Otherworld

For tropes associated with other worlds, see Otherworld Tropes. For the anime fan fiction series, see The Otherworld Series. For the Urban Fantasy series of novels, see The Otherworld.

Otherworld was a science fiction series that aired on CBS in 1985. It followed the Sterling family, who got Trapped in Another World when they went on a tour of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, during a rare conjunction of planets. They ended up in a world under an authoritarian regime, and the family quickly get on the wrong side of Kommander Nuveen Kroll, a high-ranking officer in this government.

The show did not do well in the ratings and lasted only eight episodes before being canceled.

As of this writing, episodes can be found online. (Thanks, io9 and commenter se7a7n7!)

Tropes used in Otherworld include:

• A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll"
• Gangsta Style: The laser guns are all designed to, improbably, be held upside-down: you hold onto the grip and the rest of the gun hangs beneath it. Who knows how you're supposed to aim it like that, but it was used to deliberately show that they're in a strange other world.
• Lady Land: One episode involved them trapped in such a zone, where men were little more than sex toys for militant women.
• Like Reality Unless Noted: Some of the zones that the protagonists find themselves in are extremely similar to those of suburban America, just with more laser beams. This allows them to blend in more easily, fortunately.
• Nuclear Family
• Trapped in Another World
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Mansion of the Beast" is totally a straight "Beauty and the Beast" plot, with a Beast Man who only wants love but doesn't know how to get it kidnaps the mother of the family.