Torchy is a native to the Land of the Lost in the 1974 to 1976 version of Land of the Lost.
Personality and Appearance
Torchy is a large twenty-foot long reptile of the Pelycosauria order of reptiles which includes Dimetrodons. He has a large fin on his back like his Earthly counterparts used in regulating his body heat plus an added Land of the Lost mutation giving him the ability to breathe fire. It is not known how this ability works, but it is possibly he incinerates the methane in his stomach with sparks off the shards of coal in his teeth, but this is only theoretical. He munches on the coal on the outskirts of The Lost City.
The full parameters of his fire breathing are unknown. He has been shown "spitting" flames up to 15-20 feet and given that he fused the key of the Time Pylon, he can reach some remarkable temperatures. It is known that methane burns at temperatures of 3560 degrees Fahrenheit (1960 decrees Celsius), sufficient to easily melt even the most low-carbon steel, but whether he can get higher temperatures or regulate its intensity is unrevealed. His tail is also covered in a poison that can be nearly fatal. A loner, Torchy tends to be distant and aggressive; yet, he has so far avoided combat with the other predators of the Land of the Lost, such as Grumpy and Big Alice.
As Jack and Will observed during their first encounter, Torchy is extremely slow-moving. Even moving backwards, Jack Marshall was able to easily keep ahead of Torchy while staying out of range of Torchy's fiery discharges.
Unsurprisingly, Torchy is not sufficiently intelligent to recognize his own reflection in a mirror.
Background
Torchy was one of several creatures located to the same valley as the Marshall Family after the earthquakes created by Rick Marshall rocked the area, along with Lulu, a two-headed Elasmosaurus. However, it is also possible he had always lived in the Land of the Lost and he didn't encounter the Marshalls until after the devastation. Jack and Will Marshall first discover him in the Lost City where he begins shooting flames into the Sleestak Caves and even causes Big Alice to retreat from his fiery breath. When Will runs up to Torchy, trying to lure him into the jungle, he gets knocked down by Torchy's tail and is poisoned by envenomed spikes on it.
Enik offers an antidote but only if the Marshalls draw Torchy out of the valley, preventing him from blowing fire into the Sleestak Caves. Holly Marshall and Cha-Ka eventually build a giant mirror and set it up in front of a small canyon. Jack soon finds Torchy eating coal (which supplied his ability to breathe fire) and lured Torchy to the mirror. Looking into it, he charged at it thinking it was another Dimetrodon and crashed through it. Jack, Cha-Ka and Holly then trapped him in the canyon with a boulder and landslide. Enik later tells them to let Will rest and allow the poison to drain out. As a result, he Marshalls become upset as that was their process all along. (apparently, if they had ignored Enik, Will would still have survived.) However, Torchy still knocked over the rocks that were trapping him and returned to roam around the valley.
In one of the Marshalls attempts to go home, Torchy became trapped in the geyser fields in the Land of the Lost and drowned under his weight. However, Jack Marshall used the abilities of the Time Pylon to travel back and rescue Cha-ka, preventing Torchy from experiencing this fate.
Episode(s)
Trivia
- Real Dimetrodons did not possess the ability to breathe fire. There is also no evidence for a poisonous tail.
- In some of his appearances, the flame-throwing vent in Torchy can be seen in the back of his mouth.
- When Big Alice encounters Torchy for the first time, she retreats from Torchy's fiery breath, making Torchy the only creature to rout Big Alice from the Lost City. Not even Grumpy was ever able to do this.
- Unlike most of the creatures in Land of the Lost, Holly was not the one to give Torchy his nickname (as she was not present when Jack and Will first encountered Torchy). Will is the first person to refer to this creature as Torchy. The first nickname given to Torchy was "Sparky," used by Jack while attempting to lure Torchy into the jungle. But apparently, this sobriquet never caught on with the others.
- While clearly resembling a Dimetrodon, Torchy is actually far larger than the Dimetrodons in the Earth's prehistoric history as suggested by the fossil record. Dimetrodons were known to range from approximately six to fifteen feet in length, and probably weighed between 60 and 550 pounds, although slightly larger specimens may have existed. However, this may be because a model made to scale of the others would be harder to manipulate and the difficulty in hiding the fire-breathing device.
- Torchy's apparent inability to swim is curious, since Dimetrodons are believed to have lived mostly on fish. Given Torchy's slowness, he would have been an ineffective predator on land. Possibly, Torchy (in addition to his other mutations) has a unique metabolism allowing him to subsist entirely on coal.
