The Greatest Earthquake Ever Known

With all due respect to Brad, he's wrong: Land of the Lost does not suck. Just gotta get that out there.

For that statement, as well as what follows, I'm only talking about the 70's classic Land of the Lost, not the 90s (?) remake version (of which I've only seen one episode). The classic is just that: a classic. The newer versions, I haven't seen enough of to judge.

Dissing Land of the Lost is like dissing Metropolis or Citizen Kane or Wizard Of Oz or Gone With The Wind or Casablanca or BladeRunner.

They all have faults, and seem almost cliche because of how often they've been aped. There's even one on that list that I don't personally care for. But if you're focusing on those faults, you're missing the point (as I no doubt did the one time I saw Gone With The Wind).

It's like dissing Warhol because the internet and the latest Photoshop filter lets us crank out similar work in under 5 minutes. (No, I've never met the people in the photo to the left, they came up in a google search. Presumably, it's not really a long-lost Warhol original like they sarcastically claim. No offense intended.)

Dissing Land of the Lost is like dissing Rocky Horror because Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon are capable of much more believable and emotionally gripping performances.

I will admit, the child actors in Land of the Lost do suck from time to time. But considering that they were frequently acting in front of a bluescreen, reacting to monsters that didn't exist (in an era where that was no yet the norm for TV or movies), they actually didn't do as badly as they could have. It was the 70s, after all, complete with bad hairdos, cheesy slang, and social dynamics that no longer resonate - the performances could have been much worse, all things considered. When's the last time a 12-year old convinced you they had a broken leg while limping around for two whole episodes? Despite 30+ years of progress, child actors still suck in most movies and TV shows.

Compared to modern technical expectations, the effects leave something to be desired. But the effects were revolutionary in their day, and pretty damn good for a weekly half-hour kids show in the 70s. Remember, this was before the era of CGI, motion capture, and digital color timing. It was all puppets, clay, and bluescreen superimposing.

On a related note - they only had three Sleestack suits. There's some incredible editing where they give you the feeling that the Marshalls are fighting off dozens of Sleestacks. I had to read it online to catch it - if it weren't for wikipedia, I'd still be assuming they must have made at least a dozen Sleestack suits. But if you watch carefully, it's all done with never more than 3 on screen. It's genius that they managed to present a community of hundreds just 3 at a time.

The concepts / ideas in Land of the Lost have never sucked. (Well, the "goodbye Rick, hello Uncle Jack" transition could have been handled better - but that was a problem of lawyers and agents, not screenwriters and directors.) The vast majority of the plots and concepts were and remain awesome. They were written by scifi luminaries such as Larry Niven, David Gerrold, DC Fontana, Norman Spinrad, Ben Bova, and Theodore Sturgeon.

Bonus: Here's a very thorough review of the DVD release by someone else who finds much to love about it.

Land of the Lost is also one of the seminal works of genre-crossing fiction, drawing on numerous disparate sources for reference and blending them into a single coherent universe. It was a product of the same thought-space that where Lucas dreamt up Star Wars and Scott discovered Aliens. Without Land of the Lost (and the "influence stew" style it embodied) we might not have Firefly or Lost. Sure, it was a lot less subtle (and less polished) than most of what followed it, but that's to be expected as time and technology progress and the state of the art improves with it.

In closing: To each their own - Brad will likely disagree with most of what I've said. :) To that, I offer one final defense: Whatever else you can say about Land of the Lost, at least the Sleestack's spines don't glow inexplicably when they get some. To me, that's important.