Blog.

Bill Laimbeer Was a Sleestak

FEBRUARY 9, 2005

No, seriously: Bill Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy ’70s show Land of the Lost, a program that terrorized a generation of young kids on Saturday mornings.

I discovered the Laimbeer connection on my own a couple of years ago, when I watched a two-episode LotL videotape I had bought during a bout of nostalgia. This obscure bit of trivia is, I admit, probably only of interest to North Americans born between about 1963 and 1973 who remember the nightmares caused by those hissing, rubber-suited monsters. Like the entire show itself, the Sleestaks seem hilariously campy now, but they were terrifying to a six-year-old. Also terrifying was the show’s incredibly weird music, a bizarre amalgam of eerie synthesizer bleeps and down-home banjo pickin’. 

This image is from the opening credits of a Walter Koenig-penned episode called “The Stranger” that aired in late 1974, when Laimbeer was 17:

land_of_the_lost1.jpg

One of these Sleestaks is Laimbeer:

land_of_the_lost2.jpg

Laimbeer went from menacing Marshall, Will, and Holly as an adolescent to menacing the entire NBA as an adult.

Previous
Previous

An Annotation of the First Page of White Noise, With Help From Don DeLillo

Next
Next

Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript