Land of the Lost (TV series)/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


General Trivia

  • Land of the Lost had strong connections to Star Trek: The Original Series starting almost from the moment of its conception. Sid and Marty Krofft approached Gene Roddenberry and asked him to be story editor and head writer for the show when it was still not much more than a proposal; he turned them down but pointed them at David Gerrold, a young writer who had worked on Star Trek (among other things, writing the classic episode "The Trouble with Tribbles"). Gerrold took the job and became responsible for the show's extensive lore and surprisingly high writing quality, and among the writers he recruited were Trek‍'‍s D.C. Fontana and Walter Koenig. Makeup artist Michael Westmore was also well-known for his work on the Star Trek films and later series.

Trivia Tropes

  • Doing It for the Art: Surprisingly crossed with Executive Meddling. As mentioned on the page for the series, one of the NBC executives ordered the Krofft brothers to hire a linguist to create an actual Pakuni language for the original series. Considering this was a no-budget Saturday morning kid's show, this is the only explanation.
  • Double Vision: There were only three Sleestak costumes; mattes, multiple exposures and split-screen effects were used when more needed to appear on screen together.
  • Gondor Calls for Aid: During the shooting of the first episode, it quickly became obvious that the innovative in-camera effects system was not working properly. The effects team contacted people they knew at Disney for help, and over the next couple weeks a veritable flood of experts from multiple studios combined their efforts to debug the system and get it working.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!:
    • Thanks to the makeup you'd never know, but Sa, the female Pakuni, was played by former Mousketeer Sharon Baird.
  • Hey, It's That Voice!:
  • Separated At Birth Casting: Spencer Milligan was cast as Rick Marshall because of his resemblance to Wesley Eure, who had already been cast as Will.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Those Two Actors: An example of rather limited scope: Cathy Coleman and Phillip Paley had made a Cheezits commercial together a year before auditioning for Land of the Lost, and upon encountering each other at an audition immediately recognized each other and began singing the song from the commercial.