Wow, haha, awesome! Great work JLJac! I'd suggest making his head segment a little bigger? So it maybe goes better witht he resst of the segments?
Other than that, pretty rad.
I wonder how hard this will be to code though - I suppose you made sepparate segments that can be saved as single files?Edit: that rotation looks pretty swell - have him come out at a random x position and this could work out quite nicely. Good job!
Also nice work on the distant worm animation, godsavant.

Here are a couple of suggestion for the level though:
In the original game the ground was up a bit higher in the screen, so the player could actually see what's happening underneath the earth's surface. I think this would be appropriate here too because the player would get a short time span to see where the worm is coming from.
Also it gives us the possibility to add cool stuff like weird animal skeletons in the earth's crust.

I think it would be a good idea to visually declare where the ground the player will actually be standing on is at. This is only important in levels that fake a perspective like this one, but right now, the player could be standing anywhere between the bottom brown line and in the field further 'to the back'. Maybe when moving everything up a bit, you could make the brown line at the bottom the same sand like structure, but lighter or somehow visually readable that this is the floor where the player will walk upon.
I really like what you have done with the background already, but the sky just seems a little bit boring. I know this would differ from the original, but maybe you want to add some clouds or mountains at the horizon?
Generally I think it's a little bit too flat, Maybe take some creative liberties and put larger stones in the front that are just deco or make the landscape a little more uneven.
The crashed probe searcher thing looks pretty sweet, but the crashed airplane looks like it's in mid air flying downwards. You could put the whole thing down a couple of pixels and bend the nose harder to show that it actually has crashed. Also using more dark gray and black on it wouldn't hurt to show that it has been burnt out or something.
I'm not sure about the plattforms. They just seem to be a little uninspired and the setup is imho a bit too similair to the bonesaw stage. I'm sure we could come up with something a little more interesting.
Sigh, I wish I just wasn't so busy with the Heroes&Villains stuff.
