Yeah you read that right: I did dare to use my personal "worst epithet ever" for this. Because everything about this project (with the possible exception of Will Ferrell which I'll get to later) screams out "wrong" in every way possible.
I was 5 years old and in kindergarten when WFMY out of Greensboro started showing Land of the Lost on weekday afternoons at 3:30. Land of the Lost, even before I ever saw a Star Wars movie, was my first serious exposure to what I would come to appreciate as epic storytelling within a broad mythology. The weird landscape, the dinosaurs, the Sleestaks, the Lost City, the Pylons, the Civil War soldier, the ape dudes, the spaceship... and Rick Marshall and his two kids trying to get home: I ate it all up and wanted more. Here's the first season's opening title sequence if you've never seen it before...
Then they had to show the Season 3 episodes where Rick left and Uncle Jack showed up. By that time I was 6 years old and had realized, before the term had ever been coined, that Land of the Lost had "jumped the shark". Let's not even talk about the early Nineties remake.
Ain't It Cool News was where I first heard that Universal is about to spend $100 million dollars on a big-screen Land of the Lost feature starring Will Ferrell.
Universal's Land of the Lost is being billed as "an event comedy".
Ummmm... 'scuse me?
Land of the Lost is not a comedy. No doubt that there were some light-hearted moments in the original show, but for a children's series it was always dark and foreboding. What ABC's Lost is today, is what Land of the Lost was back then. And in the hands of people who understand Land of the Lost and "get" the whole concept, this could turn into a fantastic project. I think that Will Ferrell could do a fine job with this: it has the potential to move him out of the perception that he's mainly a comedy actor, if the material is treated seriously. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
Can't Sid and Marty Krofft maintain some creative control over this? The way things are going we can look forward to Chris Rock and Adam Sandler in the Far Out Space Nuts movie any day now.
Land of the Lost...My sister watched it, I just thought the special FX were too cheesy, until I saw the credits and noticed writers like Larry Niven, and D. C Fontana. The remake had better FX, but the writing was sub-par. Of course isn't Ferrell's first connection with Land of the Lost. In Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, he played Marshal Willandholly...
ReplyDeletePersonally, I want to see Will Ferrell play George Jetson, with Danny DaVito as Mr. Spaceley. I can just imagine Ferrell yelling "Jane, stop this crazy thing!"