He Was 'Grumpy' Long Before Land of the Lost: How Wah Chang's Dinosaurs Captured the Hearts of a Generation


 Written by Ken Hulsey

This morning I was going through more of my photos from the Monster Island News archive when I stumbled across this one of the puppet used for 'Grumpy' the Tyrannosaurus who menaced the Marshall family in the 70s Saturday morning science fiction series Land of the Lost. I believe that the image originally came from a 1998 Sid & Marty Krofft memorabilia auction when it was sold to a private collector.

Land of the Lost: Season 1 DVD - $39.99 @ Amazon.com

Interestingly enough, good old 'Grumpy' wasn't actually created for Land of the Lost at all. In fact, both the puppet and the full-sized stop-animation model seen in the series made their first appearance in a short educational film produced in 1970 entitled 'Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards.' In fact, most of the dinosaurs that ended up populating ' The Land of the Lost' were in the film also. These terrible lizards were created by sculptor and artist Wah Chang, who also created the flip-open communicator from the original Star Trek series, along with many other props and creature costumes, including the Gorn from Arena. The dinosaurs were animated by Doug Beswick, who later worked on animation for the original Star Wars Trilogy.

"I wonder why he's so grumpy?" - Holly Marshall

Check out Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards and look for some of your favorites from Land of the Lost:





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