Land of the Giants

From the prolific master of US televisual sci-fi, Irwin Allen, came Land of the Giants (1968–70), a bold, big-budget adventure that remains a cult curiosity, if now showing its age. Allen, whose previous works included Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, continued his penchant for high-concept fantasy with this tale of a sub-orbital commercial flight gone disastrously awry.

The series begins with the rocketship Spindrift—a sleek, futuristic craft that wouldn’t look out of place in Thunderbirds—which, during a routine flight, enters a mysterious space-warp and crash-lands on a strange planet. This new world looks oddly like Earth, save for one small detail: its inhabitants are twelve times the size of normal human beings. What follows is essentially a survival drama, with the ship’s crew and passengers—Capt Steve Burton (Gary Conway), Dan Erikson (Don Marshall), the ever-resourceful engineer Mark Wilson (Don Matheson), young Barry Lockridge (Stefan Arngrim), heiress Valerie Scott (Deanna Lund), and stewardess Betty Hamilton (Heather Young)—desperately evading detection and capture by these towering foes.

The setup borrows heavily from Gulliver’s Travels, just as Lost in Space lifted from Swiss Family Robinson, and the nods to classic literature give Land of the Giants a veneer of the allegorical. Like its predecessor, it also features a scheming antagonist within the group: Commander Alexander Fitzhugh (Kurt Kasznar), a cowardly blowhard whose antics cause as much trouble as the giants themselves.

Despite its imaginative premise, what truly set Land of the Giants apart at the time was its production scale. At $250,000 per episode, it was the most expensive television series of its day. Elaborate props—giant pencils, oversized syringes, enormous telephones—and clever trick photography created a convincingly perilous world for the human-sized protagonists. The visual ingenuity is admirable, even if the effect now feels quaint to modern eyes raised on CGI.

That said, the storytelling could be formulaic. Episodes often followed a familiar rhythm: the group explores, is discovered, escapes—repeat. And while there were occasional attempts at social commentary, they rarely delved deeper than surface-level adventure.

Still, for fans of vintage sci-fi, Land of the Giants offers a nostalgic journey into an era when television wasn’t afraid to dream big—quite literally. Its blend of miniature heroism, towering villains, and Cold War-era paranoia wrapped in shiny technicolour makes it a fascinating watch, if more for its ambition than its execution.