Customer Reviews

Land of the Lost: Volume 1 & 2 Two Pak [VHS]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The original Land Of The Lost remains a stellar series. Verisimilitude permeates the show, from the very effective use of video matting to the elaborate miniature sets and often excellent animation (by Gene Warren Sr. and Jr. and Peter Kleinow) of the show's dinosaurs, to the consistently excellent performances of Spencer Milligan (as Rick Marshall), Wesley Eure (Will Marshall), Kathleen Coleman (Holly Marshall), and Walker Edmiston (Enik).

Bringing out the full power of the show were superior scripts by sci-fi veterans David Gerrold, Ben Bova, D.C. Fontana, and Star Trek/Babylon 5's Walter Koenig, and the flawless direction of Bob Lally and Dennis Steinmetz.

Koenig and Lally wring maximum emotion out of the cast in the episode "The Stranger." I'd like to know if Lally fed his cast gunpowder before shooting, for they fight and argue with an unnerving amount of gusto. Over-the-top then comes into play in the climatic scene where Enik probes the Marshall family's minds and extracts their greatest fears, leaving them as almost helpless wrecks.

From Hitchcockian flavored psycological terror, Volume One then steps into glorious Ray Harryhausen-flavored chase drama in "Tag Team," in which the Marshalls meet the show's resident prehistoric missing links, the Pakuni (Philip Paley plays the youngest, Cha-Ka), and all are chased to a huge crevase by the tyrannosaur Grumpy. Will, Holly, and Cha-Ka are trapped on a ledge twenty feet down as Grumpy gets into a yelling match with another tyrannosaur, Big Alice - the video matte scene of the two dinosaurs over the three humans is one of the best SFX shots ever.

Volume Two opens with Ben Bova's "The Search," in which Rick is electrocuted by energy crystals. Holly laborously brings her dad back to their cave while Will tries to convince Enik to help them. But Enik has opened a dimensional dorrway to Earth, and urges Will to go through, to his home. But Will can't leave his family behind - can't he?

"Paku Who Came To Dinner" is another chase episode that piles on excellent SFX footage in its story of Holly's kidnapping by the Pakuni, who are enamored of the young lady's perfume.

The two tapes capture a memorable sci-fi series.

I can't say how much I love these tapes. I have been begging Rhino Records to come out with a DVD version of this via several emphatic e-mails.

They did a superb job of delivering the broadcast quality of these classic shows onto VHS. The FBI warning is just as entertaining.

The four episodes they selected for tape pretty well round out the experience, but I'd love to see all the episodes ever made if they ever come out with them. Very good (if not over-done) acting by all the characters and some of the cheesiest special effects you have ever seen.

Before the tapes arrived, I had all these memories of adventure and cool dinosaurs... seeing the tapes really opened my eyes concerning the perception you have as a child. In the opening scenes when the theme song is playing, "shook their tiny raft...," the special effects are so awful, it looks like they borrowed them from the 1973 "Tidy Bowl" commercial. Still, these were low-budget shows and they still brought great entertainment to children and adults alike in the mid 1970s. The dinosaurs are still menacing even though they have muppet-like mouths (no throats!)... thanks to the original music and panicked family.

The show was watched by adults as well due to the clever concepts in sci-fi... aliens called Sleestak from a different time and place, the most terrifying looking lizard people I ever saw as a child. Even the sounds they made gave me the willies. Enik, the talking Sleestak from another dimension has a powerful voice and an interesting culture which he shares reluctantly with Marshall, Will and Holly.

Exploding crystals and primitive Pakuni abound. It's funny to see all of the necessary-to-live items that the family brought with them on the "routine expedition" before they got thrown into the land of the lost.... Holly brought her makeup kit, they all have tons of rope, pulleys and camping gear. Regardless of some of the cheesy props and poor SFX, it is still an awesome show and especially endearing for those of us who saw it in its hey-day when we were kids. These tapes are well worth the price for the trip to back to the land of the lost, the lost city, and the land of Sleestak, Pakuni and Alice, the Allosaurus.

Okay. This show was for kids. Was and still is. It's a fun trip down memory lane for those that saw it first-run as long as the expectations are reasonable.

I bought these remembering that one of the fascinating things about this show was that episodes were written by well known and successful sci-fi authors...Ben Bova, DC Fontana, etc. Yet the dialogue and story lines are still very simplistic and one note concepts...again for kids.

And while it's classic over-acting here (wayyyy over the top), it's the same hammyness that lends charm to the old Star Trek (a la Shatner). Overacting? Yes. But it still evokes more involvement and is preferrable to the dry talking heads of current s.f. shows (like any of the new Star Trek incarnations for example).

Of course, there's the additional charm of being from the mid 70's, the clothes, the hair. (Gotta love Rick Marshall's perm).

One major flaw seems to be the randomness of the episode selection for these two tapes as well as the other two tapes in the series (3 & 4). Issuing them in chronological order would have been a lot more satisfying and as it is, the episodes jump around in time. And running story elements such the mysterious unseen thing in the pit, the colored crystals that can combine for different effects, etc. pop up here without understanding their origin or context.

Was VERY disappointed that none of the 8 episodes released by Rhino here had those funky Pylons or Skylons with their resulting weather changes.

So if you're prepared for simplistic child like stories and dialogue, and stop-animation special effects that are straight out of the 1926 film The Lost World, combined with the puppetry of Sid & Marty Kroft you'll be very satisfied with these.

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I would not have kicked out $40 for 8 episodes had the above reviews not been so good.

What amazed me as I watched the shows--and I had not seen them since I was 10 years old in 1974--was the quality of the writing. I would later go on to love science fiction and STAR TREK, but when I was 10 I had never heard of David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana, Walter Koenig, Ben Bova, just to name a few. This Saturday morning kid's show had some of the best SF writers of its day...a truly amazing roster of talent.

It was worth the money to take me back in time, back to the house I grew up in. As I watched, I remembered many scenes and nearly every plot, even though I thought I had forgotten them. This is wonderful stuff. The Sleestaks are still scary, the dinosaurs are still cool, and the acting, if a bit overdone at times, is pretty good.

I don't regret buying these episodes at all. Even though I just got a DVD player, I bought the VHS tapes (both twin packs), because you get more episodes for less money than you do on the single DVD. The only thing wrong with these sets is that there aren't enough episodes. Hopefully one day they will release all 40+ episodes on a DVD set. Until then, you can savor these.

Volumes 3 and 4 are probably the ones to get if you are on a limited budget. The four episodes on these volumes were voted as the best by fans.

Enjoy!

What can I say? Land Of The Lost was and still is one of my favorite 70's Saturday morning shows. Watching these video tapes took me back and sat me right in front of my old tv set, eating my sugar coated cereal, wearing my pajamas, and not having a care in the world. These are great tapes of a classic show. Buy them, you will love em....

When the Land of the Lost was cancelled from t.v.--I was only 4 years old...My sister is 4 years older than me...Almost 25 years later--my sister and I still joke about the Land of the Lost: it was our most favorite show of all times--to watch on Saturday mornings.

This past March--my mom purchased the first 4 tapes of the Land of the Lost series for my sister's birthday.

Believe me--if you were ever a "die-hard" Land of the Lost fan--
this is money well spent:

You'll never laugh any harder...the special effects look like they filmed the raft scene in a bath tub!

If you get a kick out of those old sci-fi shows...the Land of the Lost is one not worth missing!

...and I used to think those brown jeans were cool...

For at least a year, _Land of the Lost_ was a huge hit for the under-10 set. Like today's _Pokemon_, it featured an infectious cast and a satisfactory melding of familiar and alien characters. Paramount among these were the Sleestack, bipedal dinosaurs on a slithering mission of human extinction. They terrified children in the seventies with their (mostly) non-verbal hissing and control of mystical jewel-operated power pyramids. Sounds ridiculous? It quite happily was.

But the stories worked even with bad special effects because of the earnest acting. You believed this single-parent family was in danger from the first episode, and you also believed they WERE a family. Over time, Marhsall, Will and Holly actually became characters you cared about, and that emotional involvement made you worry that the obviously fake T-Rex was gonna eat them.

Are these the best episodes from the series? It's hard to say, because it's been so long absent from Saturday morning television. But I personally remembered the plot of "The Stranger" even after decades. It's memorable for the appearance of a talking, beneficent Sleestack and (for kids) a surprising plot twist leading to an unexpected moral. "The Search" is not so tightly written, but it does feature Cha-Ka, played by a young man who would eventually grow up to be the musician Sugar Ray.

Viewed now decades away from the hysteria, it's probably hard for most adults to see what all the fuss was about, but my guess is that kids under 10 will still see Sleestacks under their beds at night. In any case, the low price makes it painless to take a trip down memory lane.

I always wondered what happened to this show, one of my very favorites from childhood. I was always fascinated by the idea that an earthquake could open a passage back in time to the dinosaur age...how does that happen? I ordered these tapes on a whim, and have enjoyed many a laugh since. The overacting and jerky special effects (which were cutting-edge thirty years ago) only add to the charm. My two-and-a-half year old daughter loves the episodes, and has added the words "Chaka" and "Holly" to her vocabulary. She is learning the words to the theme song, complete with the "AHHHHHHHHHH" when the raft plunges down the Tidy-Bowl waterfall. There are bigger collections now on DVD than when I purchased these tapes, but episodes of LOL in some format are a must-have for the retro collection of any child of the seventies!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, THE CLASSICS! This is LOL:
TOS. (LAND OF THE LOST: THE ORIGINAL SERIES), as opposed to LOL: TNG. (LAND OF THE LOST: THE NEXT GENERATION), which was a bastardization of the original.
LAND OF THE LOST is about the Marshall family. Rick, the
father, and his two children, Will, and Holly. They're your typical California family of the 1970s. Well, atypical's more
like it. In the first episode, THE STRANGER, they've survived an earthquake which hurled them over a waterfall and into a
mysterious land from which nobody escapes. The original
series is my favorite. Rick and his family rafted into the Land
of the Lost. They didn't drive in like the Porter family did in the 1989 revival of the '70s series. Rick Marshall was probably a forest ranger. He had two children. Will, played by
an actor who went by the one-word name of Wesley, who was probably around fifteen or sixteen when the show began, and his preteen daughter, Holly, played by Kathy Coleman. The show, especially its depiction of the dinosaurs, is rather dated. In 1974, there were two Apatosauruses, (that's what they're called now. Back then, it
was Brontosaurus), named Dopey, (the baby), and Emily,
his adopted mother. There were also Grumpy, a T-Rex with a bad attitude, and Big Alice, an Allosaurus with an equally
bad temper. The puppets were good. This was before computer animation and movies like Jurassic Park. It's also
before syndicated series like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. The best episode is the one written by Walter Koenig, Chekov, of Star Trek fame. It stands the test of time
and has been on NBC, CBS, and the Sci-Fi Channel.