Remembering land of the giants Models

Science fiction has always been an inspirational genre. Great Sci-Fi movies and television series captured our imagination. So many of us can look back at Star Trek or Star Wars or Lost in Space as landmarks in our childhood. Some people wanted to be Captain Kirk. Others wanted to blow up the Death Star. And everyone wanted a Robot for a friend. But for me, the one series that really excited me when I was 5 years old was Land of the Giants. They had giant monsters. And giant people. And a cool spaceship.

I was in kindegarden when the show debuted. In school each week, we would receive a little 4 page picture magazine called The Weekly Reader. The cover would feature Zip the dog and Nip the cat each week, along with interesting picture news to inspire the minds of a 5 or 6 year old kid. I even named my cat Nippy after the feline in the magazine.

Thanks to the Weekly Reader, I learned about new television shows. I remember reading about Sesame Street, and more importantly, that amazing show called Land of the Giants. I recalled a photo from the show being featured in The Weekly Reader, and something about Land of the Giants excited me. The program aired on Sunday nights, and Sunday was when we always had dinner at my great grandparent’s house and watched Ed Sullivan. I must have been pretty insistant, as we ended up watching the first episode of the program instead.

My earliest memories of the show are fragments… the eyes of a giant as he looked through the cockpit window… a giant cat… and a giant human trapped in quicksand. I was very impressed that the lead character was named “Steve.” I remembered an episode with a giant gun and a magician. It seemed the crew and passingers of the Spindrift were always being captured or caged. Often they were in danger of being crushed or disected. And then there was the Snake.

DC Comics frequently featured advirtisements for Aurora model kits. In 1968, they featured this exciting image of a giant snake menacing the crew of the Spindrift. I wanted that kit. I had to have that kit. Who didn’t want that kit? The amusing thing is that the show never featured a giant snake.

Eventually I got the model! It was molded in a deep, shiny green plastic. I remember my build up being a bit of an unpainted glue bomb. I tried repainting it a few years later, but the model pretty much fell apart on me. Except Betty. She was embedded in a puddle of model glue on the base. I know I had the snake’s head in my parts box for years. It might still be there!

Aurora also did a kit of the Spindrift, which looked pretty good at the time. It featured a couple figures and a detailed interior. When Aurora reissued several science fiction kits in the mid-seventies, they included slightly revised version of the Spindrift, but the Snake was nowhere to be seen.

Thirty years later, Polar Lights resurected the Land of the Giants Snake diorama and the Spindrift. The original molds had disappeared long ago after Aurora was sold off to Monogram. Monogram destroyed a large number of old Aurora toolings as they felt they had no commercial value. Polar Lights recreated the molds of both these classic kits, along with other Aurora models from Lost in Space. They also brought us reissues of the Aurora monsters, the 1966 Batmobile, the Green Hornet’s Black Beauty, and more.

Land of the Giants lives on, thanks to DVDs and reruns on MeTV. It was great to be a kid 50 years ago. And some of us are still kids at heart.