Land of the Giants: Difference between revisions

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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* [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever]]: The premise of the show of course required ignoring the [[Square-Cube Law]].
* [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever]]: The premise of the show of course required ignoring the [[Square-Cube Law]].
* [[Con Artist]]: Alexander Fitzhugh.
* [[Con Artist]]: Alexander Fitzhugh.
* [[Continuity Drift]]: In the first few episodes, the heroes are completely unable to understand the giants (one episode features a giant putting them in a jar hooked up to a complicated listening device so he can communicate with them). The writers quickly realized how much this limited the kind of stories they could tell, and changed the giants to be perfectly understandable with no explanation. [[Hand Wave|This is the kind of thing you could get away with back then.]]
* [[Continuity Drift]]: In the first few episodes, the heroes are completely unable to understand the giants (one episode features a giant putting them in a jar hooked up to a complicated listening device so he can communicate with them). The writers quickly realized how much this limited the kind of stories they could tell, and changed the giants to be perfectly understandable with no explanation. [[MST3K Mantra|This is the kind of thing you could get away with back then.]]
* [[Expy]]: Fitzhugh is an attempt to replicate Zachary Smith, the [[Breakout Character]] from Allen's previous series ''[[Lost in Space]]''.
* [[Expy]]: Fitzhugh is an attempt to replicate Zachary Smith, the [[Breakout Character]] from Allen's previous series ''[[Lost in Space]]''.
* [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]]: The travelers are from [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]], but the giants' world resembled... modern-day America.
* [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]]: The travelers are from [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]], but the giants' world resembled... modern-day America.

Revision as of 20:00, 27 November 2020

Land of the Giants is a late 1960s Irwin Allen science fiction TV series that can be summarized as the inverse of both Gulliver's Travels[1] and The Incredible Shrinking Man. A commercial spaceship gets into a freak storm and is transported to a world where the people on that world are all forty feet tall, a skyscraper is two miles high, and when they're found out, the government wants them for scientific research.

You have the pilot, the co-pilot, the pretty but serious stewardess, the pretty but serious junior stewardess, the Con Man, the little boy and his dog.

This crew must make their way in a world where fatal hazards abound; a tarantula is the size of a wolf, a kitchen table requires mountain climbing gear (string and a giant safety pin) and making a phone call means using a phone the size of a wardrobe closet.

Not only that, the equivalent of Inspector Norse to them as six Richard Kimbles, with the government offering a substantial reward for the capture of any of the little people as they are called. They end up on a series of adventures, often helping people out of jams that they get into.


Tropes used in Land of the Giants include:
  1. Gulliver did travel to a land of giants called Brobdingnag in his second voyage; however, Popcultural Osmosis rarely mentions any parts of the book other than Lilliput.