This blog will have nothing to do with Buddhism, or at least I don't think it will.
Just about a month ago, I went out and bought copies of the Land of the Lost first and second season DVDs. Yes, the LoTL from the mid-70's Saturday morning kidfests. I had thought about these shows from time to time over the years, and so I was very pleased to have a chance to see them again if only for the nostalgia of it. I also thought my daughter might enjoy them.
I had never forgotten the image of the ancient lost city with it's allosaurus guardian and the creepy Sleestacks (large insectoid/lizardlike humanoids) with their hissing and their lousy crossbow marksmanship. Or the mystery of the pylons (the little mini-pyramids) with their crystal matrix control panels that controlled time doorways, the weather, and other more esoteric things. Nor had I forgotten the Zarn, an alien made of light who could vanish at will and made the sound of tinkling bells when he was around. Just amazing stuff! And all on a low low budget. What I hadn't realized until recently was that the list of writers for these shows reads like a who's who of mid-20th century Sci-Fi: Ben Bova, D.C. Fontana, Larry Niven, even Walter Koenig from Star Trek. No wonder those shows were so intriguing.
My daughter is enjoying them just as much as I did when I was her age. I think she likes the thought that she is watching something I watched when I was little. But man, I forgot how intense and scary some of those shows were. Like when Rick Marshall (the father) is experimenting with the crystals and almost electrocutes himself and his ten year old daughter has to drag him through the jungle back to their cave before the T-rex gets them while the older brother searches the lost city evading Sleestack so he can get help for his father. I had never forgotten the father's scream or the look on his face after being shocked by the crystals. It made me very wary of electrical sockets that's for sure.
Another tense and creepy moment I never forgot in almost 30 years was when the Marshall family found a journal left by someone from the revolutionary war who had been trapped there many years before that supposedly led to a gateway back to Earth. They followed it deep under the lost city past rows of hibernating Sleestack in the tunnels, only to discover it led to a dead end at a river of rising lava and that the owner of the journal had not gotten out because he was trapped in the chamber when the Sleestack awoke from hibernation and came after him. The Marshalls find his skeleton and realize that the Sleestack are waking up as the lava rises and raises the temperature of the caverns and that they will soon be trapped like the unfortunate journal writer. They then have to run through the caverns as the Sleestack stir back to wakefulness and begin grabbing at them. Holy crap! That's pretty intense stuff for a Saturday morning kid's show. Fortunately my daughter is not scared by anything, but I know there were a couple moments when she jumped a bit when the Sleestack jumped out of the dark caverns at the Marshalls.
But it wasn't just scary stuff like the dinosaurs or the Sleestack or the dangerous and seemingly unpredictable alien technology that grabbed me. There were the mind-bending concepts and ironies as well. Like when the Marshalls discovered that the Land of the Lost was an "enclosed" universe and that if they went too far in any one direct they would end up in the same place because the space there bends back on itself (as opposed to just being a sphere like our planet). At one point they even look through binoculars from a mountain top and on a distant mountain they see themselves from behind looking at themselves. Or Enik, the intelligent Sleestack stranded like the Marshalls from another time who believes that he has come from the more evolved future of the Sleestacks back into their primitive past, only to find out to his dismay that he has actually travelled from the past into his race's future and that they devolved into the primitive beings who are not trying to kill him as well as the Marshalls and that the ruins of his own civilization lie all around him. That can make quite an impression on an 8 year old! Progress is not gauranteed, de-evolution is also a possibility! Maybe this is one reason I was able to appreciate where the band Devo was coming from when I saw their video for Jocko Homo on Saturday Night Live many years later.
I'm glad Julie doesn't seem too frightened by it, she takes it all in stride except for when something jumps out unexpectedly (she tells me she was just surprised). I guess after watching as many episodes of Buffy and Angel as she has when they were on t.v she doesn't find monsters all that scary. She even wrote in her homework the other day about a book she had to read for class (a Dr. Seuss story whose name I forget because it was part of a collection), "The main character is like me because he is not afraid of the dark." Anyway, now she insists on watching it before going to bed, and she even sings along with the theme song.
Anyway, an incredibly cool show, and it is a real pleasure to watch it again and especially to be able to see it through my daughter's eyes as she watches it for the first time.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei