Another “memory cheats” moment: I swear that sometime in the late seventies, my mother made me sit down and watch an afterschool special or a TV movie or something called “Little Boy Lost” about a kid who ran away, but I can’t find any trace of it now, although I did find that David Janssen, Joanna Pettet, and Greg Morris made a charity short film for the United Way in 1974 with that title.
As for this episode, which was written and directed by Arthur H. Nadel and which guest stars John Carter (Lt. Biddle on Barnaby Jones), it’s a pretty treacly “kid-and-puppy go missing” segment, which Daniel really enjoyed most because of the puppy. It does, however, have a remarkably surprising visual effect. In a very, very contrived moment, the dad, having found his missing son, and the puppy, pauses on the drive home at some kind of “ghost town” tourist attraction, “for old time’s sake,” and, in the least surprising development possible, ends up trapped down a mine shaft so that the little boy has to then get help.
What nobody saw coming was this: the entire front of one of the fake abandoned buildings falls atop the hole to the mine shaft. I’ll give Nadel and Filmation total credit for that. The “trapped dad” angle would have worked just fine, in its low budget kids’ show way, without that very neat flourish. The full-size building collapses, and Jackson Bostwick has to haul it back into place before he jumps down into the hole to save the day. It’s always nice to have a surprise watching these shows, you know?
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 