THE LAND LOST TO TIME SERIES
One element that marked the series out was commissioning linguist Victoria Fromkin to create a 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 Marshalls also encountered the Pakuni, a race of ape-like humans, and made friends with Cha-Ka, one of the creatures. The three main characters faced danger from the dinosaurs and also from slow-moving, hissing lizard-men creatures known as Sleestaks, who nevertheless lived up to typical bad-guy behaviour by never quite defeating our heroes (or being able to shoot straight with crossbows). It was the Kroffts attempt to break into newer, more epic, and – for them – more reserved territory while still keeping the kiddie appeal. This might be attributed to the fact that the show was markedly different from the garish colours and weird puppet creatures of other efforts.
Literary SF heavyweights Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon and Ben Bova all contributed episodes, while a number of people who had been involved with Star Trek, including Dorothy "D.C." Fontana, actor-turned writer Walter Koenig and David Gerrold also bashed out scripts. Plus, it attracted some serious talent behind the scenes…įor what was effectively a kids' show, Land managed to score some hefty talent to write episodes. Of course, given the extremely low budget they had to work with (Marty often jokes that it cost “$1.98 a show”), the series has the air of camp about it, with the actors over-reacting to stop-motion dinosaurs blue-screened in later and plastic props.īut for all the cheese, it became a beloved show in the States and has long since snatched the title “cult classic”. You have a few nightmares and you come up with these wild characters and places." “Great things happen when you have imaginative people aboard, and we had Allan Foshko, who had worked with us on other things, and it was a very collaborative effort. and those two entities together worked out to be a really good combination," Marty Krofft remembers. "We were trying to find a habitat that could feature dinosaurs and a family. Land has a basic concept - Park Ranger Rick Marshall and his two kids, Will and Holly, are on a “routine expedition” in a raft when a massive earthquake sends them tumbling over a waterfall and through a portal in time and space to the titular world. And you just root for them because you love them and you can relate to them and you can’t understand why they can’t get home.” And like The Swiss Family Robinson, every single show has a family, or a little boy or a little girl that is lost in a strange world - like The Wizard Of Oz. “Especially as kids are so in love with them. It made such an impression on me, that every year when we came up with a new show I always thought “Dinosaurs, wow, wouldn’t that blow everybody away? Yeah, in the old King Kong or whatever, way back in the '30s, but nothing like One Million BC. “It scared the hell out of me, because we'd never, ever seen a Dinosaur moving before.
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