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panopticist: Bill Laimbeer Was a Sleestak: "Bill Laimbeer Was a Sleestak
No, seriously: Bill Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy '70s show Land of the Lost, a program that terrorized a generation of young kids on Saturday mornings. I discovered the Laimbeer connection on my own a couple of years ago, when I watched a two-episode LotL videotape I had bought during a bout of nostalgia. This obscure bit of trivia is, I admit, probably only of interest to North Americans born between about 1963 and 1973 who remember the nightmares caused by those hissing, rubber-suited monsters."
4 comments:
Nightmares wouldn't actually describe what the sleestaks inspired in me. Chuckles was more like it...back ca. 1972 when I watched the series at an appropriate age. Saw some on dvd at a coffeehouse a few months back and was impressed by some of the worst acting and effects I'd ever seen in a theoretically professional context, and I've looked at a number of serials and Ed Wood/Phil Tucker/Arthur C. Pierce extavaganzas over the years.
Despite the limitations of a budget lower than Paris Hilton's IQ, the show had some clever and surprisingly sophisticated plots. Perhaps not so surprising, however, when you look at some of the writers: Larry Niven, David Gerrold, Norman Spinrad, and Theodore Sturgeon.
Will the persecution never end? That aside, I remember seeing the names of some of those writers in the credits when I watched the show with my kids.
Sadly, Anon., those weren't the episodes I saw at the coffeehouse. But there had to be a reason I remembered enjoying the show (aside from the bad fx and juxtapositions of dinosaurs and Lucy-like hominids, along with sleestaks and teleportation devices)(wonder how much DR. WHO had to do in the inspiration of the series, however transformed). Niven's Hollywood career seems to have peaked on early-'70s Sat Morns, what with this and the STAR TREK cartoon...
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