Marshall, Will, and Holly
On a routine expedition...

For some reason this show came up during a conversation with my coworkers. I remember it being rather mediocre with some of the worst special effects. However, it did give me one of my favorite insults to use when I was a child. There was nothing worse then calling someone a Sleestak.

How shocked was I to come across the Wikipedia entry that it is a cult classic and is being made into a movie.

Who else use to watch this show?

I LOVED that show! So campy and it fit right in with the rest of the Sid & Marty Krofft Sat. morning stuff.

I actually got Wesley Eure's autograph (he played Will) fifteen or so years ago. He wrote a children's book and was signing them at the mall. It was illustrated by Ron Palillo (Horshack from "Welcome Back, Kotter").

Here's the movie page.

When I was a kid, we came up with a LotL variation on the game of tag. The person who was tagged as "it" had to walk around stiff legged making those wheezing Sleestak sounds while every one else dodged in and out an arm's length away. Very stupid, but very fun.

I remain dubious about a movie version, but if Will Ferrell is in it, then I have to watch it. It's the law. It might even be in the Constitution.

I loved this stupid show when I was a kid. And I've never felt older in my life than when I had to tell a high school student who was one of my employees to take off his giant sunglasses at work because they made him look like a Sleestak, and got nothing but a blank, uncomprehending stare in return. Oh, woe.

Chaka was always my favorite.

Sci Fi / Syfy will be having a marathon of this on Memorial Day (May 25):

Here's the Sci Fi schedule for the day. It looks like we'll get 40 out of the 43 episodes.

Yay! I have the day off, but not even a Sleestak could get me out of bed at 8:00 am. Perhaps some recording will be in order...

Alas Ananayel, Will Ferrell's prescence in it means exactly the opposite to me. He is an abomination before the gods and must be shunned. Too bad because I loved the original series.

It still cracks me up that NBA All Star Bill Laimbeer played a Sleestak in the original series when he was a high school student in Southern California. I guess it was hard for the producers to find enough 7 foot tall actors for the show back then.

The trailers I've been seeing seem to indicate you're correct. At least there's the Memorial Day marathon.

I'm watching the Sci-Fi marathon, and it is awesome! And by "awesome" I mean "awesomely terrible"! For most shows, a commercial for OnlineBootyCall.com would be a large step down, but with this show, the crappy commercials that air on basic cable seem to actually be several steps above the show.

I have to agree -- no offense to those who loved the show from way back when (seriously, I have fond memories of The Last Starfighter) -- but this was not even "campy" good.

I only watched the first two episodes and caught parts of other episodes so far, but wow. I think the opening title sequence is a contender for worst ever (too much banjo, the oh-so obvious miniature rapids behind the green-screened raft) -- sure this was before CGI became reasonable, but I don't think a better miniature model of the rapids would have been too hard.

The original version was before my time but I did catch the SciFi marathon and yeah it is bad, lol. Part of its charm I guess. I remember the 90's version was also like that.

I disagree. It's cheesy, but it's a lot better than the crap you can see on Saturday mornings today.

My rule with Sid & Marty Krofft shows is that you have to be under 12 or on some type of hallucinogenic to appreciate them. And yes, I'm including The Donny and Marie Show with that.

I've been watching the marathon all day and I love it, in all it's campy, cheestastic glory!

My favorite parts are when Will and Holly start speaking Pakuni to Cha-ka. I wonder how long it took them to get accustomed to that language?

They sure managed to make a nice life out of random crap in their Cave. They put the Flintstones to shame. Yet they never managed to find new clothes to wear.

Yeah, there's some interesting bits here and there, and some decent writing and science-fiction as well.

I watched a lot of the marathon today and I was struck by this as well. I thought it would be pure camp and and stories that made no sense. Considering it was a kids' show, there were quite a few callbacks to previous episodes for continuity. There were little details that they explained in the episodes that I appreciated -- like when they first saw the skylons and Holly mentioned their classification system (whoever sees it first gets to name it).

I read somewhere that they consulted some anthropologists(?) to make the Pakuni language more realistic and introduce it in such a way that we the audience would be able to understand it too. It didn't work for me, however, but maybe I'm not the only once since after they replaced the father, Cha-ka suddenly started speaking Tonto-English.

I noticed that, too. How quaint to assume kids had attention spans and the ability to retain information!

The special effects were so awful that even as a kid I thought they sucked, but it was a Saturday morning kids' show, after all. But it was a pretty visually ambitious show. They had the jungle, the Sleestak caves, the mist swamp and the twinkly-light spaceship guy, plus all the crazy pylon stuff, not to mention the dinosaurs. The writing was also pretty damn ambitious, considering it was a kids' show. Very abstract stuff.

The acting was really, really, really bad. There's no way around that. A lot of it probably had to do with them working so much with blue-screen, and having no idea what they were supposed to be reacting to. But still. Bad.

Damn, I had planned to spend Memorial Day productively, and then chanced upon the Land of the Lost marathon and spent much more time in the vicinity of the TV than originally planned. I was glad that one of the episodes I caught was Enik in his "Planet of the Apes" moment in front of the Lost City: "These are not my ancestors. These are my descendants."

I too stumble across the marathon yesterday, but really late in the series after the uncle shows up. I wasn't going to watch it, but it does pull one in doesn't it?


An interesting note on the Wikipedia page for the show has an explanation for that.

A number of well-respected writers in the science fiction field contributed scripts to the series, including Larry Niven,[6] Theodore Sturgeon,[6] Ben Bova,[6] and Norman Spinrad, and a number of people involved with Star Trek, such as Dorothy "D.C." Fontana,[6] Walter Koenig,[6][7][8] and David Gerrold.[6] Gerrold, Niven, and Fontana also contributed commentaries to the DVD of the first season.[3]

Something that bothered me not at all when I was a kid, but drove me bananas yesterday: "Marshall, Will and Holly..." Except it's not Marshall, his name is Rick Marshall. Why was he called by his last name? Why couldn't they give him a two-syllable first name like Richard or something to make the song work, or have Marshall be his first name and the family last name be something else? Made me bonkers. And now I have the song stuck in my head.

I must have stopped watching before the Uncle Jack episodes, because I didn't remember any of them. I did get a good laugh out of Wesley Eure being credited as just "Wesley" for the early episodes. You're not Elvis dude, settle down. He was cute though.

Thanks, Ananayel. I successfully avoid the opening during the marathon. Now, not only do I have that song going through my head, but also, I'm wondering about that odd bit of the lyrics you described. ;0)

eta: Did they change the song for the third season to include Uncle Jack?

The Wikipedia page also mentions the development of the language for the show.
To support the internal mythology, linguist Victoria Fromkin was even commissioned to create a special language for the Pakuni, which she based on the sounds of West African speech and attempted to build into the show in a gradual way that would allow viewers to learn the language over the course of many episodes. The series' intention was to create a realistic fantasy world, albeit relying heavily on children's acceptance of minor inconsistencies

Aren't minor inconsistencies something one almost always have to accept in fantasy/sci fi worlds?

This caught my eye when I was reading the page.

It should be noted that the hydra (Lu Lu) and the fire-breathing Dimetrodon (Torchy) both appear in the third season of the series, when the consistency and style of the series' writing appeared to suffer a significant change; one episode in the third season also features the legendary Greek Medusa, for example.

I must have been watching the third season episodes then, because I caught this one. Bad. I did like the one with "repairman" who fixes the Sun pylon to stop the solar flares. Anyone know who that actor was?

*humming*.... "the greatest earthquake ever known."

Yes, I recognized those names in the opening credits.
You didn't miss much. I watched a couple to compare/contrast with what I had been watching all day and it was HORRIBLE! In no particular order, 1)the cave they lived in collapsed, 2) forcing them to move into the lost Sleestak temple, 3)the Paku had vanished (left, maybe died?), 4) Cha-ka spoke Tonto English, 5) the dinosaurs in the swamp were displaced by a never-before seen hydra, 6) the Sleestak became the henchman of a third rate Conan, and 7) Eenic was still hanging around for no particular reason (hadn't he left for his own time several times already?).

Next time I'll mute the song and watch for the names.


It is tempting to rent the DVDs just to listen to the commentaries.

Chaka learning English never bothered me that much. If the Pakuni had only spoken in grunts or something and had no language all, it would have bugged the crap out of me. But since we saw they could learn and use language, it made sense that the Marshalls would teach him their language while making an effort to learn Pakuni. They had nothing but time, after all, once they figured out the basics of survival.

The Blandings the repairman episode bugged - first, we're expected to believe that after all the time they'd been out there, they hadn't been able to retrieve their gear from the swamp, but Uncle Jack got it in like five minutes. Rick couldn't have done that? And it was still all good and dry? And then the Sleestaks came to the temple and just took all their stuff, like on a shopping spree at Marshall Mall, while hardly menacing them at all?

Don't even get me started on why a girl Holly's age would bring makeup and perfume on a camping trip with her brother and father. Or was that dumped through the pylon into TLoTL along with the grocery cart full of food and supplies? All the episodes began to run together by the late afternoon.

Hmm, I have an unopened first season DVD set somewhere...
That she did!

I'm afraid I missed the marathon.




We did back then. Kids today still have it (they can play video games for hours after all so they must have some kind of attention span) but most creators of TV and movies seem to think they don't.

As a kid watching Saturday morning TV all those years ago I enjoyed all the live-action shows that we had. Unfortunately I can't recall the names of any of those other shows. Lets see - the teenagers that crash landed on an island and got shrunk down to the size of hamsters by a mad scientist. The Vet with the pet ghost dog. The kids with the robot that crash landed on another island with another mad scientist that was always after them. Love Boat's Gopher as a guy who befriends wax figures of Dracula, Wolf Man and a mummy that come to life (had to be the stupidest one of all but I watched it). Of course there was Wonder Woman and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. There was alot of live-action shows back then that I watched for hours on Saturday mornings and I don't think that a single one of them thought that bathroom humor was funny. Nowadays kids shows are at least 50% bathroom humor I think.

BTW, I just noticed that the first 17 episodes of LotL are on Hulu. Ugh, saw an advertisement for the movie - what kind of crap is that supposed to be? The three lead characters aren't even related and the advertisement had so much sexual crap in it that totally turned me off.

TV Land awards this year had a tribute to Sid and Marty Kroftt If you can stomach Will Ferrell, either by muting this or skipping to about the 3:30 mark, the stage show is worth it, especially Cyndi Lauper's performance.

I didn't realize just how many shows I had watched were made by Sid and Marty Kroftt! With the exception of "Wonder Woman" and the show with Fred Grandy, the ones you listed were Krofft shows.


Ain't it the truth, Ignamom?


It totally freaked me out when I found out that Holly was the assistant (or something)!

So...season 3 episode "Medusa" - what happened? I stopped watching after the Triceratops, complete with chew stick, was frozen into stone. Now I wonder how Holly was rescued. (trying not to be too embarrassed for asking)

I cannot stand Will Ferrell. I don't watch his work. Because of that, I will miss this movie and miss the cameos by Kathy Coleman (Holly) and Wesley Eure (Will) in the LoTL movie.

I happened to check out a bit of the marathon yesterday. What memories that show brought back. It was so cheesy watching the show now as an adult but back then, it was the highlight of Saturday mornings along with the other Sid & Marty Krofft shows.

I see Kathy Coleman has not done any work since her LoTL days except with her upcoming cameo in the movie. She has two sons, one of whom is a rapper.

Wesley Eure is pretty busy. Did you know he was hired to replace David Cassidy on THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY but the show was canceled when the powers that be decided the show was no good without David? Wesley did that kids show on the Nickelodeon network several years ago called FINDERS KEEPERS. He was the host. He also writes children's books, one of which is illustrated by none other Horseshack from Welcome Back Kotter, Ron Paolillo. Yes, that is how his last name is really spelled.

Caught part of the marathon. What a stinker! Looks like I didn't miss much during my 70s "I don't watch tv" phase. Some friends were discussing this show a few years back and I'd never heard of a Sleestack. No great loss, but now I'm all caught up. I may pop the Ferrell version into my Netflix queue, but doubt I'll catch it in the theater.

Didn't need 'em. Their clothes never got dirty nor worn out!

I watched the commentaries on the first disk of the DVD set last night. It was fascinating, but I must say I found the commentary by Walter Koenig incredibly tedious.

• NBA basketball player Bill Lambaird played the leader Sleestak
• The Sleestak were played by UCLA basketball players on stilts with high topped-masks to make them look as tall as possible.
• Will will also on Days of our Lives at the time.
• Technicians from Disney helped them integrate the film (dinosaur) segments with the video (live) ones.
• There were a LOT of Star Trek writers and talents working on this show!
• Cha-Ka's father was played by ex-Mousketeer Shara Bard.
• They used a puppet to represent the dinosaurs that were later matted in via green screen.
• They once used the Donny and Marie Show set.
• They originally planned to re-dress the Sigmund and the Sea Monster sets but they had just burned down.
• Michael J. Fox was considered for the part of Will.
• Cha-Ka was named after singer Chaka-Kahn (She was around in 1974?!?).
• The Paku language they created did not have l's and h's, thus Cha-Ka's weird pronunciation of Holly,Will, and Marshall.
• The Paku word for "Sleestak" was "Sari-Sataki". They put the "Beware of Sleestak" graffiti on the wall to tell us their name and made a back-story for it later.
• Due to budget restraints, there were only 40 minutes of dinosaur footage. As a result, they recycled footage a lot.
• Each ep cost about $35K to make.
• Tai and Sah were originally planned to be Cha-Ka's parents, but decided they worked better as his siblings.
• The Sleestak were inspired by the monsters from the Buck Rogers movie serials.
• The writer described at length an episode that was never made entitled "The Littlest Sleestak". It was going to be about the kids finding and hatching Sleestak eggs and the surviving one becoming the Sleestak's "Speaker to Food". The idea was dropped because TPTB were scared kids would ask where babies come from.
• The Sleestak putting their captives in a net over a fog-filled pit with the "Sleestak god" at the bottom was going to a running joke. They wanted to reveal what the monster was later.
• Although they established that the Sleestak were afraid of fire, they avoided using open flames (torches) because of what happened to the Sigmund and the Sea Monsters set.
• Koenig originally named Eenik "Eneg", in tribute of Gene Roddenberry, but TPTB thought that was way too obvious.

The rest of Koenig's commentary was captain obvious stuff and him waxing poetic about how although Enic was different, they still could be friends.

Fascinating! Apparently they were aiming at having Will's character much younger (Fox being only 13 at the time and Eure being 23) and being closer in age to Holly (Coleman being a year younger than Fox). I guess they figured out two tweens might have been annoying and they'd have better luck making one of them old enough to gain a crush following.

Her name is actually Sharon Baird:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Baird

As for the mention of the name Chaka Khan being chosen, yes Chaka Khan was around back then. She was with the group/band known as Rufus & Chaka Khan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaka_Khan

Cool! Thanks, ubiquitous, for posting the highlights!

Actually, they said they chose Wesley because the chemistry was better, something that was VERY important to them.
You're welcome! I'll be checking out disk two tonight. I was deeply disappointed by Koenig's commentary!

Wesley was the best choice. If they had chosen Michael J. Fox, Kathy Coleman (Holly) would have towered over him by the third season since she had already reached Wesley's height by that time.

BTW here is a bit of Chaka information. A graffitti tagger that plagued our state of California, from Los Angeles to San Franciso, liked the Chaka character so much he used that as his "tagger name" and covered anything and everything with CHAKA. In the article below, just scroll down a bit to the 1990 article that mentions the Chaka/Land of the Lost character:
http://laeastside.com/2009/04/la-graffiti-...first-art-show/

I watched the commentaries on the second disk of the DVD set last night. The commentators this time were Wesley and Cathey (Will and Holly) and the kid who played Cha-Ka separately.

• Wesley cringes about only his first name being in the opening credits.
• Wesley's canteen was always empty.
• Wesley and Cathy laughed about how the Sleestak never used their weapons.
• When Spencer (Rick Marshal) is thrown into the Sleestak God pit, he visibly bounces out.
• The actors portraying the Sleestak couldn't breathe in their costumes. In fact, they would take their helmets off every 20 seconds or so and be drenched in sweat.
• Wesley was a dancer; You can see it in the way he runs.
• Wesley accidentally wore a gold chain necklace to filming. It wasn't noticed until a couple eps had been taped, so he had to keep wearing it.
• Wesley sings the theme song in the opening and closing credits.
• Phil Paley's name is misspelled in the opening credits, which always drove him nuts!
• Phil remembers interviewing for Sid and Marty and showing off some karate moves (he was the youngest American blackbelt and had been offered the part after appearing on the Tonight SHow).
• Phil passed Billy Barty, who was auditioning for the same part.
• Phil remembers it took about 45 minutes to apply the Cha-Ka makeup and costume.
• Phil recalls that Cathy made fun of his underwear showing.
• Phil and the other Paku studied monkeys at the zoo.
• Phil has kept in touch with Wesley and Cathy (Wesley not as much).
• In the opening credits, there was sppd to be a vortex in the waterfall scene that they fall into.
• Wesley had a knife but never used it.

I have to add that Wesley and Cathy's commentary on The Search cracked my shit up, especially the long, drawn out scene with Holly dragging her father into their house-cave and Spencer hamming up his injuries and about to die.

That was mentioned in the first DVD commentaries as well.

Thanks again, ubiquitous!


Was it ever explained why only his first name was listed? Was it an oversight or a deliberate attempt to get interest for their 'heartthrob'?


What is a sppd?

supposed?

Correct.

That was Wesley's doing. He thought it would be "hip", kinda like Cher.

Oh man, another marathon? Damn, they are really trying to get people to go watch the LoTL movie aren't they? It won't work for me, I can't stand Will Ferrell. Some things are best left alone.

Thanks all for the answers!


Oh, so much Word!

I can't help but wonder if someone who has never seen the show, but catches a marathon and then goes to the movie, just how totally confused they will be. (They were a family?) You know, kinda like finding out that the original "Charlie's Angels" were originally police officers. (...grumble, grumble...)

Wesley Eure comes out of the closet.

I had read about Wesley's homosexuality about two years ago. Some guy who had a relationship with him mentioned him in some article. I had a feeling Wesley was gay but that was his business if he wanted to come out or not.

Chiller Network (I assume it is a new one) is running a marathon of the show right now. I just came across the network on my digital cable and it has alot of cool shows like Twin Peaks, Poltergist: The Lagacy, Dark Shadows, etc.

Land of the Lost Declared "First Bomb of Summer"

Anyone surprised?

Did no one watch the marathon on Sci-Fi on Friday?

I guess since Wesley came out, it's not something people will watch anymore.

Not sure what you're saying here. Because the actor who portrayed a character has said that he is gay would stop people from watching a 35-year-old show?

Well, if Skiffy...ahem...SyFy would bother to advertise something other than their own movies, maybe people would know about the marathon. [/end tape:SciFi Channel Rant]