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I have grumped about people who focus way too much on the details of world-building, and how this can get cluttered in irrelevancies. So I am going to hold up an example of it done well. And for fun, I am going to pick on a kid's show: Sid and Marty Krofft's 1974 Land of the Lost.
Not the 1990's one, which was worse, or the Will Ferrell movie which was much worse. The original.
The storyline is that a family on a camping trip gets transported to a world populated by dinosaurs, aliens and visited by humans from the past and the future. The family tries to survive long enough to find their way home. It ran for 3 seasons, so maybe 50 half-hour episodes.
It had a number of "real" writers, many of whom came from Star Trek. Dabid Gerrold, DC Fontana and also people like Larry Niven.
Things they did right:
(1) They did not talk down to their audience.
(2) They did not explain everything - it was still a mysterious place after 3 seasons. This helped with...
(3) The world was largely consistent. If something happened in Episode N, it usually was still true in Episode N+1.
(4) For the most part, people and beings the protagonists interacted with were no purely good or purely evil ("the only good orc is a dead orc") but had their own motivations that may or may not be aligned with the protagonists.
(5) When they did tell the audience something, they let it out a little at a time. Clues in one episode weren't explained until later episodes, and in some cases not at all.
Was this the best show ever? No. But it shows how one can crearte a setting that provides a great backdrop to stories, in a way that writing a textbook on warp drive physics does not.
Not the 1990's one, which was worse, or the Will Ferrell movie which was much worse. The original.
The storyline is that a family on a camping trip gets transported to a world populated by dinosaurs, aliens and visited by humans from the past and the future. The family tries to survive long enough to find their way home. It ran for 3 seasons, so maybe 50 half-hour episodes.
It had a number of "real" writers, many of whom came from Star Trek. Dabid Gerrold, DC Fontana and also people like Larry Niven.
Things they did right:
(1) They did not talk down to their audience.
(2) They did not explain everything - it was still a mysterious place after 3 seasons. This helped with...
(3) The world was largely consistent. If something happened in Episode N, it usually was still true in Episode N+1.
(4) For the most part, people and beings the protagonists interacted with were no purely good or purely evil ("the only good orc is a dead orc") but had their own motivations that may or may not be aligned with the protagonists.
(5) When they did tell the audience something, they let it out a little at a time. Clues in one episode weren't explained until later episodes, and in some cases not at all.
Was this the best show ever? No. But it shows how one can crearte a setting that provides a great backdrop to stories, in a way that writing a textbook on warp drive physics does not.
