I don’t get the vitriol, to be honest. Land of the Lost was a entertaining kids show and this is probably a kids movie.
While obviously it’s not a life changing thing, the vitriol is because the show has 35 years of built in nostalgia and MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of fans who have talked for many years about how much they’d love to see it as a big budget serious movie. It was probably as influential as STAR TREK to Gen X and Gen Y- I wouldn’t be the least surprised to learn that there are physicists, sci-fi writers, paleontologists and others of my generation (I’m 42 and will count my generation as “a few years either direction”) who can track their interest in their subject back to that show.
Note that if they wanted to make a drugged up spacey comedy about Puffnstuff nobody would mind and a lot of people would love it, and also that there’s hardly any shoutouts for “when’s there gonna be a Korg 70,000 BC movie!” It’s because the show was that good and that imaginative.
I vaguely remembered Land of the Lost, and thought of it as strictly for kids. But now that I’ve been reading about it, I’m impressed by how imaginative it sounds. (And some episodes were written by real science fiction writers like Larry Niven.)
And the language spoken by the Pakuni (the chimp like people) wasn’t gibberish but an actual simple language devised by UCLA linguists.
While I sincerely appreciate the unacknowledged creative potential of the Krofft oeuvre, I also feel that your fondness for the show may be leading you to overstate its legacy of influence on pop culture just a bit.
However, I wholeheartedly agree that it would be a shame if Will Ferrell’s irreverent adaptation prevents other Krofft Supershow productions from receiving the respectful handling that is their due. Sadly, I doubt that any contemporary filmmaker would have the patience or vision to seriously explore the intricately nuanced interpersonal allegory established by DOCTOR SHRINKER.
I think you repeated yourself 
Eh, I don’t really mind them making a humorous remake of it. I’m not gonna run out and see it, but the mere existence of the movie doesn’t really mean anything to me.
But I’m kinda curious what the though process was behind the studio that decided to make this film. Isn’t the point of a parody to make fun of something people are familiar with. I imagine the movie going public is made up of about 1% of people who have fond memories of the show and will be pissed at it being turned into a comedy, 1% of people who watched it as kids but haven’t thought about it in years and only vaguely remember that it involved some dinosaurs and lizardmen, and the 98% of the population who have never heard of it. Seems like they could’ve dug up a more popular kids show if they just wanted something people would remember to serve as a Will Farrel vehicle.
If wonder if, by the usual process of Hollywood corruption, a script or proposal for a serious remake was mutated into a Will Ferrell vehicle. Or more likely, someone somewhere discovered they had purchased a batch of cheap, long-shot movie rights including LotL, and decided to see if they could whore some money out of it.
My husband must have seen a trailer for this, because I swear I haven’t thought of the word ‘Sleestak’ in thirty years, but we have four 2-week old cockatiels that hiss/moan/snarl when they’re hungry, and he’s been calling them Sleestaks. I couldn’t have told you what kind of noise those things made after all these years! Okay, minor hijack over.
I will be interested to see the rating on it. Like I said earlier, I suspect it is targeted at kids.
I don’t see how this could be done as anything but parody. How could it possibly be done seriously? Conceptually, the premise is utterly asinine. It makes The Core look like a BBC2 documentary.
I haven’t seen the original in like 35 years, but I remember thinking it was horrible, even as an 8-year old. It was so cheaply produced that even small children could see through the sets and the costumes, and even at a tender age, I can remember being offended by the inaccuracies and implausibilities. If anything deserves to be sent up by Will Ferrell, it’s this piece of shit.
Sorry, Sampiro. I think you’re great, but I have to disagee on this one. I guess I’m in the minority, but I actually like Will Ferrell (at least sometimes), and I think this looks like a good project for him.
We’ll agree to disagree.
In house memo to security eunuchs: make it look as if he just decided to take a business trip and never came home. For his participation in the religion threads, change the straw in the cell every so often.
No one is denying the original was cheaply made and looked tacky, but that wasn’t the point. That would be like criticizing Dr. Who or even Star Trek TOS for it’s production values. What part of the premise or the plot of the episodes do you consider asinine or implausible?
Are you kidding me?
Ok, well bear in mind I haven’t seen the show since I was a child so my memory might be a little fuzzy, but this was about a family who gets over a waterfall and ends up in some kind of “land that time forgot,” which has donsaurs, monkey people, lizard people and magic crystals that change the weather.
Yeah, nothing implausible about that.
It’s not supposed to be a documentary. It’s a science fiction show. For children. The crystals were long lost technology from the same race that created the bubble universe, IIRC.
When I was 11 I was obssessed with this show. I’ve avoided watching it on DVD, as I’m sure it won’t live up to my memories. The movie looks horrible and I agree with the thread title. Kill it with fire so all parts of it are destroyed.
I’m more or less with Dio, here. I’ve never seen the show, never really heard of it until they started making the movie, I think Farrell can be funny with the right material, and I like goofy skiffy comedies. It won’t be one of the four movies a year I see in the theaters, but I’ll probably rent the DVD.
I’m amused about the comparison to ST:TOS and Dr. Who. I can’t really say for sure, not having seen the show, but I suspect there’s a reason that those two are cultural icons, while LotL is cultural detritus.
If someone asked me if I was a Will Farrell fan I would say no. Wasn’t fond of a lot of what he did on SNL. But if you start naming his movies I would say I liked most of them (and Stranger than Fiction I loved). I watched Land of the Lost when I was a kid. I was the right age to be the target audience. Looking back at it, it sucked as much as the original BSG. I have no problem with them making it into a comedy.
But I have to admit. This was a great line from the OP:
But to many Gen X/Gen Y’ers, it is a cultural icon. You’ll see Sleestaks and memorabilia for it at Cons and the like- you rarely see that for the Great Space Roller Coaster or Filmation’s Tarzan or the like. Never having watched DR. WHO I’ll abstain from judging it because that’s what you do when you’ve never seen something.
As for the premise being loopy, is it any loopier than a neglected abused English boy discovering he’s the most famous “boy who lived” in a world of wizards? Or Middle Earth? Or Star Trek? Or Star Wars? It was a kid’s show, but the ideas of spatial folding, alternate universes, a self contained bubble existing independently of time and space external to the bubble (remember the episode when Enik was attempting to return to his own time and briefly opened a portal that Will could jump through to get into his own time- albeit a canyon? Or the Confederate soldier who also fell through the portal?), competing races, the notion of intellectual collapse (Enik was hyperintelligent yet was an distant progenitor of the brainless Sleestaks), complex relationships (the Pakuni used Chaka as a whipping boy because of his friendliness to the humans while Enik was always distrustful of the humans in spite of their being the only other life approaching his intelligence), etc… Then there was the Deistic aspect- the fact that the entire miniverse was an obviously intentional creation of an extreme intelligence that had created the pylons and for some reason had walked away).
It was definitely a cut above Lidsville.
The pity isn’t that Will Ferrell will make mockery of a nostalgic touchstone but that this could have been a MAJOR intelligent blockbuster that with the right writing could have woven the best parts of Crichton’s works, THE MATRIX, and other sci fi/fantasy classics and already had a built in audience. It would have been like making TRANSFORMERS an Adam Sandler project (or GI Joe into an international rather than distinctly American agency which they’re also doing in the upcoming film).
Most of the OP is Godfather references. See if you can collect them all.
I’m from your generation and I think you’re overstating things. A lot. Millions and millions of fans haven’t talked for many years about seeing a big budget serious movie. Really.
How dare you suggest a moral equivalence? Only the Spanish Inquisition is as bad as a new Will Ferrell movie, and nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!