Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Land of the Lost (1991 - 1992): "Make My Day" (November 14, 1992)

In “Make My Day,” Kevin goes around with a water pistol shooting Tasha and Stink.

Meanwhile, Tasha is teething, and chewing up Mr. Porter’s shoes in hopes of diminishing the pain.

After Kevin is attacked by the Sleestaks, he learns that Stink has discovered an ancient but highly-advanced gun in nearby ruins. It’s no ordinary gun, either, but a “light gun.”

Dressing up in a camouflage head-band and sun-glasses, Kevin decides to confront the Sleestak with the highly-advanced weapon.

But Shung wants the weapon for himself…

With only a handful of episodes remaining in its run, the remake of Land of the Lost (1991 – 1992) begins its final descent from mediocrity into downright rottenness. Although this episode is still better than the segment I’ll feature next week (“Cheers”), it is almost uniformly dreadful.

Here, Kevin finds a highly advanced Sleestak hand-gun that even the Sleestaks don’t recognize as being representative of their technology. They act like they’ve never seen it, even though Kevin observes the gun has Sleestak writing on it.

Then -- angry because the Sleestak are stronger than he is -- Kevin suits up for battle with the lizard people, and shoots the ground around them…making them dance.

At this juncture, Stink notes that “Sleestak have no rhythm,” a low-point for the Paku character.

Kevin has had so many low-points in the series, but “Make My Day” provides him with several more.  He spends the episode quoting dirty Harry (“Go ahead Sleestaks, make my day…”) and comes across as borderline psychotic as he notes that he “owns the jungle.” 

Porter is creepy as all get-out in this episode and all I can say is…we need to talk about Kevin…he needs an intervention (as “Cheers” also makes plain).

But here’s the really disturbing thing about this episode: “Make My Day” seeks to wring comedy out of its pretty frightening premise -- that a teenager finds and starts using a discarded gun.

Sadly, this premise doesn’t even work in terms of series continuity.  Where does Kevin get khakis, sun-glasses, head-bands and the like? 

And where does he find enough of that gear to outfit Stink as well?

Furthermore, why don’t the Sleestaks recognize their own technology?  And where did these ruins come from?  We’ve never seen them before in the series, but nobody comments about them in the body of the episode.

Next week: scraping the bottom of the Land of the Lost barrel with “Cheers.”