"Same thing, The Wizard of Oz — that will always be one of my all-time favorites. The transition from black-and-white into color, you know, that idea of merging the two worlds using cinematic magic, to meld those worlds for the first time ever. I mean, you look back at the movie and obviously you can see now that there were backdrops and cheap sets and all of that kind of stuff, where today we would probably laugh at it and brush it off as a B-movie. But in those days it was magic. And it’s still magic."

"I, on opening day, saw The Wizard of Oz — 1939, in Providence, Rhode Island. I even remember the theater, the Majestic Theater. Our dad [took us] and we slept in the street that night to wait for the first showing of it. And of course, just like everybody else on this planet, it’s made a lifetime impression on me. As a matter of fact, I think that H.R. Pufnstuft, which was our first television show, the whole feeling came from The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t like it, but the story — with a boy instead of a girl, and all the characters and the trees and the witch — but we went in a whole other direction with ours. As a matter of fact, when the first Pufnstuft movie came out a year after we did the series, Time Magazine said it was “the next Wizard of Oz.” That was quite a statement. What else? Margaret Hamilton — as a matter of fact, I think the very last job that she had before she left us was in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. She played the crazy lady next door who kept seeing the little monster and nobody believed her. She did two or three episodes for us. And the reason she wanted to do it? She wanted to meet Billie Hayes, who was Witchiepoo. She said Witchiepoo is the best witch; as a matter of fact, Billie Hayes met her at the airport and they became great friends. And the reason for being of Land of the Lost? In 1940 there was a movie called One Million B.C. Marty was just a couple of years old, and I was eleven. I had never seen a dinosaur moving; no one had. Only in our schoolbooks. I would take him to see One Million B.C. with Victor Mature… wow. That made a huge impression. It scared the hell out of me. Because, like I said, we had never seen a dinosaur moving before! And that idea gave us the idea to do Land of the Lost."