With the passing of Deanna Lund this week it is a shame that so far the footage from her lost mud/quicksand scene is stilling missing after 48 years. For youngsters who may not have heard the story, which Rob Blaine and Hurley both told to me, there was a deep mud quicksand scene that was shot for the finale last episode of "Land of the Giants" in 1970. This scenes caused some controversy when it was shot, because the network censors did not like the revealing outfit Deanna wore in the mud (screenscap from that episode below) and also Deanna was unhappy during the shoot because co-star Kurt Kazner (who was known to be a prankster on the set) kept goosing Deanna when they were in the mud together, This was well documented in later interviews with Deanna Lund, which she recounted...

"In "The Graveyard of Fools" episode our characters were trapped in quicksand and Kurt was goosing me under this guck we were in. I remember yelling, 'Who do you have to fuck to get out of this show?!!' (quote from an interview with Deanna).

We don't know what happened, but with the network censors unhappy about Deanna's slimy and revealing costume and Deanna filing complaints about Kurt Kazner's wandering hands under the mud, Irwin Allen decided to drop the entire mud scene from that episode.....so the episode that exists today in DVD format still has that scene missing. One would hope that a new DVD release of the series would have restored this deleted scene as a DVD extra, but so far no luck.

Anyway,,,,for me this goes down as one of two most famous missing mud scenes of all time.

The other well documented missing mud scene is from the 1936 film "Tarzan Escapes" where we see all these production photos of Maureen O Sullivan in the mud, but that footage has remained missing since the 1950''s...when it was last seen at a drive in theatre with the scene still iin the film print. The scene was deleted from many film prints because it was deemed to be too horrific and disturbing.

http://caferoxy.blogspot.com/2014/11/tarzan-escapes-revisited-once-again.html
http://www.erbzine.com/mag6/0618.html

Anyway...RIP Deanna

MK

Well shit, Mark, if you had told me about this BEFORE she died, I could've hired her to recreate it as a custom.

#GMILF

First of all it sucks to lose another childhood hottie. She seemed like a nice lady. Sorry to hear it.

I've spent a lot of time searching for the tiniest hints and details of her scene and the missing Tarzan scene for years. I'm convinced they both ended up in the trash but the search goes on. Maybe one of them is in a private collection in a garage somewhere.

Wow -I remember this film from the Saturday morning kid's films during the '39-'45 war
The mud scene was right near the end & had large lizard type creatures in the mud to make sure the 'baddies' were truly engulfed

Two scenes are still vivid 1)Tarzan in his loin cloth standing knee deep in the mud with ,I think,mud smeared over his thighs ( this film has much to answer for!!)

2) The villain forced back into the mud by Tarzan.I don't remember watching him sink but his hat was floating on the top & the lizards were "busy" under the surface

Can you wonder some of us developed mud fetishes?!!!

If I were a betting man I would say that it is more likely that some day the lost Tarzan movie mud scene will show up than the Deanna Lund scene....reason being that the lost Tarzan footage is like the lost pie fight from "Dr Strangelove" and the lost Marx Brother slapstick scene with Esther Muir in "A Day at the Races".....i.e. in all these cases we have photographic evidence that those scenes were shot, because publicity stills exist that prove the existance of those scenes. We know that Groucho removed that slapstick scene from "A Day at the Races" after he once said "we are not the 3 Stooges"...and it was probably destroyed in the 1930's. However the deleted pie missing scene from "Dr Strangelove" definitely still exists because Stanley Kubrick retained the footage in his personal archives and when he died his family screened that deleted scene at his wake....and later they turned over that footage to the British Film Institute for preservation....so it remains to this day inside the vaults at the BFI, who have so far not released it as a dvd extra on dvd or Blu Ray released.

There is lots of photographic evidence of the 1936 deleted mud scenes from Tarzan Escapes".,....and the footage was definitely not destroyed in the 1930's because it was seen in the 1950's in Drive in Theatres in the USA and on European cuts of the film.....so somehwere in Europe that footage is sitting in a vault somewhere.

The Deanna Lund scene is less certain....because this may be an urban legend told by several people on the mud/quicksand forum over the years.....but nobody has ever provided any evidence that the scene was shot.....no photos from the supposed deleted scene have ever been seen. It could just be an urban legend....but there is no proof to support that legend. The only reference is supposedly what Deana Lund supposedly said.....but I have never seen any print article or video interview where she refers to that scene. It is all hearsay on what some folks have said that Deanna Lund supposedly once said.....and there I am skeptical that she actually said that line.....because that line is an old comedy routine line said by many comedians...e.g.. the exact same line "who do I have to sleep with to get off this show".....was said verbatim by sidekick comedian Geraldine Garder when she appeared as a stooge on "The Benny Hill Show".

Anyway the deleted scene from Dr Strangelove is already confirmed as being held by the British Film and will one day be released, the deleted Tarzan mud scene has a good chance of being found one day in a European or Mexican film vault. The Marx Brothers deleted slapstick scene appears to have been lost since the 1930's, so it will probably never be found, and the Deanna Lund quicksand scene appears to be an urban legend where there is no concrete evidence that the scene was ever made.

Another reason for skepticism about the Deanna Lund quicksand scene, is that there already WAS a quicksand scene in earliier episode of "Land of the Giants"....see episode 7 "Manhunt"....but that QS scene only involved a male....not Deanna

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_AXuSem2vw

Irwin Allen was a notorious cheapskate when he produced his tv series....e.g. when he made "Lost in Space" he did not even bother to create new monsters for that series, because it was cheaper for him to recycle old monsters from his earlier series "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea"....so you would often see the same monster costumes being recycled and used in both series. So....if Irwin Allen had already built a quicksand set for an earlier episode of "Land of the Giants" (which was a dry quicksand set) why would he go to the expense of building a new wet quicksand set....when it was cheaper for him just to re-use the dry quickand set he had already built.

MK

The creepy thing is that I'm pretty sure that I saw a version of Tarzan Escapes with at least part of the bat scene in it on television in the early 1960's! I have no memory of a bat knocking Captain Fry into the quicksand but I have a very solid memory of a native getting carried off by a bat and Tarzan fighting a giant bat. Strangely, I don't remember any pygmies.

While on the topic of missing Tarzan scenes I saw on television, I also have a solid memory of Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) running from a lion and falling into quicksand very much like in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle only the way she got out was that she used the Tarzan yodel to summon Tarzan! My mud fetish started with this scene and I saw the scene two separate times. After that, I eagerly watched all Tarzan movies hoping to see the scene again but it disappeared and I've never met anyone else who saw it.

My assumption is that I somehow transposed it in my memory with the Tarzan's Hidden Jungle scene but the problem with that is that I still see Maureen O'Sullivan quite clearly in my memory and she looked rather good indeed with her breasts bouncing around in all that quicksand. I've always wondered if that was why the scene went missing if it was ever really there.

Methinks your memory probably transposed the Eleanor Holm mud scene from "Tarzan's Revenge". I have never seen any such mud scene with Maureen O'Sullivan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntLs6htZbI