[1] It is a live-action show mixed with stop-motion animated dinosaurs, originally aired on Saturday mornings from 1974 to 1976,[2] on the NBC television network.
The episode storylines focus on the family's efforts to survive and find a way back to their own world, but the exploration of the exotic inhabitants of the Land of the Lost is also an ongoing part of the story.
[6] The prolific Krofft team was influential in live-action children's television, producing many shows that were oddly formatted, highly energetic, and filled with special effects, with most of them following a "stranger in a strange land" storyline.
[14] The Marshalls are brought to the mysterious world by means of a dimensional portal,[15] a device used frequently throughout the series and a major part of its internal mythology.
Outfitted only for a short camping trip, the resourceful family from California takes shelter in a natural cave and improvises the provisions and tools that they need to survive.
The original creators of these time portals were thought to be the ancestors of the Sleestak, called Altrusians, though later episodes raised some questions about this.
Land of the Lost is notable for its epic-scale concept, which suggested an expansive world with many fantastic forms of life and mysterious technology, all created on a children's series' limited production budget.
[14][16] The series' intention was to create a realistic fantasy world, albeit relying heavily on children's acceptance of minor inconsistencies.
In a 1999 interview, first-season story editor and writer David Gerrold claimed that he largely created the show based on photographs of various science-fiction topoi that were bound together in a book and given him by Sid Krofft and Allan Foshko.
[14] The series for the first two seasons was shot on a modular indoor soundstage at General Service Studios in Hollywood, and made economical use of a small number of sets and scenic props that were rearranged frequently to suggest the ostensibly vast jungles, ancient cities, and cave systems.
In addition to a salary increase, he believed the rest of the cast and he should receive compensation for using their images on various merchandise (mostly rack toys by Larami,[18] including a generic pack of toy dinosaurs believed to originate in Taiwan), but also a coloring book from Whitman Publishing, a Little Golden Book, View-Master reels and a Milton Bradley board game.
Additional visual effects were achieved using manual film overlay techniques, the low-tech ancestor to later motion control photography.
[24] In a 2018 podcast interview with both Sid and Marty Krofft, they reconfirmed that they are still working on an updated remake of Land of the Lost and that this time it will be an hour-long series.