Science fiction/fantasy sculpturist Vincent Villafranca turned us on to Bigfoot and Wildboy the other day, and now we're obsessed with watching all the episodes on Youtube. It's just so wrong, from the Sean Cassidy-haired Wildboy to Bigfoot's penchant for leaping high up in the air so that his shaggy crotch occupies the dead center of the screen. THis is the reason our formative years were more like deformative years. The opening credits tell the story:

And here's Wildboy coming face to face with a sexy vampire who has a bunch of cave people in her thrall. I'm going to go out on a limb and say vampires were sexier in the 1970s:

And here he is, dealing with some space aliens, by screaming "BAYABAAA" and leaping in the air. Notice how every time he leaps in the air, it looks exactly the same? That's not because they reused the same footage of Bigfoot on a trampoline or anything — it's because Bigfoot is a gymnast, a finely tuned machine whose every leap is perfect.

Here's another great random snippet. "Suzy...Control box. Bigfoot...wait."

[Thanks Vincent! We think.]

The Los Angeles Times caught up this weekend with Phillip Paley, who played the caveboy Cha-Ka in all 43 episodes of the 1974-76 series. Paley earned the role thanks to a childhood spent learning gymnastics and karate; he studied under Chuck Norris and was a black belt by age nine. Today, he's 45 and working at a law firm in Santa Monica, and he tells the Times that, while he no longer has his Cha-Ka costume, he still has the dictionary of the Paku language created for the show that Cha-Ka and his people spoke. Years before Klingon appeared as a full-fledged language of its own in the 1980s in the Star Trek films and on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Land of the Lost hired a UCLA linguist to invent a complete language for Paley and his fellow Pakuni.

Series co-creator Marty Krofft, speaking to British magazine SFX in 1997, said the initial impulse to create an artificial language for the show came from the network, which, hoping to appease the FCC, wanted to ensure that the kids' show had a positive educational component. Sid and Marty Krofft hired linguist Victoria Fromkin to create the language.

In the same issue of SFX, Fromkin said that she developed the language to be revealed over time in the series, so that kids watching could learn new words every week the same way Will and Holly did in their attempts to understand Cha-Ka, by picking up the Paku vocabulary and grammar in context as Cha-Ka used them. (Unfortunately, Fromkin said, the episodes would frequently air out of sequence in reruns, spoiling her lesson plan.) "Since I did a lot of work on West African languages, particularly Akan, the major language of Ghana, Paku appears to be in the Kwa family of Bantu languages," she said. "Or at least if some linguist 2000 years from now would find excerpts of it, through reconstruction methods they would probably conclude that."

Not only was Paku the first artificial language created for a kid's show (according to Stephen Corley and Tim Cain's Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages), but it was also the first instance of a television show hiring a professional linguist to develop such a language. Fromkin went on to invent the far less extensive vampire language spoken in the 1998 film Blade.

Fromkin created a 200-word vocabulary for the Pakuni. A good chunk of which survives in this Pakuni-English dictionary reconstructed by LOTL fan Nels Olsen. So if you're watching the reruns again on SyFy, you can consult the list and learn not to confuse an aganka (iguana) with an agamba (dinosaur).

The new trailer gives a bit more of the movie's story, including the bizarre tachyon device that Will Ferrell builds to get himself to the garbage dump of the space-time continuum. You can watch it in absurdly high definition over at MovieFone.

One glance at this mini-episode from Land of the Lost will tell you everything you need to know about why Will Ferrell is in the remake.

By far my favorite Krofft show, even cooler than Doctor Shrinker and Wonderbug, was ElectraWoman and DynaGirl. They worked for a magazine by day, and donned cute outfits and fought crime by night. Hey, at least I grew up to work for a magazine-like thing, even if I don't always wear yellow tights. I cannot believe how utterly funktastic their theme song is. Do you think ElectraWoman and DynaGirl were superlovers?

What I find really interesting about these cut-down MySpace episodes is that they actually work in their new, shrunken, share-this-video-online format. Some 70s culture does seem to survive the upgrade to the web, even if it has to become even more short-attention-span to do it. Really, I don't mind losing the boring parts of these episodes. Now I've got the very best stuff, and I'm actually going to visit MySpace to check out future mini-episodes as they become available.

Sid and Marty Krofft on MySpace [via MySpace]

Instead of a family getting trapped in the dinosaur wasteland, it'll be a "disgraced paleontologist" (Ferrell), his assistant, and his macho sidekick (Danny McBride). In other words, it'll be more of the homoerotic two-guys comedy that Ferrell has excelled at lately. Brad Silberling (Casper) will direct. And the film will still have monkey people, dinosaurs and Sleestaks, but it'll be a spoof of the TV series rather than a remake. McBride says "massive sets" have been constructed for the film. [IGN]