Raja's Blog

In the early 1970s, one of NBC's powers-that-be decided that they needed a Saturday-morning kids' TV show with dinosaurs. Sid Krofft and Alan Foshko put together a "portfolio" of colorful SF magazine covers and asked David Gerrold if he could create a story that incorporated all these elements. Gerrold, with the hubris that's an important part of any writer's toolkit, said “Sure.” Thus was born The Land of the Lost, which first aired in September 1974.

I watched the first two episodes last night for the first time in (nearly) 30 years. There are significant barriers to suspension of disbelief for a modern audience: The hairstyles scream out the era when the show was produced, the special effects are downright clunky by modern standards (though for the time, stop-motion animation on a
weekly basis and TV budget was an amazing accomplishment), the budget was obviously low (though as Gerrold says, every penny ended up on the screen), and the acting isn't quite there yet. (The last will likely improve as the actors and show find their feet.)

Even so, I found the first two episodes (which were written as one story) fascinating. Why? The writing. I've always argued that good writing can compensate for almost any other shortcomings. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by nostalgia, but Land of the Lost seems to be a good example. Gerrold (who was Story Editor for the first season) created most of the features of the setting, and slowly revealed them over the course of the first season (though he took care to keep certain things mysterious). Perhaps this is where my predilection for season-long story arcs came from (half - ;-).

To give one example, one of the powers-that-be decided that the show needed to be “educational”—so they hired a linguist to create a full-blown language (!) for the Pakuni race. In the opening episode, you get a feel for a first-contact situation that you rarely get in written SF, and almost never in TV or the movies. The Marshalls push English on the character they meet, but the character is clearly speaking his own language (which I'll call Pakuni), and you get the feeling that it's a language you could pick up, if you paid enough attention. Also, certain English-language sounds aren't in Pakuni, so the character has trouble with them. Gerrold was annoyed because these particular sounds happen to be in the names of all three human characters, but I find the effect quite authentic.

I didn't enjoy Season Three as much as Season Two; only two and a half episodes struck me as really memorable. “Backwards” is just built on a silly gimmick—but what a gimmick! It takes a stupid idea you sometimes see elsewhere in SF (the final episode of the animated Star Trek for instance) and shows in living color just how stupid an idea it is. “Timeslides”, on the other hand, strikes me as the most interesting of the episodes from a Science Fictional viewpoint—the writers start with a silly idea, but then they build rules around it and try to stay within those rules. Besides, any episode that lists Adolf Hitler as a Special Guest Star does exhibit a sense of humor. Finally, I think that “Polymorph” (which may be a fan favorite, judging by the commentary) is half-memorable; the lowbrow spoof main plot isn't that great, but the scene of Rimmer as a facilitator is rolling-in-the-aisles funny. (Perhaps a “harsh language” warning wouldn't have been out of place.) Finally, all the commentaries are still fun, as the actors still enjoy making fun of each other.

The usability of these sets is improving; you no longer have to agonizingly pick your way across very-slow-to-react graphical menus. I also found the hidden Easter Egg by accident; if you go to the Select Episodes menu and wait long enough (e.g., if you blog something in another window ;-), the polymorph (from the episode of the same name) will show up. If you can get your pointer over it, you'll see a large question mark. Click it for the short but amusing Easter Egg.

Here are some more staggering images created with POV-Ray:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/scc3/final/

The trick here is that all these were entries in a contest to specify interesting images using “source code” of 256 bytes or less. To give you an idea how small that is, my message here is about 100 bytes too long to be a legal entry ;-).

If I remember correctly, about thirteen years ago I was first dating Julie, and starting Computer Science courses at Indiana University, working towards my Masters in Computer Science. One of my major computing interests then (and now, for that matter, though I haven't spent very much time with it for years) was computer graphics. Before I entered IU, my raytracer of choice was the freeware program POV-Ray, the “Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer”. It was fun, though the lack of a graphical front-end, and the somewhat control-freak-y nature of the POV team (IIRC I posted a port to the OS/2 operating system and they [politely] asked me to take it down) dampened my enthusiasm a tad.

On Slashdot yesterday, they had an interesting story somewhat misleadingly titled “POV-Ray 10th Anniversary Contest”; the story also says that the contest is to “celebrate POV-Ray's tenth anniversary ”. This is incorrect—as my recollection and a statement from POV-Ray's logo designer says, the first public release was in July 1991. But the more interesting thing about the Slashdot story, and the thing that inspired me to blog this, was the pointer to the POV-Ray Hall of Fame:

http://www.povcomp.com/hof/

I'm stunned by the quality of these pieces, both from a CGI standpoint (POV-Ray has radiosity and caustics now?!) and an artistic standpoint. I really like Distant Shores, Villarceau Circles, Almost Sphere Spirals, Evening at the River, Non-Cubic Space Division, Balanza, Dancing Cube, Hyperboloides 4, The Accident, The Dark Side of the Trees, and POV Planet. But YMMV ;-).

Hmm, maybe I should think about downloading POV-Ray again ;-).

I need to eat lunch, finish packing, & go to the airport, but: I'm now 1/3 of the creative talent of a new blog, created by Ignacio. As far as I can tell, all 3 of us can post (and edit each other's posts). Should be amusing ;-).