Dejections

For those of you who don’t know, Irwin Allen was a clever man. He devised a movie and tv series called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, other tv shows that followed included Lost in Space and a time travel adventure called Time Tunnel. Having tackled every dimension in space-time you would have thought that Allen would have quit while he was ahead. No chance. By a stroke of genius, in 1967, he came up with Land of the Giants, a tv series where the main characters found themselves on a planet just like Earth where the human were just like us - except that they were 12 times bigger.

Irwin Allen knew that the screenwriters would have great fun with the almost limitless possibilities of the situation he had conjured. At first he played with various potential scenes using sketch storyboards. He imagined a giant foot coming down with the an actor just scurrying out of the way and a pursuit by a giant cat and a giant spider. Many more scenes were sketched until he was ready to take his idea to the television networks. He produced an 8 minute presentation movie reel and took a tour of networks chiefs and production houses. The ABC network soon realised the show’s potential and gave Allen the go ahead for a pilot and a 26 episode season.

Long time collaborator Tony Wilson helped Allen write the pilot. This laid down a template for the show so that writers such as William Welch and husband and wife team Bob and Esther Mitchell could pen other episodes. The cast included Gary Conway who played captain Steve Burton and Don Marshall who played his co-pilot, Dan Erickson.

The pilot show sets the scene: it is the 1980’s and Captain Burton and Dan Erickson pilot a routine flight from New York (changed to Los Angeles in later shows) to London. In order to escape the drag of the atmosphere, aircraft travel such distances through the edges of the atmosphere. On this occasion, though, things go wrong. Their craft, the Spindrift is caught up in a space warp that somehow dumps it on an alien planet that is just like Earth - except that everything - and everyone - is 12 times bigger than on the real Earth.

Land of the Giants started its run on ABC on 22nd September 1968 and lasted for two seasons. The underlying plot of the show was that the characters needed to repair the Spindrift. Other characters included rich society girl Valerie Ames Scott, played by Deanna Lund and a Spindrift’s stewardess, played by Heather Young. Kurt Kasznar played lovable rogue Commander Alexander B. Fitzhugh. The show used giant props such as a giant stool or a giant camera (which was kept on display at Universal Studios for many years). These props needed to be constructed, moved and stored and this made production expensive. Throughout its run, the show maintained thought provoking storylines. Ostensibly it was an adventure series characterized by the almost constant battle for survival as the “little people” tried get by in a giant’s world. The problem was that the writers were inevitably drawn by the fascinating possibilities that were opened by the existence of a parallel Earth. What were the differences between the giant’s Earth and our Earth? What kind of society did they live in? Whereas Irwin Allen’s earlier tv creation Lost in Space had become more frivolous as each season went by, there seemed to be a determined effort to maintain some serious content and depth to Land of the the Giants.

In a show like this one, a tightrope is always being walked. On the one hand a show needs some glitz and action to maintain audience share especially amongst youngsters. Although this can achieve its aim in the short term it has the tendency to cheapen the whole project over time with each story needing to out-glitz the previous one, leading to falling off of appeal and the show’s eventual demise. On the other hand, keeping some integrity and keeping gimmicks and glitz under control will maintain a loyal, albeit limited, following. This approach may result in a slow audience build which is fine until the tv network and advertisers lose patience and pull the plug prematurely. This is what happened to Land of the Giants especially in view of the high production costs. Still. there are very few shows that have managed to walk this tightrope over a length of time. In this case, two seasons may seem short, but it was still a great achievement.