I mostly remember being frightened by the Sleestak also. My older brother did a pretty mean impression, and scared me into giving up some of my best toys as a result. I also remember running outside to play Land Of The Lost with the neighbor kids, and the inevitable fight over who had to play Chaka. Being one of the youngest, this was often my role, comprised of jumping around by a tree in our front yard. However Chaka did sometimes become angry resulting in the other kids being pelted with water balloons, if ignored long enough. I was always a fast runner. Poor Chaka. heh
My memory of the finale agrees with what Otto posted earlier. However Enik also reveals that originally, they did not come through a warp. They simply fell to their deaths. The paradox is resolved, and a warp home opened, when the have Enik open the warp to bring them to LOTL
Enik is definitely from the past. His line ‘This is not my people’s past. It is our future. The Sleestak are not our ancestors. They are our descendants’ is my favorite moment of the series. In another episode, dad (or possibly Uncle Jack) is captured by the Sleestak and thrown into a pit as sacrifice to some great beast. Also tossed in the pit is a talking Sleestak. He explains that occasionally inteligent, speaking throwbacks like him hatch. The Sleestak always kill them.
Don’t forget the episode of Electro Woman and Dyna Girl in which they go inside a mirror. Definitely some hallucinogenic input into that script.
If I recall correctly, it was only explained in the opening credits of the final season. An earthquake (10.5??) hits and the kids run up to a pylon. Marhsall is standing there then falls in. Next scene shows Uncle Jack on a raft “Uncle Jack went searching…” then he fell into the LOTL. I’m not sure how they met up. Also I believe Chaka’s people all disappeared as well, their footsteps just stopped at a big rock wall.
The only thing I remember from this show is this alternate pronunciation of Sleestak - except I remember it sounding more like Sa-rees ataka. Can anyone provide a cite for the correct alternate pronunciation?And , also , refresh my memory - was that how the Sleestaks pronounced it , or was it some other creature’s way?
I read somewhere they had to fire the guy who played Marshall because of his alcoholism. Might have read it right here on this board.
I liked the show, and found the sleestak very frightening. I was too young to appreicate the science fiction though, and was shocked to read of the concepts they used. It sounds like I missed a lot!
But take a look at the contemporary cartoon with a similar theme: “Valley of the Dinosaurs”. Given that any child will suspend disbelief at seeing cavemen co-existing with dinosaurs, that show simply used the cavemen for human-scale antagonism when needed to break up the monotony.
And “Land of the Lost” already had Chaka and company, so I wonder where the impetus came to add this additional totally bizzarro element. Not that I’m complaining, it really set the show apart.
The wild thing is, E! ran a “True Hollywood Story” about the Krofft brothers, which had the two of them fully participating, unlike many outings of that series.
I’ve seen many a former acid-dropper, and they just don’t fit the profile. The more “visionary” of the two (I forget if he’s named Sid or Marty) came off a little effeminate, but that appeared to be the only strange thing about them.
And a look at either of theirIMDB profiles shows that occasionally, they veered into the straight comedy/variety formats of the time. In other words, these two business types are sitting around the office in 1976, saying “Hey, these Osmond kids with their comedy/variety show are really panning out for us! How can we build on this success? I know, let’s do a show about a bunch of kids who get stranded on a jungle island, shrunk to H-O gauge size by a mad scientist, and terrorized by his midget slave!”
Somehow, that’s more unnerving than thinking they were on drugs the whole time.
But is there ANY precursor to the sleestak?
I mean (to examine their output up to that point) L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll gave us lands where objects can talk (HR Pufnstuf). A Jukebox as a giant building in which a variety of beings live is not that big a stretch, the existence of the Beatles lent itself to other bug-themed singers with British accents (The Bugaloos) on other shows. Talking hats (Lidsville) and, as the book “Saturday Morning Fever” described him, “an ambulatory pile of green crud” (Sigmund and the Sea Monsters) are your basic child-like anthropomorphisms of inanimate objects. And "Land of the Lost was not even the only dinosaur-themed show that started that year.
But how do you decide that the thing which will set YOUR dinosaur show apart is a bunch of green, bug-eyed freaks that are capable of inspiring terror despite their glacial gait? Where do you dig that up from?
I thought perhaps the Dinosauroid was a going theory at the time, and they might have got wind of it, but Darwin’s Finch has already pointed out that it was more likely the other way around.
Was there something on “Outer Limits”? “Twilight Zone”? Not that I assume they couldn’t have come up with it on their own, but they obviously hit upon something primal, since many Dopers remember the Sleestak and little else from the show.
I don’t know alot about Sid and Marty but I’ll bet they were somewhat influenced
by the horror films of there youth. The Creature From the Black Lagoon is An old school scary type that sort of fits the bill.
The Sleestak do look rather like a cross between the Creature and one of The Mole People.
But my WAG is that they were inspired by a pulp writer. HP Lovecraft and various others writing Cthulu Mythos stuff had ancient, nearly extinct, races who ruled the earth before humans were standing erect. Robert E Howard (creator of Conan) wrote at least once on Serpent men. At least two of his stories include ‘worms of the earth’ a species of small humanoids who apparently evolved from snakes and have many reptilian characteristics (at some point the process reverses, and they begin evolving from humanoid back to snake). I haven’t read much of Edgar Rice Burroughs Pelucidar(avdentures within the hollow earth), Barsoom (swashbuckling fantasy on mars) and none of his Tarzan, but it’s a good bet he wrote at least one adventure involving an ancient race of lizard or snake men.
LOL. Ditto. 
Well, it WAS supposed to be “The greeeeaaaaaatest earthquake ever known”
So large, that it causes gigantic styrofoam boulders to block the river behind you.
I haven’t seen LOTL in a while but, IIRC those weren’t giant styrofoam boulders. They were ornamental cobble stones roughly six inches by two inches by one inch and badly bluescreened in behind footage of folks on a raft
As a matter of fact, *Tarzan at the Earth’s Core * is both a Tarzan story and a Pelucidar story, and it has lizard men in it!
Don’t forget to visit http://www.landofthelost.com as well. Check out this pic of Kathy Coleman (girl who played Holly) from 1978. What a cutie!
The Sleestak always seemed more insectoid than reptilian to me. And they lived in caves!
For my money, that was much scarier: The Marshalls often found themselves trapped in the caves with these insect-like things between them and the exit.
The Sleestak in the remake series were definitely reptilian and lived outdoors. Ho hum.
I heard it said that the original ideal came from Bozo the clown about a Swiss Family Robinson who get caught up in a terrestrial black hole .
Harlan Ellison started that Bozo rumor, maybe fucking with David Gerrold… who actually created this show and ran it for the first year. He was given a poster board on which was glued a picture of a dinosaur, an ape, and a “jungle girl,” and told to create a show. Gerrold says he did it despite knowing he wouldn’t get credit (the Krofts give credit to a buddy of theirs).
So, the show came from the mind of an SF talent, not the Krofts. I wonder if their other shws were done this way.
That is a nice pic of Kathy Coleman, but it is way old. On a 2000 DVD interview, she is looking rather ragged, and is a complete fucking mental loon. Phil Paley (Chaka) sits through the entire interview just laughing at her, or backing away when she cackles maniacally.
Sir Rhosis
What did she do/say that was so loony?
Whenever I’m in a car and we come over the top of a steep hill and start down the other side, the LotL theme starts playing in my head: “…Plunged them down a thousand feet below…”
When I look at crap like Pokemon (thinly-veiled cockfighting, actually) that passes for weekend children’s entertainment nowadays, I grieve for the loss of such great Saturday morning stuff as we had in the '70s.