A Routine Expedition

I really appreciate the children’s programming I grew up that was way smarter than it needed to be.

One series that stands above the rest to me was Land of the Lost. It wasn’t an educational program for kids, like the great content on PBS, it was just a Saturday morning adventure show. But, man, it really was a show that was just tried extra hard to be something good.

LOTL originally ran in the mid-seventies, but I discovered it when the Sci-Fi Channel aired it twenty years later. I was in middle school and became obsessed.

Ostensibly, the show is about a family who end up lost in a mysterious land of dinosaurs… but there was a LOT more to it than that. David Gerrold, who had become famous writing “The Trouble with Tribbles” for Star Trek, served as the show runner, and he recruited a collection of incredible science fiction authors and Star Trek veterans- D.C. Fontana, Theodore Sturgeon, Larry Niven, Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad, Walter Koenig- to write scripts for the series. They filled the Land of the Lost with heady sci-fi concepts like pocket universes and time travel paradoxes.

The Pakuni are a good example of the show just being smarter than it needed to be. They were an ape-like species who didn’t speak English. While watching the show, I became convinced that the Pakuni were speaking a real language. So I got my notebook out and started keeping track of the words they used and what they meant. My brother would tease me, because *obviously* it was just gibberish… but I had noticed patterns and repeated words and I was determined to learn to speak Pakuni. Years later, I read that they had in fact hired a linguist to create a Pakuni language. I was right!

The Skeestak, the monstrous lizard-men who appeared as regular antagonists, are another good example… because they weren’t just monstrous lizard-men. They were the tragic survivors of the fallen Altrusian civilization who had regressed to barbarism.

The thing is, they didn’t have to do any of that. It was a Saturday morning kid’s adventure show. The Pakuni could have just spoken gibberish, the Skeestak could have just been monsters, and they didn’t need to hire great writers to tell compelling science fiction stories. It could have been a series about kids being chased by dinosaurs for 25 minutes and the advertisers would have been happy.

I remember Christopher Eccleston being interviewed about acting for children in Doctor Who, and he said, “If you can get them early with good stuff, they’re going to demand good stuff as they get older.”

I believe that, and I really appreciate the artists who put in the time and effort to give me the good stuff when I was young.