Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: "Wild Thing" (October 12, 1991)

In “Wild Thing,” the sixth episode of the 1991-1992 Land of the Lost remake, the baby dinosaur Tasha begins to unwittingly make trouble for the Porters.  

She is loud at night, and keeps waking up the family.  Then, Tasha accidentally knocks over the shower stall that Mr. Porter has laboriously constructed.

Feeling that he has little choice, Porter orders Annie to send Tasha away to live in the wild.  

“No matter how sweet she is, she’s still an animal,” he notes.

Meanwhile, however, Shung and the Sleestak are looking for a way to gain possession of the Porters’ chariot, and set a trap in the woods for the now-on-her-own Tasha. 

 Fortunately, a brontosaurus Tasha has befriended comes to her aid…

In the original Land of the Lost (1974 – 1977), patriarch Rick Marshall had the presence of mind, foresight, and flat-out good sense to tell his daughter Holly that she could not keep the baby brontosaur Dopey as a pet.  It was hard to let the dinosaur go, but Marshall spared Holly a lot of pain by laying down the law early.  By refusing to let her take the dinosaur as a pet, Marshall prevented a world of problems.

Mr. Porter in the remake of Land of the Lost could learn a lot from Rick.

Here -- several episodes after Annie and the family have “adopted” Tasha -- he decides that she would be better off living in a pen, and then, finally, that she should live in the wild.  In the end, however, he must bring the young dinosaur home again, to Annie, Tasha (and the audience’s) relief.    But what lesson does he teach his child?  That parents can be capricious, cruel, and foolish?

In other words, the whole episode represents an unnecessary exercise.  Porter puts his daughter and Tasha through an emotional nightmare just to end with the original status quo.

It’s weird, but Mr. Porter is uncharacteristically mean and short-sighted in “Wild Thing,” and he also waffles a lot.  First, he tries to get rid of Tasha, but then -- when he sees she could get hurt in the wild -- welcomes her back.  Certainly, if Mr. Porter was advocating for releasing the dinosaur into the jungle, he must have realized that she might get hurt.  How could he have not considered that fact in the first place?

I know I’m not being particularly nice about this episode of Land of the Lost, but the whole story bothered me.  You don’t get rid of a pet -- let alone a family member -- just because keeping them around becomes inconvenient. 

In my house right now, we have three geriatric cats that we love, and one of them is having a problem urinating on carpets.  But she’s part of the family and has been since 1999.  We’re working to solve the problem…but we would never dream of getting rid of her.  Alas, there are many people who do treat pets the way Mr. Porter does in "Wild Thing."  Pets are wonderful...until they do something people don’t like.  I used to know someone who, when they didn’t like a cat, would drive the animal to “the farm.”  The “farm” was actually a euphemism for dropping off the animal alone in the country.

Anyway, “Wild Thing” smacks of that kind of thinking to me.  It doesn’t seem realistic or true to what we know of Mr. Porter’s character that he would suddenly decide to get rid of Tasha, especially given the fact that Scarface is nearby (and in fact, murdered Tasha’s mother and the rest of her litter). 

Secondly, it’s abundantly clear from the get-go that getting rid of Tasha is wrong, so the whole episode feels like an unnecessary exercise in futility, as we wait for Mr. Porter to come to the pre-ordained conclusion that he was wrong in the first place.  Again, he only makes Annie and Tasha suffer here, and does no real good.

Once again, this episode seems like another situation where the writing and characterization on the original Land of the Lost is a lot stronger than it is on the 1990s follow-up.

Next week: “Day for Knight.”