Land of the Giants



Land of the Giants is a late 1960s Irwin Allen science fiction TV series that can be summarized as the inverse of both Gulliver's Travels and The Incredible Shrinking Man. A commercial spaceship gets into a freak storm and is transported to a world where the people on that world are all forty feet tall, a skyscraper is two miles high, and when they're found out, the government wants them for scientific research.

You have the pilot, the co-pilot, the pretty but serious stewardess, the pretty but serious junior stewardess, the Con Man, the little boy and his dog.

This crew must make their way in a world where fatal hazards abound; a tarantula is the size of a wolf, a kitchen table requires mountain climbing gear (string and a giant safety pin) and making a phone call means using a phone the size of a wardrobe closet.

Not only that, the equivalent of Inspector Norse to them as six Richard Kimbles, with the government offering a substantial reward for the capture of any of the little people as they are called. They end up on a series of adventures, often helping people out of jams that they get into.


 * Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The premise of the show of course required ignoring the Square-Cube Law.
 * Con Artist: Alexander Fitzhugh.
 * Continuity Drift: In the first few episodes, the heroes are completely unable to understand the giants (one episode features a giant putting them in a jar hooked up to a complicated listening device so he can communicate with them). The writers quickly realized how much this limited the kind of stories they could tell, and changed the giants to be perfectly understandable with no explanation. This is the kind of thing you could get away with back then.
 * Expy: Fitzhugh is an attempt to replicate Zachary Smith, the Breakout Character from Allen's previous series Lost in Space.
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The travelers are from Twenty Minutes Into the Future, but the giants' world resembled... modern-day America.
 * Five-Man Band
 * Giant Spider
 * John Williams: Composer for the series.
 * Macro Zone: The entire premise.
 * Mouse World: Played with; in this series, humans are the mice.
 * Name's the Same: Dan Erickson is also the name of a character in two of the Saw films.
 * Quicksand Sucks: A 40-foot criminal steals their ship by picking it up and taking it with him quite a distance before falls into a pit of quicksand, dropping the ship and allowing them to escape. They decide, as bad as he was, that he doesn't deserve to die, and use the ship's engines to pull him out of the pit. Once he gets out of the pit, he grabs the ship again, making them believe that they committed a colossal blunder in allowing themselves to be betrayed, but they discover that the man, in gratitude, has taken the ship and put it back exactly where he had originally stolen it from.
 * Special Guest: Jonathan Harris from a certain other Irwin Allen show shows up as the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
 * Token Minority: African-American actor Don Marshall as co-pilot Dan Erickson, though he's actually a notable subversion, being a character who "happened" to be black rather than being explicitly written in as "the black guy" - which was quite unusual for the time.
 * Wild Mass Guessing: A theory goes that the space travelers were actually transported to an Alternate Universe -- which would explain everything, even the laws of physics allowing giant humans to exist.
 * Whole Costume Reference: A reuse of the fur-trimmed white dress from Snow White and The Three Stooges.