The
new big budget film adaptation of the 1970s cult TV series Land of
the Lost starring Will Ferrell has been rated PG-13 for “crude and
sexual content” and for “language including a drug reference.” The mind
boggles! After all, the original children’s television show was so squeaky
clean it made Little House on the Prairie look sleazy in comparison . . .
Okay, that’s not entirely true. If there is one thing
that actually made some parents think twice about letting their little
‘uns watch Land of the Lost
it was the Sleestaks, a threatening race of reptile humanoids. Sure, all
adults saw were some stuntmen dressed in very fake-looking pantomime-like
costumes, but small children are easily impressionable and don’t need
state-of-the-art special effects to scare them witless. Thus the Sleestak
can almost single-handedly claim having inspired an entire generation’s
childhood nightmares! (They are probably the most memorable thing about
the show as well – the one thing that everyone who watched it as kids can
vividly recall!)
To recap: originally broadcast between 1974 to 1976 on
the NBC television network in America, Land of the Lost was a
children’s television series produced by the legendary Sid and Marty
Krofft. (It is not to be confused with a 1991 remake of the show which was
also titled Land of the Lost.)
The plot involved ranger Rick Marshall and his family
(his son Will and younger daughter Holly) who, during a standard white
river rafting “expedition”, fell through a dimensional portal to find
themselves trapped in an alternate universe inhabited by dinosaurs,
primates and of course the aggressive Sleestak. The 43 episodes of the
series (all of them available on DVD) mostly concern their efforts trying
to find their way back home or exploring the exotic new world in which
they have been unwillingly dumped.
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"Writers such as Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Ben Bova, and
Norman Spinrad actually contributed scripts!" |
Incidentally, dimensional portals are very handy things
to have lying around all over the place. After all they also allow
dinosaurs from the past to find their way into our present in the current
British TV series Primeval. As a
plot device mysterious lands in which dinosaurs still roam has been a
staple of the genre ever since Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost
World - originally published way back in 1912! – right up to
Spielberg’s Jurassic Park sequel of the same name and arguably even J.J.
Abrams’ Lost. (Arthur Conan Doyle is
of course best-known for having created Sherlock Holmes.)
Considering the somewhat simplistic plots – it was
after all a twenty-minute show aimed at small children – it is surprising
how many well-respected science fiction writers such as Larry Niven,
Theodore Sturgeon, Ben Bova, and Norman Spinrad actually contributed
scripts to the series. After all some episodes seem to consist entirely of
the cast being chased around through a jungle set by a cheap-looking
stop-motion dinosaur!
Back to the squeaky-clean Marshall family. The
‘Seventies may have been an era of societal change in the States (see Ang
Lee’s The Ice Storm), but very little of this is reflected in the
interpersonal dynamics of the Marshall family. Rick Marshall (played by
Spencer Milligan in the first two seasons) is the kindly and competent dad
who knows “stuff” that is handy to know when trapped in a jungle
wilderness inhabited by man-eating dinosaurs. (He is a ranger after all.)
Stern, yet never scolding, he patiently explains everything to his kids
without ever losing his cool. It is a sign of the times that in the
Hollywood remake he is to be played by Will Ferrell as a “has-been”
scientist with “few skills” and “questionable smarts to survive in an
alternate universe full of marauding dinosaurs” as the film’s production
notes puts it.
The
rest of the main cast is Will Marshall (Wesley Eure who at 23 looked too
old to be playing a teenager boy) and the blonde pig-tailed Holly Marshall
(Kathy Coleman). Will’s shtick seemed to consist entirely of the “gee
Holly, I don’t think we should be doing that” variety whereas the spunky
Holly always got them into trouble. But this sort of life-threatening
behavior never really got dad Rick hot under the collar or anything. Like
the Hardy Boys books there is no over-concerned killjoy mother figure
around to get in the way of all the weekly adventures.
In the new movie Holly and Will aren’t related to Will
Ferrell’s character. Holly (Anna Friel) is instead Ferrell’s “crack-smart
research assistant” while Will (Danny McBride) is “a redneck survivalist.”
Surely a sign of the times - or a reflection of how much the material has
been retooled as an ironic-minded Will Ferrell comedy vehicle that is no
longer aimed at small children unlike, let’s say, last year’s Brendan
Fraser vehicle Journey to the
Center of the Earth.
The 1970s may have been a decade marked by societal
turmoil, the oil crisis and terrorist violence, but the sun always shone
on TV as the song goes. Today we have pretty much the same problems but
alas it would seem that even in our entertainment the wide-eyed innocence
of the Land of the Lost has also been, well, lost . . .
