For the uninitiated, the Land of the Lost was a children's television show that debuted in 1974 that in 2009 had a bad movie made from it. The show was about the adventures of a family trapped in a pocket universe full of dinosaurs, rednecks, ape-men and humanoid, predatory lizards called Sleestak. As they searched for a way home the main characters of Rick Marshall, Will and Holly struggled to survive against their environment, aggressive aliens and other denizens who wished them harm. The humans and Enik, the evolved and time-lost leader of the hostile Sleestak, often worked at cross purposes as each wittingly or otherwise sabotaged the efforts of the other to return to their respective worlds.
In one early episode Enik manages to create a portal into the human world and reveals it to Rick Marshall. The portal was useless to the exiles, however, as it opened into a region at an altitude high above the Earth and could not be shifted to ground level. Rick bemoaned the fact that had they parachutes the entire family could have gone home at that time. A recurring plot device of the series would be the Marshall family (usually the bickering kids) screwing around in the Pylons trying to find a way home, typically meeting with disastrous results culminating in a fine lesson learned by all.
The start of Season Three finds a change to the cast of the show. Having not learned anything about haphazardly messing around with the pylons in the previous two seasons, Rick Marshall is gone. By accidentally opening a passage to Earth, Rick is pulled and thrown violently through the portal, spinning out of the Land of the Lost and into the air high above the Grand Canyon. Tragically, as is evident in accompanying video, the background image seen through the portal was similar to the one shown by Enik to Rick previously, depicting a distant horizon far, far beneath the portal.
I mocked up the article below because I imagined what the sad, terrible fate of Rick Marshall would have been, sans parachute, when he emerged like a ballistic shell from a warp in space into his world with nothing but the mile-deep chasm of the Grand Canyon below him.
Click to make tabloid sized!
That is just pure genius! I remember thinking the same thing, but since the show was canceled after the third season, we never got to find out if the Marshall's ever left the Land or if Rick ever got back. So, this is as good an explanation as any! hahahaha
ReplyDeleteVery cool - and great job on the article! :)
"Interment", right? We're not talking about taking him back to WWII America and treating him like a citizen of Japanese heritage, are we?
ReplyDelete(Feel free to delete this posting after you fix the typo. And, thanks for one of my favorite blogs.)
Oh that stupid spell check. gotta quit relying on it so much.
ReplyDeleteI've honestly only seen a few episodes of it here and there. Why was Rick taken out in the third season? Contract dispute or something? Was there a replacement that was thrown through the portal to complete the trio and serve as father figure?
ReplyDeleteContract dispute, supposedly. 3rd season is also when it went off the rails as writers and creators were replaced.
ReplyDeleteFrom a recent AP article:
ReplyDelete"Milligan left after the first two seasons over a salary dispute with creators Sid and Marty Krofft. Ron Harper replaced him in the final season as Marshall's brother, Jack.
"We had a difference of opinion, let's put it this way, on using my face for stuff and paying me — lunch boxes, compasses — where they were selling them and I thought it was only fair that everyone should get their fair share."
No doubt Rick Marshall found his his final trip through the time-space portal a crushing experience. I'll bet it squashed more than his hopes...
ReplyDeleteIn the last episode of the first season, they escaped, and created a "time loop" hoping that they would escape their fate as shown by Enoch: they died at the bottom of the falls. They escaped and hoped that they would be able to take when they'd learned and survive.
ReplyDeleteLooks like Will Marshal didn't....