How The People That Time Forgot (1977) Became the Movie That Time Forgot

Guest post alert! I’ve been patiently waiting to add today’s writer to the Dust On The VCR roster for years now: the unconquerable Chance Shirley, a Birmingham film legend! Chance is the writer and co-director of Hide and Creep, a delightful horror comedy, which is actually the first feature I ever saw at the Sidewalk Film Festival when it premiered at Sloss Furnaces nearly 20 years ago. (More on that in the footnotes!) I met Chance years later and we’ve been friends ever since, which is an honor because he is a genuine inspiration who paved the way for many of today’s Alabama filmmakers. (I actually love his sci-fi creature feature Interplanetary even more.) Speaking of sci-fi, Chance pitched me about a film I’d never even heard of—and then I understood why after this riveting read, which is the perfect thing to read for Star Wars Day. Once you’re done here, go check out his Substack (Marvel Time Warp, a lovely trip down Memory Lane for comic book readers) and subscribe to his Beehiiv newsletter (Subspace, where he writes about sci-fi movies that you can watch for free). Take it away, Chance!

Imagine you’re a producer and your science fiction movie is scheduled to be released in the summer of 1977.

Your movie is inspired by a classic sci-fi property from decades earlier. It’s an adventure story with heroes on a rescue mission. Strange creatures abound in exotic lands. Your cast includes an up-and-coming actor who happens to be the child of an already famous actor. And one of your lead characters wears her hair up in side buns.

If you’re a producer of Star Wars, you should be feeling pretty good about your prospects. After all, your movie is about to take the world by storm, make hundreds of millions of dollars, and redefine the artistic and commercial possibilities of science fiction filmmaking.

But what if your movie is The People That Time Forgot?

Yes, this remarkably similar film had the misfortune of being released three months after Star Wars in the summer of ‘77. It’s inspired by a classic sci-fi property—the Edgar Rice Burroughs book of the same name—just like Star Wars was inspired by old Flash Gordon serials.* Its heroes are hoping to rescue their friend Bowen Tyler, just like the heroes in Star Wars are hoping to rescue Princess Leia.** As far as the strange creatures go, Star Wars has aliens, while The People That Time Forgot has dinosaurs and cave dwellers. And you might know that Carrie Fisher is the daughter of Debbie Reynolds, but did you know about Patrick Wayne, son of John Wayne?

All of those similarities are interesting. But it’s the side buns hairstyle that really jumps out at me.*** Princess Leia famously wears her hair up in this style in Star Wars. Sarah Douglas, somewhat less famously, wears her hair in the same manner in The People That Time Forgot. Were hair and makeup people really into side buns in the ’70s for some reason? Or just the hair and makeup people for these two sci-fi flicks?

Anyway. Before his movie opened in theaters and turned into a monster hit, George Lucas was worried the movie was going to flop, believe it or not. Instead, Star Wars set a high bar for every science fiction movie that followed. Several did their best to meet the challenge—movies like Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Disney’s The Black Hole. But some were just cheap cash-ins; I’m looking at you, Starcrash and Battle Beyond the Stars.****

But the people who made all of those movies knew the game had changed. The poor folks who made The People That Time Forgot didn’t even know what was coming.

Despite being released three months earlier, Star Wars was still a box office juggernaut when The People That Time Forgot hit theaters. Before the home video era, successful movies ran in theaters for months on end because it was the only way to see them. That’s how Star Wars wound up playing theaters for more than a year after its original release. And while the head-to-head box office numbers for that summer are hard to find, I imagine Star Wars was still beating The People That Time Forgot—and everything else at the cinema, for that matter—in August of ’77.

I imagine it would’ve been like being a band headlining a big concert venue in the late ‘60s…and then finding out that Led Zeppelin is the opener. Oof.*****

As many similarities as The People That Time Forgot shares with Star Wars, its producers almost made an even more similar film. The production team originally wanted to adapt another Edgar Rice Burroughs property: John Carter of Mars. Star Wars is a swashbuckling space opera, very much in the John Carter tradition, so I have to imagine that those stories were an influence on Lucas even though he cites Flash Gordon as his top inspiration.

Despite competing with the box office juggernaut that was Star Wars, The People That Time Forgot actually ended up doing decent business. It made three million bucks on a $500,000 budget, which would be considered a minor success today. So it may not have spawned a franchise full of sequels and prequels, sold a boatload of toys and memorabilia, or inspired major theme park attractions, but at least it generated a pretty decent return on investment, right?******

*George Lucas tried to get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie before giving up and creating his own space opera. Producer Dino De Laurentiis had the Flash Gordon rights. After turning Lucas down, De Laurentiis finally released his own Flash Gordon movie in 1980. (It’s awesome.)

**Tyler is played by Doug McClure, who was the king of lost world movies there for a minute. Aside from this film and its predecessor, The Land That Time Forgot (1974), he was in At the Earth’s Core (1976) and Warlords of Atlantis (1978). (Just don’t confuse McClure with King of the Lost World, the 2005 mockbuster released by Asylum in 2005 to cash in on Peter Jackson’s King Kong. [The titular king is, of course, a giant gorilla.])

***I don’t know if “side buns” is the actual name of this hairstyle. But while doing research, I did learn that Princess Leia’s hairdo was inspired by Hopi Native Americans.

****For the record, I love the classy movies that Star Wars paved the way for…and I also love the crass ones.

*****I had a similar experience—if on a much smaller scale—with my first feature, the 2004 zombie comedy Hide and Creep. I thought that we had completely reinvented the genre, and then Shaun of the Dead hit the States one day after our world premiere. I saw it at Comic-Con and thought “Oh, that’s how you do a zombie comedy!” Going on after Led Zeppelin is tough, y’all.

******If a theme park wanted to open an attraction based on The Land That Time Forgot and The People That Time Forgot, complete with animatronic dinosaurs roaming around and prehistoric-themed roller coasters…I’d be totally into that.

The People That Time Forgot is now streaming on Tubi and Freevee, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.