Bomb, Will Ferrell, bomb...

The other week I posted about my remorse at a joke remake of the beloved childhood show that introduced me to my first pocket universe, and to a little blonde, knife-wielding dolly named "Holly" (who was my age when the show was on air and was maybe my first crush).

Written by some modern Sci Fi greats (and even Mr. Chekov got a writing cred), the show was years ahead of it's time (despite the cheesy FX).

Well, revenge is sweet. Unlike most of his mindless drek (I found Will funny on SNL, but not really anywhere else) movies, LOTL bombed big time. As of today, it has yet to scrape the 40 million mark. It cost 120 million to make. What can I say but "Ha ha ha ho ho ho hee hee hee."

The sad part is that now I am maybe not going to see a true homage to the great show in my lifetime. But who knows? After Ang Lee Hulk film bombed, they did another (somewhat better)one a few years later. So I will hold out hope. Maybe Dreamworks can come along and save this classic property.

Sticks & Stones

OK, it wasn’t my most played microgame of the late 70’s. That distinction probably went to Rivets. Hell, I think I only managed a couple of games with one of my buddies. It was a fun little game, with 10,000 BC dudes slugging it out with Mammoths, and each other, for supremacy of their area. You could choose for your session a hunting expedition, or maybe an attack on the opposing tribe across the valley. You could steal their goods, and their women. Good times, all played out in classic Microgame style.

I mainly mention the game because it inspired one of my many homebrew ideas to never reach fruition, namely, to do an entire campaign of my own design based on the time period. PC’s would be Cro-Magnon men, doing the type of thing Cro-Mags do. Just like in Sticks & Stones.

The system was a no-brainer. I would use a version of my Road Warrior rules, a set of rules I came up with for a short campaign that I ran in the early 80’s.

I think the thing that held me back and ultimately kept me from going ahead with a game was the fact that I could not decide between realism and fantasy. Should I do this straight, with no magic or fanciful creatures? Or maybe something close to it, but with perhaps with a touch of the supernatural. Shamans and perhaps solitary, primitive wizards came to mind. Maybe light touches of magic, or even a clerical or wizard type class players could play as.

I even considered a full on fantasy take, with dinosaurs alongside man, but supernatural monsters and demons, dragons and perhaps even Gods walking the earth. I even thought of having aliens in a spaceship get encountered at some point (The Barrier Peaks?). Yeah, obviously Land of the Lost had a lot of influence on me there, along with a certain amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Marvel comic Devil Dinosaur.

By the late 80’s, I was running plenty in my D&D world Acheron, and also putting in lot of GM duty with Champions and Call of Cthulhu. Really, with these three games going as successful campaigns that went from the 80’s and well into the 90’s, I just didn’t have time to introduce another game genre to my players. Hell, it had been hard enough to sell my regular D&D folk on Champs and CoC (which they loved once they experienced them).

With all the great shows on Discovery and History Channels in the last decade or so, and movies like the recent 10,000 B.C. (I actually liked it for what it was), I still get stirred to try to get a “Sticks and Stones” type role-playing game going now and again. But if my group plays anything else but D&D for a break, it’s probably going to be CoC or Champs again. But a GM can day dream, can’t he?

Land of the Lost (lostlostlostlost…)

This weekend I happened to spend a lot of time at home with the BBQ going on the back patio, and a Sam Adams in my hand. Enjoying some rays, drinking a few ales, and burning some meat and veg on the grill is the perfect Memorial Day for me.

But a certain marathon on the Sci Fi channel kept me running into the back workshop to tune in the TV. What had me so interested? A little show I grew up with called Land of the Lost. In honor of the movie the network had a non-stop marathon of the old show on, and it brought back some great memories.

I grew up with this show. In fact, outside of comic books this was the first piece of “speculative fiction” that I geeked out on. I was only about 10 years old, and I read comics for the wild super-combat, not for any philosophy or rationalizing about time travel and alternate universes. Those concepts would come to obsess the comic book geek teen I would later become. But LOTL instilled in me the first love of weird places, creatures, and worlds. It was for sure my very first pocket universe.

Watching with adult eyes, I was struck at the adult nature things in the show. I didn’t know this as a child, but a variety of great science fiction writers, including Star Trek’s David Gerrold, and Sci Fi icon Larry Niven, brought along some real weight and meaning to the magical goings-on of the chaotic land filled with dinosaurs, aliens, and powerful cosmic, inter-dimensional energies.

This show was no doubt a great influence on the gaming I would get into in the couple of years to come. It really prepared me for my early “anything goes” nature of my game environs (only Dave Hargrave would be a bigger influence of the weird and out of place). I do remember using pylons as gateways and time travel devices in some of my earliest scenarios (I placed a couple on the Isle of Dread). I haven’t used them in decades, but after getting inspired by the show…

I was also struck by the intense drama of the show. Sid and Mary Kroft’s earlier shows, HR Puffenstuff and Lidsville would feature young kids lost in a mad pocket world, but LOTL really pumped it up a notch with constant danger. I mean, every time the kids went out to get water or firewood they had to contend with a pissed-off T. Rex lovingly nicknamed “Grumpy.” And I still kind of get chills when I see the boulder near the Lost City with “Beware of Sleestak” painted on it. Those friggin’ lizards won’t just eat you, but will even go so far as to lure kids into traps with visions of their dead mothers. Bastards.

And I’ll admit it, Holly was my first TV crush. She was just a little older than me, and carried a knife. She lived in a world filled with dinosaurs and various monsters, and got out of every situation alive and well. You know that if she never got out, that girl grew up into an Amazonian badass with dino-armor and a huge sword.

For the third and fourth season they had dad make it home and his brother show up to help the kids. Pretty convoluted. Plus I remember being sad thinking about the dad at home worrying about his kids still being in that closed-off nightmare realm. You know he must have turned to drink, staggering around the grand canyon looking for an entrance to that world so he could find his kids.

So they made a big budget movie out of it. Sounds like a no-brainer. A capable, ranger-like dad, and a brother and sister who constantly bicker, but are always at each other’s side with the save when danger looms. But no, sadly, they have raped the material (sometimes I hate you, Hollywood) for the sake of Will Farrell’s cheap humor. Holly has been made into an older, non-related research assistant for the sake of sexual humor (har har), and Will has been turned into a fat, crude trail guide ( ha ha). And Rick Marshall, as played by Farrell, is an incompetent Paleontologist (har dee har har). It’s hard not to think of what a great movie it could have been if done with some seriousness, but I guess I should not dwell on what might have been in Hollywood. That could drive ya crazy.