Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Land of the Lost The Complete First Season (early review)
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 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.
