When you were a kid, did you ever go digging around in your backyard looking for dinosaur fossils? And even if you didn’t, haven’t you kind of always dreamed of owning dinosaur fossils anyway? Well, good news! Bonhams Auction House in NYC is selling artifacts from the Ice Age. Listen to the descriptions of some of these prehistoric pieces:

Exceptional, Very Large T. rex Tooth – An Unsurpassed Marvel

Superb Whip Scorpion in Dominican Amber

Giant Squid Beak, with Four Sucker Rings

Tyrannosaurus rex Vertebra

Don’t you feel like every one of those descriptions should be punctuated with six exclamation marks? (T. Rex Tooth!!!!!!) (Four Sucker Rings!!!!!!)

I got so hopped up planning to buy one of these fossils and recover some DNA and build my own theme park on a deserted island — because what could go wrong with that plan? — that I made a list of the best fictional dinosaurs.

Dino, The Flintstones — You might be tempted to call Dino a “brontosaurus,” but first of all, brontosaurues (brontosairi?) aren’t even reals dinosaurs. Apparently there was some mix-up when two paleontologists were racing each other to put bones together back in the day. And second of all, Dino is a Snorkasaurus. He’s better behaved than any pet you’ve ever had, and for a time, he even served as Fred and Wilma’s butler!

Littlefoot, The Land Before Time — You think it’s sad when Bambi’s mom gets shot? How about when Sharptooth sneaks up on Littlefoot and the gang and forces him to flee and leave his treestar behind? It was the last gift his mother gave him! But Littlefoot presses on and leads his friends to their new home. “Oh, you can’t quit now. What if the Great Valley’s just over the top of these rocks?” Oh, Littlefoot! You are our hope for the future!

Rex, Toy Story — Wallace Shawn’s Tyrannosaurus Rex with an inferiority complex is one of the greatest dinosaur ironies ever committed to film. “What if Andy gets another dinosaur? A mean one? I just don’t think I can take that kind of rejection!” And the poor guy is so pathetic that he actually yarfs when he sees Buzz Lightyear’s dismembered arm. Oh, and don’t forget: He’s not from Matel, he’s from a smaller company that was purchased by Mattel in a leveraged buyout.

Tyrannosaurus Rex, Meet the Robinsons — I like to think of Meet the Robinsons as Disney’s promise to stop sucking. After the Golden Age, the Mouse made some seriously mediocre movies (Home on the Range? Really?), but Robinsons was a fine return to Disney form. Besides Bowler Hat Guy, the best part of the film is the 15 seconds  T-Rex is on-screen with my favorite dino dialogue ever. “Why aren’t you seizing the boy?” Bowler Hat Guy demands. ” I have a big head and little arms!” T-Rex answers.

Velociraptor, Jurassic Park — “Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this ’six foot turkey’ as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex — he’ll lose you if you don’t move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that’s when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side.” Yeah. That sounds like a lot of fun. Let’s go to that theme park, Dad!

Godzilla — At the end of 1954’s Godzilla (Gojira), Kyohei Yamane-hakase says, “I can’t believe that Godzilla was the only surviving member of its species. But if we continue conducting nuclear tests, it’s possible that another Godzilla might appear somewhere in the world again.” He was right! In fact, Godzilla has appeared in 30 films since then! Plus he’s got his comic book line, his video games, his full-length novels. At this rate, the only thing that can break Godzilla’s stride is another freak Ice Age.

The dinosaurs from Dinosaurs — Conceived by Jim Henson, Dinosaurs was the best thing to happen to ABC in the early ’90s (besides Lois and Clark, of course). The sitcom is ludicrously camp, with a little bit of subversive humor on the side. Earl pushes down trees for Wesayso Corp, and since the show is set in 60,000,003 BC, Robbie always wants to know what they’re counting down to. You’re counting down the to the birth of a religion that will one day oppose the idea that 60,000,003 BC (or you) even existed, little dinosaur.

Dopey, Land of the Lost (the TV series) — I’m pretty sure all of the dinos on Land of the Lost were named after the dwarves from Snow White. The T-Rex, who is constantly trying to eat The Marshalls, is called “Grumpy.” And the young brontosaurus, who became their family pet and cart puller, is called “Dopey.” I think the lesson here is: always trust the vegetarian.

Yoshi, Mario Bros. — After playing Super Mario World on Super Nintendo, it’s hard to remember a time when Mario or Luigi got along without Yoshi. He is a shield against Koopa Troopas. He makes the cape easier to use. He can throw turtles and flames, and fly like a superhero when eats a purple shell! Every Mario game is made better by him, and Yoshi on the mach bike on Mario Kart is just absolutely unbeatable.

Barney and Friends — He loves you. You love me. We’re a happy family. Despite the ardent protests of my six-year-old pseudo-nephew, Barney is a dinosaur. And he’s so mesmerizing with his clomping around and dancing and really weird voice that you can pop in a DVD and sit your kids in front of him and get an entire hour of peace — as long as you can stomach his singing voice.

What dinosaurs did I miss?

There still hasn’t ever been anything quite like Land of the Lost.

A live-action Saturday morning kids’ show in the 1970s, Lost was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, the creators of H.R. Pufnstuf and Sigmund and Sea Monsters, but it couldn’t have been more different. Using a combination of stop-motion animation and men in rubber costumes, it told the story of a family trapped in a mysterious land of dinosaurs and curiously slow-moving reptilian humanoids called Sleestack.

Since its original run from 1974 to 1976, the show’s cult status has risen steadily — mostly because all of the show’s fans have grown up remembering it so fondly. By today’s standards, the special effects look ridiculous (which, frankly, is part of the show’s enduring appeal). But there’s also no denying that some of the stories it told were surprisingly sophisticated.

And did I mention the Sleestak?

Recently, I had a chance to chat with the former star of the show, Wesley Eure, who played the teenage son, Will (due to his status as an emerging teen heartthrob, he was billed simply as “Wesley” for two years of the show’s run).

After the show ended, Eure went onto a successful career as an actor (with a long stint on the soap opera Days of Our Lives), game show host (of Nickelodeon’s Finders Keepers), producer (of the PBS show Dragon Tales), and children’s book author (his book The Red Wings of Christmas was almost turned into an animated Disney movie in the 1990s).

But with the big screen adaptation of Land of the Lost opening this Friday, what everyone wants to talk to Wesley about this week is, of course, his time on that classic show.

And sure enough, he has some pretty interesting stories to tell — including some about, yes, the Sleestak.

TheTorchOnline: So you’ve seen the new movie, what did you think?

WE: You know what? It’s Will Ferrell at his best. If you’re expecting the drama of the Marshall Family, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re expecting a slapstick, funny, comedy with Will Ferrell, you’ll be delighted.

TTO: Does it capture any essence of the show, do you think?

WE: Yeah, they kept the Sleestak exactly the same, except for their teeth, which are amazing in this movie. They move just as slow. [laughs] They kept Enik. There’s a lot of references. They call the dinosaur you see in the trailers Grumpy.

TTO: Do they have the flyswatter?

WE: [laughs] No. But Cha-Ka is very funny, very bawdy. Cha-Ka’s very sexual in it. It’s a hoot. Danny McBride, who plays the part I did — of course, nobody is playing the parts we did. Marshall, Will, and Holly are not brother, sister, and father. Will Ferrell plays an anthropologist, well, a quantum paleontologist is what he is. Holly is a girl from England, played by Anna Friel from Pushing Up Daisies, and is a big fan of his research. Will, the character I played, is a stoner out in the desert who has this amusement ride that goes through this cheesy underground drainage ditch that they created. All hell breaks loose, and they enter the Land of the Lost.

Land of the Lost has been with Disney for years. I think they went through four or five scripts, tons of writers, it was optioned off and on. It took someone with star power like Will to get this pulled off. And the only way it would work was, they looked at it and said, “It’s like the three stooges.” They tweaked it.

TTO: I hear you had a cameo that was cut.

WE: We did. We did a cameo with Will at La Brea Tar Pits, Kathy [Coleman], who played Holly, and I.

TTO: Why was it cut?

WE: They changed the entire ending. They spent weeks and weeks and millions of dollars filming at the La Brea Tar Pits, then they cut it all. It just wasn’t working. They cut all of that. I was part of the ending. Then they reshot a scene with Matt Lauer, which is great. That scene is really funny. Matt Lauer is just terrific in this movie.

TTO: When did you learn the cameo had been cut?

WE: At the TV Land Awards a couple of weeks ago.

TTO: Were you disappointed?

WE: I was furious! [laughs] It was like, “How could you do that?” Put us in the credits or something! Do something silly, you know?

TTO: You could always say you were a Sleestak.

WE: That was exactly the original intention! During the credits they were going to have people taking Sleestak heads off and they were going to have the biggest stars in Hollywood, from Mel Gibson to Tom Cruise to whoever they could get. I was going to be one of the Sleestak. But they had to reshoot the movie, so they spent so much money doing that, I think they ran out of time and money to do it.

But I was very disappointed that we’re not in it. It was very odd. It was odd being on the red carpet the other night at Grauman’s Chinese [for the premiere]. To do all that with them was sort of an odd feeling because it was like being at the party, but not being part of the party. [laughs] I had to give my photo ID to get my ticket.

TTO: Did you ever think at the time that this thing would still be remembered all these years later?

WE: I was saying at the after-party for [the new movie], which was above the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. I was with Philip Paley who played Cha-Ka, and we were looking at all these props from the movie. There were I don’t know how many thousands of people there, with buffets and the band playing, and the celebrities: Brooke Shields, Randy Jackson, Bruce Vilanch. I looked around and I said, “Do you believe that our little show was the spark of something like this?” We were just standing there thinking, “This is so odd!” Wonderful, but odd. We were just commiserating and thinking, “Hmm, why aren’t we part of this?”

TTO: On one hand, you are the reason it exists, but on the other it’s completely outside you. I can only imagine how surreal that must have been.

WE: It was very surreal. Some of the props, like the raft, looked very much like the old show. Anna Friel’s outfit is red and plaid, just like Holly wore. They kept the exact same colors for the outfits. There are a lot of nods to the old series. It’s certainly not based on the old series, but there’s Enik, who is a main character, and The Zarn, which was a villain in ours, and the Sleestak, Grumpy, Cha-Ka, all those things are part of it. They kept the Pakuni language, which was written by this linguist, this woman from UCLA. What Cha-Ka spoke was actually a real, created language. It had a vernacular and everything. You can actually go online and look up the language.

They do a great job in the movie. The guy that played Cha-Ka is terrific. He’s a Saturday Night Live guy.

TTO: I watched a couple of the episodes last night, and it was surreal even for me how indelible they were since I hadn’t seen them since 1974. I was also struck by how clever some of it was, the whole mythology of the Sleestak, and the whole land, but also how incredible cheesy the special effects were.

WE: Star Trek writers, David Gerald, he wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the old classic. David’s one of the top sci-fi writers in the world. In the first year, he was one of the head writers. There were a lot of Star Trek writers, so some of the scripts were absolutely fabulous. Some were pretty stupid. I loved them the more complicated they got.

You have to remember that this is 1973. I had a knife that I carried, but I was never allowed to point it, because the rules for kid’s programming then. The Sleestak didn’t move very fast because they couldn’t be that threatening. There could be no violence. Nobody could get hurt. Nobody could really threatened somebody. But I remember watching the opening, I remember the day we shot it, we were sitting in the rubber raft and they said, “Ok, jerk your head back like you’re falling.” It almost looked like a Tidy Bowl with the blue water going down.

At the time, we had the largest Chromakey, which is the blue screen or green screen, whichever, but an entire soundstage wall painted. It was the largest ever in Hollywood. And the stop-frame animation, which took them eight hours to do sixty seconds, and the reason it didn’t make our first season was the cost. It was so expensive.

Today, they could just whip them up on the computer, and it would cost them nothing to do all that animation. But back then, everything was so complicated, and it had never been done. Actually, when we were on the show, we’d be in front of the green screen, and they’d do the animation, and because it was on TV, they could play it back and we could actually see everything. When we were on the green screen, we’d just point to a light up on the rafter and say, “That’s where Grumpy’s head is. Now, look at that and run the other way.” That’s how we did it.

TTO: The scenes when you’re crossing the bridge over the chasm, that’s all green screen?

WE: All green screen. They would place a riser and paint it blue, because blue disappears, and we would walk up the riser. We’d be all lined up on the animation to look like we were walking across the bridge. Which is exactly what they did in the movie. It’s the same technology, just a little bit better.

TTO: Did we ever see the Sleestak god? Or was that just always in the pit?

WE: No, you never saw him.

TTO: I didn’t know before this interview that you sang the theme song to the show… “Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition…” Did they ever release it?

WE: No, but I used to go over to the Osmond’s house. The Osmond’s had a studio across from the Mormon Temple in Los Angeles, and we’d record these little ditties and it was fun. Bobby Sherman would record stuff with me.

TTO: Did you sing the theme to the show in your act ever?

WE: No, I didn’t. [laughs] What was fun was Will sings it in the movie, and when I met him on set of the movie, he came over and said, “I just learned to play the banjo and I sang the song.”

TTO: You don’t have to answer this, but I’m curious if you get royalties from the show.

WE: No, not at all. Back then, in the 70s on the morning kids’ shows, there was no royalties, at least for the first two seasons. By the third season, I think the royalties clicked in, so the Krofft’s never aired the third season until the marathon started.

TTO: Uh! Well, what are you gonna do? But I hear that at least a lot of people are contacting you via your website.

WE: I just put it up a couple of weeks ago. Because the movie was coming out, I had so many people were asking me what was going on, so I said, “I need to put something out there that has my voice.”

TTO: And you’ve already heard from a lot of people, I can imagine.

WE: Oh my gosh. The marathon was on last Monday, Memorial Day weekend, on SciFi. They had a 17-hour non-stop marathon of Land of the Lost. As a matter of fact, they’re doing it again on the 6th, I believe.

TTO: It’s all day Thursday and Friday this week.

WE: Oh really? I woke up at nine in the morning, and it had been on in New York time for several hours, and I decided to put a counter up on the website that morning. By the time the marathon ended, I had 11,500 hits.

Visit Wesley online.

Read more of my interview with Welsey Eure at AfterElton.com (including his publicly coming out for the first time as a gay man).

And if you’re interested in buying previous episodes of Land of the Lost (or any other media), support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing them through this link.

Sleestak are, of course, the curiously slow-moving reptilian humanoid inhabitants of the lost dimension where Rick Marshall and his children Will and Holly found themselves trapped in the 1970s Saturday morning children’s show Land of the Lost (now adapted as a feature film starring Will Farrell, opening this Friday).

But who are they? Where did they come from?

The Sleekstak actually descended from a much more advanced race, the Altrusians, who were also trapped in the Land of the Lost, but whose civilization fell a millennium prior to the Marshall’s arrival. The Altrusians built the Lost City, the vast complex of surprisingly similar-looking underground tunnels in which the Sleestak now reside. The Altrusians looked similar to Sleestak, except they were yellow, not green, and possessed an extra finger on each hand; the Altrusians also wore clothing.

Two different theories exist to explain the transformation of the thoughtful, if emotionless Altrusians into the evil, unspeaking Sleestak:

• According to Enik, a time-traveling survivor of the Altrusian civilization, the species fell due to their inability to contain their hate and anger.

• But according to Land of the Lost’s resident know-it-all Rick Marshall, it wasn’t the Altrusian’s hate and anger that led to their turning into Sleestak, but rather their absence of compassion.

See? Two completely different theories.

The Sleestak enjoy sacrificing the Land of the Lost’s semi-frequent human visitors to their mysterious god, a beast of some sort that lives in a pit filled with what looks to be dry ice. But the Sleestak are not mere animals themselves; they have a system of government that includes both a Sleestak council and an overall leader — which is pretty impressive given not just that they are incapable of speech, but that they seem to have difficulty even moving their mouths.

Sleestak also wield crude weapons such as nets and crossbows, though their aim usually leaves something seriously to be desired.

According to the Library of Skulls, a collection of talking part-Atrusian heads located in the Lost City, the Sleestak currently number about 7000, though they are rarely seen in numbers greater than three. Explanations vary as to why this is, though one outlandish theory posits that the Sleestak are actually human actors in costumes, and only three such costumes existed at the time the television series was filmed.

While Sleestak are a violent, angry race, they are, in many ways, as much victims of the Land of the Lost as are its human visitors. For example, they aren’t just nocturnal; they seem to be caused physical pain by the harsh Land of the Lost sun and rarely, if ever, venture beyond the chasm that separates the Lost City from the rest of the Land.

How a colony of 7000 subsists in an underground cavern with no obvious food source is unknown, but it’s possible that Sleestak eat rocks.

There is no explanation as to why the Sleestak are so curiously slow-moving, capable of being out-run even by a young girl, although a combination of an inner ear imbalance and a species-wide prevalence of early-onset osteoporosis is thought to be one explanation.

What can fantasy enthusiasts expect to see on movie screens this summer? Quite a few “fantasy-eque” films and lots of “fantasy comedies” — and not nearly enough genuine fantasy.

Still, here are the ones that might be worth checking out, along with a thought or two from TheTorchOnline.com’s frighteningly wise resident Oracle:

May 15: Angels & Demons

Why It’s Fantasy: Ancient, secret societies, palace intrigue, and riddles galore.

The Oracle Says: It’s the same writer and director as the disappointing The Da Vinci Code, which doesn’t bode well. Then again, that writer is an Oscar-winner (for A Beautiful Mind) and that director is Ron Howard. Maybe the second time is the charm. The Oracle thinks the source material is better.


May 22: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Why It’s Fantasy: In this sequel to the 2006 hit Night at the Museum,  Ben Stiller goes to the Smithsonian … and the largest museum in the world comes alive.

The Oracle Says: This has “more is better” written all over it. Does that ever work? The movie is chock full of cameo actors who display varying degrees of hamminess, from Amy Adams (as Amelia Earhart) to Jonah Hill, Christopher Guest, Ricky Gervais, Bill Hader, Hank Azaria, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, and Robin Williams. Still, if they all manage to get at least one laugh apiece, that’s more than most comedies these days. And having James Earl Jones return to play the voice of Darth Vadar (on display in the Smithsonian) was brilliant.


June 12th: Imagine That

Why It’s Fantasy: A man with no confidence finds the answers to his problems when he enters his daughter’s imaginary world.

The Oracle Says: For years now, Eddie Murphy has been alternating between respectable supporting turns in quality films and embarrassing, over-the-top performances in horrible, high-concept disasters. But early indications are that this movie may be neither: just a modest, mainstream diversion.


June 19th: $9.99

Why It’s Fantasy: A stop-motion film about a man who pays $9.99 for a book that contains the meaning of life — then tries to share it with his neighbors who all already have their own definitions of happiness.

The Oracle Says: This Australian charmer is an unassuming little hobbit going up against the snarling hoard of unstoppable Hollywood summer behemoths. Can it possibly prevail? Then again, we know how that story turned out in The Lord of the Rings, don’t we?

June 19th: Year One

Why It’s Fantasy: Jack Black stars in this comedy about two hunter-gatherers who refuse to hunt-and-gather. Expelled from the tribe, they go an “epic,” allegedly hilarious quest through the ancient world.