Sleestaks and Other Monsters

Here are two things which never meant as much to me growing up as the media implied they should:

• The Sid and Marty Krofft TV show Land of the Lost, shown on Saturday mornings from 1974 to 1976. Sure, I watched more episodes than was healthy, but it wasn't really that gripping. We shouldn't use "classic" as a synonym for "anything we remember from when we were eleven."
• The supposed dirty play of the Detroit Pistons' Bill Laimbeer. According to the Boston press in the 1980s, he was the second coming of Attila the Hun. That same press had little to say about, for example, Larry Bird being the nastiest trash-talker in the league.

But the fact that Laimbeer played one of the antagonistic Sleestaks on Land of the Lost as a college job, as documented by the Pantopticist--that I find very meaningful.
The current publicity about the underperforming big-screen remake of Land of the Lost its second run on television in 1991-93. That cast included one of my high school classmates, who probably was watching the original Land of the Lost on the same Saturdays that I did. Since he hung out with the athletes, he might have cared about Laimbeer.