writing for their little dinosaur show.
But it shows. I was not aware of it when I was a kid, but there’s some genuine sense of wonder in there. The Land of the Lost is not just some hidden valley somewhere, it’s an artificial time and space pathway in a pocket dimension, fallen into disrepair. And the original builders are still there, descended into barbarism. Although the nature of the dimension might indicate they also are the ancestors of the builders. There’s some weird timey wimey stuff going on, to the point that nobody can make sense of the timeline in the first place.
So what’s the show about?
If you never have seen it (or didn’t click the video above), it’s about the Marshall family (father Rick, and children Will and Holly) who are trapped in an interdimensional portal while rafting down a river and now are stuck in the titular Land of the Lost, a wide tropical valley with prehistoric flora and fauna that wraps around itself. Here they encounter mysterious ruins, helpful apemen (the pakuni), savage lizard people (the sleestak), dinosaurs, mysterious artifacts, and lots of other weird interdimensional flotsam and jetsam.
The effects are… bad, with dinosaurs played by a mix of (quite decent) claymation and (unconvincing) hand puppets, and liberal use of astonishingly bad green screen to put it all together. But the budget for the show was minimal, and they still manage to pull out evocative scenes from reused sets and bad photographs.
The acting is ok for a kids show, which means not great. But I have seen worse.
But the ontological mystery of it all, and the gradual worldbuilding is fantastic. Why are they here? How do they leave? And what IS this place?
And then there are the Sleestak. Everyone loves the Sleestak. They are derpy-looking lizard people that are almost always hissing, walk slow as molasses, and the costumes are terrible (and only three were ever made, which explains why they show up in groups of three at most). But they also are uncanny and implacable. Like the oversized pepper pots, the Daleks of Doctor Who, these are clearly monsters made on a budget. But they also are terrifying.
Their first appearance is in episode 3 The Sleestak God, and here we encounter them in a lost underground city, guarded by an allosaurus in the front yard, trying to sacrifice Will and Holly to their unseen God living in the tunnels under the city. There’s some heavy Lovecraftian or even Howardian vibes here. Much more than what you might expect from a stupid little dinosaur show.
What I am trying to say is… this show is pretty DnD in that “just after the game was invented” sense.
Now I doubt Dungeons and Dragons itself was directly influenced by Land of the Lost, and I doubt the series was influenced by DnD, the timeline just doesn’t add up for that. But they definitely were using the same sources for their ideas, and they came up with a lot of similar ideas.
That is to say, in the beginning it wasn’t influenced. Clearly kids were watching this and bringing their ideas from the screen to the game. Especially the sleestak might have had a great influence on how lizard folk in the game evolved over time.
Some links to other people who already wrote about it:
The Welsh Piper on Land of the Lost
Swords and Stitchery on the series
Talaraska Idea Chest