Every Saturday morning thousands of children tuned in to watch the popular 1970s adventure series "Land of the Lost."
The show spawned a range of toys and merchandise while drawing a loyal cult following in the process. Then it abruptly came to an end, three years after it first aired in 1974.
Nearly 50 years later star Kathy Coleman has revealed why the popular series came to an end. Speaking with Fox News, the 57-year-old actress said the show grew too expensive to run and execs needed to make a decision whether to continue or call it quits. They chose to axe it.
"It required a big budget and the executives thought it was just a kid show," Coleman explained. She added that money played a big role in why the series was eventually cancelled, but other factors also came into play.
"For instance, when I got the part, I had just turned 12, and so I was still growing," she continued. "My brother got the part when he was like 20 or 21. He was an adult though. I was starting to look at him straight in the eyes and he supposed to be my older brother."
Coleman was not even a teenager when she shot to fame after landing the role of Holly Marshall in the series, which followed the adventures of a family hurled in back in time and trying to survive in a land dominated by dinosaurs.
She said that, from the age of four, people said she should be in show business. However, despite her big blue eyes and golden hair, it still took several callbacks to convince execs to give her the part.
"I do remember going in wearing the same thing in every interview so they wouldn’t forget me," she recalled. "It was my mother who came up with the checkered shirt and pants with desert boots and braids. So basically the way my mother sent me is the way they wound up designing the character for the entire show."
Once production began, the cast grew to be like a family to one another. And like any close-knit family, they were known to play the occasional prank on set, which landed them in trouble with directors.
"We were such huge pranksters," Coleman told Fox News. "Sometimes it would get us in trouble. There’s one time, the father of the show had the guy who painted the sets draw a slot machine on his chest. We were filming a scene where we were supposed to go through the jungle to this pond. We were supposed to take off our outer clothing and have swimming gear underneath. But when he took his shirt off, all you saw was this slot machine. It was hilarious, but the producers weren't thrilled. They thought we were wasting money messing around like that."
When the show came to an end, Coleman tried to pursue an acting career, appearing in a string of Burger King commercials, before choosing to settle down and start a family.
"The jobs started getting fewer and far between. I did some commercial work. Then I ended up getting married, having kids and starting a family. I moved out of California for a while and went in a different direction," she told The Washington Times in a separate interview. Coleman added that, after years of chasing adventures on screen, she decided to pursue them off-screen instead.