Sleestak Love: Anna Friel Gets Lost With Will Ferrell

Anna Friel hopes to learn how those stones on the pylons work.

 In his ongoing effort to leave no ’70s bit of pop culture untouched, Will Ferrell is doing a big screen version of the Saturday morning kids’ TV show Land of the Lost. Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Anna Friel is joining him.

(You remember Land of the Lost, right? “Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition…” In case you don’t, it’s about a family who gets into trouble while out rafting, and emerge from a tumble down a waterfall into a land dominated by dinosaurs and lizard-like creatures called Sleestaks who move slowly and ineptly. Everyone spends a lot of time running to pylons topped with shiny colored stones that they keep rearranging in the hopes of getting back to the 1970s. It was, um, great.)

In this version, though, Ferrell is playing a “disgraced paleontologist” who finds himself thrown back to a prehistoric world (wow, a paleontologist? in the TV show, Rick Marshall was just a park ranger!). Friel is slated to play his love interest. No word on whether she’s a love interest who he finds in the prehistoric world or whether he brings her with him from the 20th c.

Sid and Marty Krofft, creators of the original TV show (and many other pieces of classic Saturday morning fare) are producing along with Jimmy Miller. Chris Henchy wrote the screenplay (pre-strike!).

Friel has most recently been seen on TV in “Pushing Daisies.” Ferrell is in the soon to be released Semi-Pro, a movie about a, well, ’70s semi-pro basketball team that seems to mostly be focused on big hair and short shorts (on the players). It looks like it wants to be a roundball version of Slap Shot.