They were scheduled to appear on Saturday only, but so many fans were excited to see Sid for the first time at one of these shows that the brothers Krofft made a surprise visit on Sunday. The show was less crowded and Sid regaled them with stories of his years with the Ringling Bros. Circus where he was billed as “The World’s Youngest Puppeteer”. He found the circus a hard life, especially for him as a 16-year-old away from his family for so long. But now he values the lessons he learned and unique experiences he had under the “big top”. (The Kroffts made a TV movie loosely based on Sid’s circus experiences called “Sideshow”.)

Marty also told of his experiences growing up in Brooklyn and at 14 worked at deli near Yankee Stadium and made sandwiches for Yankees team members, including Joe DiMaggio. (He had a collection of baseballs the Yankee greats had signed, but his mother accidently threw them all out.) While Sid was in the circus and then performing in Europe, Marty started performing with Sid’s left-behind puppets and sometimes even billed himself as “Sid Krofft”.

Oh, the things that entertained us in our youth. Sid & Marty Krofft were the Roger Corman of Saturday morning kid fare, taking a minimal budget and turning it into a world in our imagination.

Case in point — take some gunny sacks, cover them with leaves, paste on some eyes and have actors run around in them, and you have a family of sea monsters ready to create weekly havoc. That was the milieu for Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, a series in which two brothers, Johnny (Johnny Whitaker, Family Affair) and Scott (Scott C. Kolden) Stuart, befriend a friendly sea monster, Sigmund Ooze (Billy Barty), who has run away from his mean family: Big Daddy, Sweet Mama, and two brothers, Slurp and Burp.

The Ooze family may have felt fine with Sigmund taking off — but on an almost weekly basis they have need to bring him back, by force, to cave-sweet-cave. Initially it’s a visit from rich Uncle Siggy that prompts them to bring Sigmund home (or be written out of the will). Other times it’s because they need Sigmund to do something only he can do, like accept a sweepstakes winning in his name. On top of that, there was a peculiar similarity in the design of Sweet Mama that made her look like Bea Arthur (even Whitaker and Kolden quip on this in the commentary track); and Big Daddy, with his consistent use of words like ‘dingbat’ and ‘stifle’ could only be a sendup of All in the Family’s Archie Bunker.

Johnny and Scott hide Sigmund in their “No Adults Allowed” clubhouse, in their back yard, so that he won’t be seen by their housekeeper, Zelda (Mary Wickes, “White Christmas”), who’s taking care of the boys while their parents are away on a very extended vacation. But Zelda’s not the only one who might stumble across Sigmund. There’s Peggy (Space Academy’s Pamelyn Ferdin), whose dog is an objet d’amour for a lovestruck Sigmund. And then there’s the nosy next-door neighbor, Mrs. Eddels (Margaret Hamilton, “The Wizard of Oz”), who’s always snooping about or having tricks played on her. Finally, there’s Zelda’s boyfriend, Sheriff Chuck Bevans (Joe Higgans). Keeping Sigmund out of sight turns out to be a full-time job for the boys.

Like several Krofft shows, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters had a musical segment to it. Each of these numbers, like the opening theme and closing song, are performed by Johnny Whitaker, and all of them are downloadable off the third disc of this set in MP3 format. Additionally, Whitaker and Kolden provide commentary for two of the episodes, and Sid Krofft himself provides a commentary track for the pilot episode, “The Monster Who Came to Dinner,” giving insight into the events that inspired him to create Sigmund.

Other bonus features include an on-screen interview with Whitaker and Kolden, and highlights from the HR Pufnstuf American Cinemateque Event in Los Angeles, held on November 20, 2010.

The real question, though, is this: How can a low-budget 1970s kid show hold up after nearly forty years? The answer is, surprisingly well. Yes, you can see how fake everything is with grown-up eyes, but it turns out that the newest generation of viewers, who are cutting their teeth on Pixar-level animation and toy tie-in marketing, will still put that away for a while to take in a life-size puppet show. And when you’ve got preschoolers gamboling about singing “There’s nothing like a day out on the beach, when all it does is rain…” then you have to take that as evidence that there’s something enduring in the Krofft magic of yesteryear.

Sigmund & The Sea Monsters: Season One
In 1973, after several successful Saturday morning TV series, Sid and Marty Krofft came up with this sitcom about two brothers who discover and befriend a little sea monster named Sigmund. This series would not have been out of place in prime time at the time with shows like My Favourite Martian, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched all dealing with the problem of keeping someone unusual out of the public eye. Johnny Whittaker (Family Affair) and Scott Kolden starred as the brothers who did everything they could to protect Sigmund from their nosy housekeeper (Mary Wickes) as well as his own sea-monster family, who were out to get him because he wasn’t scary enough. This new DVD set contains all 17 first-season episodes on three DVDs, three of which contain fun audio commentaries from the two lead actors (who also contribute a new 20-minute interview), downloadable MP3s of 11 songs from the series and more. (Vivendi)

Sid & Marty Kroftt Classic Now on DVD!

It’s oft been said that today’s kids demand more from their entertainment. This usually comes from producers and promoters, and all the others who profit from children’s’ entertainment… as well as the parents who consume it. They would have us all believe that our little Dakotas and Skylars and Hunters would never be caught watching the stuff we used to watch, because it’s so simple and booooring. Truth be told, kids are gonna watch what ever catches their eye, be it a black and white cartoon of Popeye, a Punch and Judy puppet show, or a flip book cartoon. And truth be told, it’s the parents who are demanding more from their kid’s entertainment. They want to see stuff in the programming that they can relate to, or that makes them laugh. And the producers are all too obliging, because they know who’s buying the stuff —it’s the parents, not the kids.

I like to prove the theory of theirs wrong. I regularly my li’l Pop Cereal flakes with a good dose of retro kid fun. And truth be told… they love it. Sure they love their My Little Pony and their Little Bear and Yo Gabba Gabba. They also love them some Groovie Goolies, and Double Deckers. And now their latest demand is for more Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters was an early 1970s gem from those boys of Saturday Morning weirdness Sid & Marty Kroftt. It told the story of a young sea monster named Sigmund Ooze (played by the legendary Billy Barty), who ran away from his cave, because his family disowned him for not being mean enough. He befriends two California boys, Johnny and Scott (Johnny Whitaker and Scott Kolden), who he attempts to scare as they play out on the beach. The boys hide Sigmund in their cool backyard clubhouse, not only from their nosy housekeeper Zelda (the fabulous Mary Wikes), but from the dysfunctional Ooze family. It seems that every time Sigmund’s family get themselves into a bind, Big Daddy and Sweet Momma send out their remaining bumbling boys, Blurp and Slurp, to go fetch Sigmund to help straighten it all out.

The stories are simple and the dialogue is fun and unoffensive. The adventures are straight forward and loaded with silly slapstick action. A lot of the acting is corny, but that was the style of the Saturday morning program back in that era. It was all just plain fun. However, there was the right amount of cultural referencing to make it contemporary. Like Big Daddy’s parodying Archie Bunker with the voice and mannerisms — and a good ol’ Stifle it!” every so often. The comic action is absolute fun for the kids, and there are little tidbits of frights every so often, to make it exciting.

All this simple fun has made this DVD set a “demand” for my kids. They ask to watch it several times a week. They make up their own li’l Sigmund toys to play with, alongside their store bought Little Pony’s, and they’ve even announced that they’ll be Sigmund for Halloween (but then again, they’ve changed costume ideas like five times since).

Barry Meyer Barry Meyer was born to the world as the first scientifically produced Cathode Tube baby. He’s a film critic, videographer, editor, and writer, residing in Jamestown, NY.

This three disc set contains the entirety of Season One which is 17 whopping episodes of the shows 29 episode run. There are also commentaries with Whitaker and co-star Scott Kolden, a downloadable folder of mp3′s of all Whitaker’s many songs on the show and a featurette showcasing the H.R.Pufnstuf American Cinematheque from November 2010.

It’s fair to say that Terra Nova is the most anticipated new fall show, or close to it, if only because of all it’s trying to pull off—a TV show made on a blockbuster movie scale, with a massive budget, extensive CGI, location shooting in Australia, and a plot that incorporates dinosaurs, conspiracy and time travel. The jury’s still out—what I’ve seen of the pilot is still preliminary, even as it approaches airing in a month. But for all its fancy production and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, it would be hard to imagine it coming up with a storyline half as wild and creative as TV’s original family/sci-fi/dinosaur/time-space-travel show, Land of the Lost.

As with any Sid and Marty Krofft production of its era, it’s easy enough to make fun of the details of Land of the Lost: the stop-motion special effects, for instance, the latex Sleestak costumes, or the opening white-water sequence, above, which appears to take place inside a fourth-grader’s nature diorama. The dialogue was corny, the resolutions were sentimental and much the mythology hallucinatory.

But oddly, the essential premise is surprisingly like Terra Nova’s—except, when you think about it, darker and ten times as insane. At root: a family is sent through space time to survive among dinosaurs, except in this case, the mom is dead, a fact that lends poignancy to several of the episodes. The explanation is flimsy at best—they fall through some sort of rift when an earthquake hits while they’re rafting—but not much more so than Terra Nova’s (scientists somehow opened a hole in the fabric of space while doing unspecified “research”).

And as on Terra Nova, it turns out that they have not just gone back in time, but have actually traveled to an alternate universe, landing in a place that shares characteristics with prehistoric earth but is not exactly that. As a matter of fact, while it’s hard to judge Terra Nova on just its pilot, Land of the Lost’s sci-fi premise actually turns out to be fairly sophisticated, involving questions of causality paradoxes that the Terra Nova pilot simply sidesteps with a bit of expository dialogue in the first hour. (Land of the Lost, in fact, for all its cheese value, had contributors that included sci-fi luminaries likeLarry Niven, author of Ringworld.)

And on top of all that: Ancient ruins! Aliens! Not just any alien villains, either; the Sleestaks who harassed Will, Holly and Rick, we eventually learned, were the fallen descendants of a past, less debased civilization. Bizarre alien technology, like the mysterious, universe-controlling pylons, whose power and inscrutability rivaled any oddities dreamed up for Lost. (On top of that, the show eventually revealed the Land to be powered by a pulsating red subterranean “Heart” that echoes the magic glowing water flume of Lost.) And a tribe of furry humanoids, nearly a decade before George Lucasever put an Ewok on-screen.

Did I appreciate any of this watching the show as a kid (in retrospect, one way too young to be watching Land of the Lost)? No, I did not; I only knew that the hissing Sleestaks scared the living bejeezus out of me. And re-watching it on YouTube as a grownup does not lessen the dissonance of its trippy sci-fi and Little House on the Prairie wholesomeness. But I do have to respect the show’s inventiveness; the hold it had on me back then was not just because I was easily impressed and had fewer TV-viewing choices. If nothing else, it’s a reminder to the many, many producers and crew members of Terra Nova: there is a certain kind of insane creativity that the biggest CGI budget can’t buy.

Although siblings Sid and Marty Krofft started working in show business several decades before they made inroads on the small screen, by the time the ’70s rolled around, they were the uncontested sovereigns of Saturday morning. After creating a cornucopia of classic series, including H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, Sigmund And The Sea Monsters, and Land Of The Lost, the Kroffts made the jump to prime time, producing variety shows for everyone from the Brady Bunch to Barbara Mandrell And The Mandrell Sisters. In recent years, Sid and Marty have taken a step back from working on new properties, instead turning their attentions to repackaging their ’70s shows—the duo signed a deal with Vivendi Entertainment which thus far has seen the release of H.R. Pufnstuf: The Complete Seriesas well as a single-disc best-of collection, Sid & Marty Krofft’s Saturday Morning Hits—and transforming more of their past successes into feature films. With the reissue of Sigmund And The Sea Monsters: Season 1 on the horizon, the Kroffts spoke with The A.V. Club about what the future holds for H.R. Pufnstuf as well as the origins of their career, their disappointment over the Land Of The Lost movie, and the fine line between Charles Nelson Reilly and the character he played on Lidsville.

The A.V. Club: The first season of Sigmund And The Sea Monsters is being reissued on DVD. Do you enjoy the opportunity to revisit these properties when it comes time to compile sets like this?
Marty Krofft: Well, absolutely. You know, Vivendi is distributing all our shows, but Sigmund, Pufnstuf, Lidsville, we’re working on them all to be movies. Brand-new, big movies. So it’s more than revisiting this stuff. We’re bringing it back! [Laughs.]

AVC: Sid, you started in vaudeville, but you also did a stint with the Ringling Bros. And Barnum & Bailey Circus, correct?
Sid Krofft: Yes, I did. In 1946 or 1947. In the sideshow, actually, not even knowing that that was a show full of freaks. I saw ad in Billboard, which at that time was for carnivals and circuses, and they were looking for unusual acts. I was just 16 years old, so without even telling my parents, I went and auditioned with my little tape recorder, and they said, “Well, you’re going to be opening in two days,” and offered me $75 a week, which was a fortune. I had another brother, two years older, who had a job where he had to take a subway all the way downtown for only $35, so 75 bucks? That was a fortune! I traveled with them, but I never finished the season, because it was a very, very hard life, especially for a young kid. I was rejected by all of what they called freaks, because they felt that I didn’t belong. The show opened in April, and I left in September. But we traveled all over the country, and we would just stay in cities for a day, and it was pretty rare that we were there for two days. What people don’t realize is that the big top held 15,000 people. It was a five-ring circus traveling with 2,000 people. It was quite an experience.

AVC: What was your act like at the time?
SK: Well, I was totally self-taught, so I had things like two rumba dancers, a breakaway skeleton, two minstrel dancers, and a juggler. When I was 11 years old, I saw a puppet act at a theater in Providence, Rhode Island, which was the first vaudeville show I ever saw, and I thought, “Oh, my God, that’s something I want to do for the rest of my life!” [Laughs.] And then in the very firstSuperman comic book, I saw an ad in there for a Hazelle marionette for $15. Of course, my family and I didn’t have $15, but there was also an ad to sell Christmas cards for 50 cents a box—this was in July—and you could keep a quarter.
So I went into the streets and sold my Christmas cards until I saved $15, and that’s how I sent away for my first puppet. After I got my first marionette, I went back on the streets with my little wind-up Victrola, and it was like a little street act, selling Christmas cards. My sales tripled! Here’s this little tiny kid working with puppets. Nobody had ever seen anything like that. So it all started with that. And the circus—well, I used to do little shows for $3 or $4, and then we moved to New York in 1945 and I got myself an agent. [Laughs.] And I was doing shows for, like, 10 bucks. Maybe 12. But 75 dollars from the Ringling Brothers circus? The circus, really, was the foundation for my whole career. I mean, that’s where I learned so much, not even realizing it. But I was self-taught, and I created everything myself, made my own costumes. The ideas all came from me. I had no help. I chose my own music.
MK: You could do a whole story just on the circus.
SK: Well, I am! [Laughs.]
MK: No, I don’t mean you.

AVC: He’s right. Your life in the circus, that’s an article in and of itself. A movie, even.
SK: Oh, yeah. Well, we did a movie in 1981, a Movie Of The Week for NBC that was called Side Show. But in those days, Standards And Practices wouldn’t allow you to get too deep into the stories, you know? I mean, we wanted to call it Freaks, but they wouldn’t even allow that word, so it was called Side Show. But anyway, after the circus, the ball started rolling, and here we are.

AVC: So what brought the two of you together as an act?
SK: Well, in 1958, I was with Judy Garland. I was the opening act for Judy Garland, and at my last engagement with her at the Fontainebleau Hotel, I lost my assistant. And Marty, who was quite a businessman himself in New York, he was—how old were you, Marty? 19 or 20. And he was the leading car salesman for Ford in New York. This young kid. And so he came and joined me as my assistant. But it wasn’t until I think eight or maybe even close to 10 years later than Pufnstuf happened.

AVC: You guys designed the costumes for The Banana Splits, but did you have anything to do with the show beyond that?
SK: Well, what happened was, we had what we called the Show Business Factory. It was financed by Six Flags, because we had a show there. Angus Wynne, he owned Six Flags, and he set us up, and we became the creative team for the park. We built rides, whatever they needed. We had over 250 creative people. It was like a mini-Disney operation. We had every department. And so when they walked out with all their stuff that they needed for the season, Marty and myself didn’t want to let anybody go, because we had some of the most creative people in Hollywood. So we opened up our doors to everybody. Ice Capades, Ringling Brothers. The Queen Mary, when it first arrived, we were the designers for that. So many, many things. Earth Wind & Fire, the Jackson Five, everyone was coming in to have us build their stuff.
With The Banana Splits, Hanna-Barbera mainly only did animation, but they were given an assignment by NBC to do this live-action show, and they knew nothing about it. And we had always put people in costumes—we knew how to do that even before Disney was putting people in Mickey Mouse costumes—so they came to us to build the Banana Splits. But when they walked out with the costumes, Marty looked at me and said, “Oh, my God, they’re gonna make a fortune!” And the head of programming at NBC, he was watching on a daily basis to see what the costumes were going to look like, how they were going to work, and he just saw our creative company and said to Marty and myself, “Oh, my God, you should come up with your own show! This is incredible what you’ve got going here!”
And so we came up with Pufnstuf. That was our first show. Actually, you know, we never did a pilot. We did this fabulous book, a huge book with all the characters, and we told the stories to the executives in their offices, and then we threw the book down. And that was how we sold our shows. And they waited for us every year, to see what the hell we were going to come up with next. It was wild. Just one show after another. And, geez, when I look at the list, I didn’t realize myself, but we did something close to 50 shows and specials for television. It’s amazing.

AVC: What was it like to finally be able to create your own universe with Pufnstuf?
SK: Oh, my God, well, it’s your first child, you know? It’s amazing. And we knew nothing! Marty even said, “Hey, we don’t know anything about making a television show. Sid, you better go to the library and get a book!” [Laughs.] I mean, we came from live theater. Marty, say something!
MK: Well, you’ve been talking! He hasn’t even gotten to ask any questions since the one about the circus. “Hey, let me talk about the circus some more!” I’m only kidding.
SK: Well, you were very, very young. You were, like, eight years old when I…
MK: Oh, let’s get off the circus.
SK: No, I’d say it was a very important part of my life. And it was the groundbreaking thing for what we’re talking about! I mean, that was the foundation of how we came up with all these crazy things. I think that’s a very important part of my life. I mean, Marty wasn’t involved, but… okay, we’re off the circus.
MK: Twenty minutes later. But okay. [Laughs.]

AVC: Okay, Marty, what was the creation of Pufnstuf like for you?
MK: Well, what I did was, I took this thing from a puppet act to a business. Okay? That was my initial contribution. Pufnstuf came out of the World’s Fair in Texas from the year before, in 1968, and we did a pavilion for the Coca-Cola company, who had done business with us where they sponsored our shows at Six Flags. So we did their pavilion, and that’s where Pufnstuf was born. So when we did The Banana Splitsfor Hanna-Barbera, NBC and Kellogg’s would come by our place and see the progress. So the head of programming said, “Why don’t you do your own show?” So we used Pufnstuf the character, and then we gathered all the troops to do our first series. I think I sent my sister out to get a book about how to produce a series, because we didn’t know how to do it at the time. So we were learning on the job. SoPufnstuf was really the beginning of our television career, other than that we’d done some guest-star appearances with the puppet on Dean Martin’s show and several others prior to that.

AVC: Given the limited experience you had in the field, are you surprised that you did as well as you did?
MK: Well, what I first did was—I was friends with Si Rose, who had produced many sitcoms and was successful, and he was actually winding down. He made so much money that he probably didn’t want to work anymore. So I asked if he would come about and help us produce the show, and he was the big difference. He was a writer and a producer, and he was very funny. He was involved with our first four shows. You know, when you do television or movies, you’re not doing this alone. This is not like Picasso going in a closet and drawing a picture. We surrounded ourselves with some great people —artists and producers and directors—and we just had the best people. When we did Land Of The Lost,Star Trek: The Animated Series was cancelled that year, so we got most of the Star Trekwriters. We were always getting great people and bringing them into our camp.
SK: Not only that, but another reason why we got great people was that our shows were so odd and so creative that they wanted to work on something as wacky as that. I mean, it was like stepping into another world for them. So we never had a problem getting famous people, even though we had no money. Pufnstuf was done for $54,000 an episode. Even though we lost a lot of our own money…
MK: Yeah, it wasn’t done for $54,000. The network gave us $54,000.
SK: Yeah, that’s what they gave us.
MK: We’re still paying the dues for Pufnstuf. That cost $100,000 an episode. I guess today that would equal about $600,000.
SK: No, it would be $2 million.
MK: No, it wouldn’t be $2 million. But it would be a lot.

AVC: You’ve said many times that, despite people’s suspicions and concerns, you were not on drugs when you created these shows. But were you at least conscious that people might think you were?
SK: Well, we were always accused of that. But hey, three presidents said that they smoked pot. It was the ’70s. It was a psychedelic period.
MK: The bottom line, basically, is that we weren’t on drugs. If we were on drugs like they say we were, we definitely would be dead today. Okay? Maybe all of the college kids, they might’ve been on drugs while they were watching it.

AVC: Oh, they definitely were.
MK: We didn’t know we were having that influence, though. We didn’t do our shows directed at drug connotations.
SK: It was amazing how, at the end of the show, Pufnstuf would say, “Keep those letters and postcards coming in!” And it was crazy: We were getting up to 10,000 letters a week, you know, and most of them were from college kids, ’cause they’d get up on Saturday morning and watch it. Like they did with Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It was the thing to do on a Saturday morning, regardless of being a kid or an adult.
MK: You know, let me talk about what’s going on right now. We’ve got Sigmund And The Sea Monsters that’s coming out on DVD in September, and we’re working on the Sigmund And The Sea Monsters movie. We’re in the process of deciding where we’re taking it. And right now, you know, we’ve been very fortunate. We’ve got Lidsville, which was our third series, and we’re developing it at DreamWorks. We’re surrounding ourselves on that picture with some major talent, music-wise and the writer. I was told not to mention the two guys doing the music, but one of them has won eight Academy Awards, so someone will have to figure out who that is. [Laughs.]

AVC: With Land Of The Lost, you had Will Ferrell in the lead role, which is dream casting for a comedy, but was there ever any talk of taking the property more seriously? Because you had some top-notch writers on that series, and there are some surprisingly solid sci-fi concepts going on if you take the time to look for them.
MK: Right. Well, what happened was, I was working mostly with our managers, and I really wanted Will Ferrell to do the movie. [Laughs.] Not knowing what was going to happen. And once we got underway, it’s like once the train’s out of the station, you can’t bring it back. But you know, the way it wound up was, the series had all the heart and the movie was all comedy. I don’t know, it probably was closer to Saturday Night Live than it should’ve been. But we got the movie made. And the movie cost a lot of money. I think the fans were bugged. The fans were pissed off. They were hoping it would be more like the series. The new kids, the high-school and college kids today, it’s big on HBO and on DVD. I mean, we were No. 1 for two weeks on DVD. But we were unfortunate when we opened. We switched our date, because Harry Potter was moved into our date, and then we wound up opposite The Hangover, which we thought would be good. So they wound up scoring real big.
SK: But we also learned one huge thing about our properties. You know, it’s like a studio buying a book, and then they take it, they put their own spin on it, and they ruin it, and people become really angry, because they really loved that book. I think that was a mistake we had. You really just don’t take away the important elements. Like Marty said earlier, the heart of the piece, it didn’t have that. And especially the fans, they become angered.
MK: Well, you know, also… I want to get off Land Of The Lost, but everybody got excited walking on the stage and seeing the sets. I don’t know what the sets cost. $30 million? The bottom line is, that isn’t what makes the movie.
SK: It’s the script.
MK: We’re at fault with this also. We produced this movie. You don’t have a lot to say once the director gets hold of it. But we got the movie made.
SK: You also go, “Wow! Universal! Will Ferrell!” All the top people in town were connected with it, and they kept coming up to us and saying, “Oh, my God, this is going to be huge and fabulous!” And so you really lose control or whatever, and you go, “Wow, I guess it is!”
MK: Well, I think enough of Land Of The Lost right now.
SK: Well, but it has a lot to do with our next property, too. We’re being very careful and we’re watching over everything that’s being done right now.

AVC: To touch on the original Lidsville for a moment, can you talk a bit about working with Charles Nelson Reilly, who played the evil Hoodoo?
SK: Charles Nelson Reilly was a friend of mine and a very, very funny man, so he came in and did it. He didn’t want to. I think he was doing it as a favor to Marty and myself. He hated the idea of putting on that green makeup. But you know, he wasn’t really doing movies at the time. Wasn’t he just a comedian at that time? Yeah, I think he was just making appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or whatever. But in Lidsville, he really created that character, that Charles Nelson Reilly character you know.
MK: Yeah, well, he didn’t create that, Sid. He was that character. He played that character. That’s who he is. Or was.
SK: No, that’s who he became after that character. He did Hoodoo all the time, not even knowing it.
MK: Well, I don’t know. Okay.

AVC: Is there a series that you’ve done over the years that you felt was particularly underrated?
MK: Well, you know, when you’re on Saturday morning, you feel like you’re underrated, because you feel like the audience is confined to kids and a handful of adults. So, that’s a good question, but…
SK: Lidsville. You know, I loved that show, because it was so unique, so original. And it didn’t do as well as the other shows, and I think it was because of the competition. I don’t know if the kids just weren’t watching it as much. I don’t know what we were with Lidsville, but that’s a very, very original concept, you know?
MK: The shows, most of them got 17 episodes, and then you got canceled because… well, whatever the reason. New program directors, maybe. But to catch on with 17 episodes is pretty rough, and we did it. And I think Sid is wrong about Lidsville. That wasn’t a poorly rated show at all. As a matter of fact, we got the highest ratings for women 18 to 39, for some reason. So that show, it wasn’t high on the list to have a movie made, I’ll tell you that, but when we went to DreamWorks, the head of development there loved Lidsville. He was very into Lidsville. His name was Bill Damaschke. He loved it. And then Conrad Vernon, who works for them a lot as a director, who did Monsters vs. Aliens and Shrek 2, he’s doing Pufnstuf for us, which is at Sony as a movie. And he brought it with us over to Bill at DreamWorks, and they loved it, and we’re immersed in that thing. And they’re a great company to work with.
SK: Oh, they’re amazing.
MK: Not just creatively, but they spend the money to get the best talent. So we’re in good shape with them. And Katzenberg, of course. Jeffrey is someone that I’ve gone back with and was close with back in the days of Paramount, back when he was there.

AVC: As you mentioned, you’d made some prime-time appearances pre-Pufnstuf. Was it difficult to transition from Saturday mornings to doing prime-time variety shows?
MK: Well, it isn’t once they say they want you to do it. [Laughs.] And after that, you go surround yourself with people who have that sort of expertise, which is what we did when we did Donny & Marie, which was the first one we did. Fred Silverman and Michael Eisner were at ABC at the time, and they wanted us to do it.
SK: Fred Silverman saw Donny and Marie [Osmond] on an afternoon talk show, and he thought, “Oh, my God, they’d be great for a variety show!” And Fred loved us. He just thought we were so creative. And he came to us with that idea. And then we put together a whole concept for that show and flew to Provo, Utah, and presented it to the Osmond family. And the rest is history.

AVC: Donny and Marie weren’t the only pop stars you worked with. You also did shows with the Bay City Rollers and Pink Lady.
MK: I never heard of The Bay City Rollers. Only kidding. Well, Pink Lady was Fred Silverman’s idea, though of course, he said it was ours. [Laughs.] They were big music stars in Japan, but at the time, I think they had us opposite The Dukes Of Hazzard, so I don’t think we had a chance. The Bay City Rollers Show, that was another Saturday morning show that was… [Long pause.] To tell you the truth, that was the only show where we ever got canceled right in the middle of the run. Fred Silverman called and said, “I’m gonna do you a favor: I’m gonna cancel the show.” [Laughs.] So that was The Bay City Rollers. And that’s a whole separate story. Which you don’t have time for. For now, we’re working on the movies for Pufnstuf, Sigmund And The Sea Monsters, and Lidsville. Those are the ones that we’re putting a lot of energy behind.

AVC: Lastly, I have to ask: Have you guys ever seen “The Altered State of Druggachusetts,” from Mr. Show?
MK: Sure.
SK: Oh, yeah.

AVC: What did you think about it?
MK: What did I think about it? I thought it was funny.
SK: I loved it! It keeps us alive, you know? Even when people make fun of us.
MK: We don’t care if they make fun of us. We don’t take ourselves that seriously.

Fortunately it also provided a venue for a number of talented people that have affected my life in ways that I could never successfully articulate; Jim Henson, Glen A. Larson, Stephen J. Cannell, Sherwood Schwartz, Kenneth Johnson, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and Sid and Marty Krofft.

Throughout my childhood, Sid and Marty Krofft brought imagination and verisimilitude to Saturday mornings. Among their work that will exist forever in my heart as “comfort television” simply because of the joy they provided me as a child are such shows as H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Bigfoot and Wildboy, Lidsville, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, Far Out Space Nuts, Wonderbug, The Bugaloos and Dr. Shrinker.

Last week, prior to his appearance at Comic-Con, I had the pleasure and honor to speak with Marty Krofft about his past, present and future work.

Were you and your brother, Sid, close as children?

Well actually, not, because he’s eight years older than me, so he was off and running, doing his act, while I was still going to school.

How did your professional relationship begin?

Actually, he needed some help in his act, and I was in New York working and going to school, and he wanted me to come join him. I think it was at the Flamingo with Judy Garland. He was the opening act.

Now, I had read that Pufnstuf was originally conceived as a Western, which is why he had the cowboy boots and the hat. Is that accurate, and how did it evolve into the series that was eventually broadcast?

Well, you know what, I don’t know where you got that from, but I don’t think that’s right. I think that Pufnstuf was patterned after like a Jim Nabors kind of character.

One of the things that’s kind of a common theme throughout many of your series is the theme of “a stranger in a strange land”. Was that intentional?

Oh, you know, we’ve always taken the kids to the places that we did the shows.

A collaborator of yours, Si Rose, said that Sid did the dreaming, and then you would make it happen. Do you think this is a fair assessment?

Yeah, I would say that’s right. Because whatever creative that I contributed was, I’m sure, somewhat substantial. I was rethinking everything. If an idea came up, and it didn’t work, then we would try to discuss it without having an argument, since we’re brothers.

Most of your successful shows only lasted a season or two.Land of the Lost made it to three, yet they ran for years and years. Were the shows initially cancelled, or did you design them to just run for a limited amount of time?

With Pufnstuf, they picked it up, but they only offered us a few pennies more to do it, and we already had lost close to $1 million the first time around. NBC only pays us $54,000/half hour, and the shows cost close to $100,000/half hour. So that one we turned down. In some of the other cases, they only wanted to do stuff that was theirs. Of course, by the time we got to Land of the Lost, those people that were at the network were still there, and the show was such a hit rating-wise, that they just kept picking it up. To have 43 episodes on Saturday morning is really unusual.

When the Pufnstuf movie was made, and it had also been done with Batman, during the first season, they decided to do a feature film. The Pufnstuf movie is a prequel, encapsulates the series, and then a sequel in itself, and it goes further. Was that always the intention, that it’s it’s a self-contained entity?

Not really. These things aren’t thought through that well. That’s true. It was the middle of October, and I went to Lou Wasserman at Universal who I knew – he ran Universal – and I asked him if he wanted to do Pufnstuf, which he’d never heard of. And we had aLife Magazine big story at the time, and the show was doing big in the first month-and-a-half.

And he asked me, “How much is this money going to cost?” I think the number was $1 million at the time, probably equal to $10 million today. And he said, “Oh, that’s too much money.”

So I said, “What if I get Kellogg’s to come in and pay half?”

So he said, “Well if you do that, I’ll do that,” figuring he’d never see me again.

So I went to Battle Creek, Michigan, sat with the chairman of the board. He fell asleep during the meeting. He woke up just in time to say yes.

Perfect.

So I went back to Wasserman and we pulled that all together.

Your shows, especially at the time, were a departure from other children’s programming. They were very colorful, they were surreal. As a kid, I thought some of them were scary, but they really come from a singular vision. It’s kind of an unusual thing with producers, but would you consider the work of you and your brothers as auteurs?

Well, you remember, when we came in with Pufnstuf, the networks were loaded with animation, so this was one of the departures. And of course, we had already worked on live action before. It wasn’t our show; it was Hanna-Barbera’s. Kellogg’s and NBC would come to our studio, watch the progress of The Banana Splits, and that gave them the comfort level to pick up Pufnstuf. We were asked to do that by the head of programming.

One day, he came in. He said, “Why don’t you come up with your own show?”

Land of the Lost also featured some fairly prominent science fiction writers, like Larry Niven and David Gerrold, among the writing staff. Were these people you went after because of their pedigree? Or, did they come to you?

Well, I don’t know what happened. But, I do know that, when Star Trek was cancelled, that was about the time we were doing Land of the Lost, so those writers were available. So, we probably went to them, and we got a number of those people. It was a big addition.

How do you think children’s programming has changed since you were producing for Saturday mornings, and do you think it’s gotten better or worse?

Well, I don’t know. I think that it’s gotten both. There are good shows on, and there are shows on that are not our favorites. But, to tell you the truth, don’t ask me about the shows, because we never watched other shows when we did our stuff, whether it be primetime or Saturday morning. We created this thing really from scratch.

In the last decade, decade-and-a-half, there were definitely shows like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and Yo Gabba Gabba, which are obviously influenced by your work. Are you familiar with them at all?

Yeah, I know those guys really well. Paul Reubens called me on the phone two weeks ago. If it wasn’t for us, he wouldn’t have had that Pee-wee Playhouse and that career. And we met with the guys who did the other one, and they totally use our show as a path to what they’re doing.

I know there’s a Lidsville feature film at Dreamworks and, also, what is the status of Pufnstuf and the Sigmund and the Sea Monsters features?

Well, I think that Pufnstuf is in good shape. (For Lidsville) We’re putting together a team. It’s a musical, so we’re putting together the music writers and the writers. Although, I can’t talk about them. They’re not signed. We’re really lucky to find the music guys. One of them has won an Academy Award (Alan Menken), so we’re in good shape.

Is Pufnstuf still in development, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters?

Oh yeah. Pufnstuf still is. It’s currently in redevelopment. Pufnstufhas been developed a few times, and now we hope that we’re going to get there. And Sigmund is being re-developed right now. So, it’s a slow process. We’ve got to be patient.

Would you want to ever reimagine your shows for television?

Well, I think so.

We’re working on The Bugaloos for television, and we’re partnering with T-Bone Burnett.

It’ll be incredible in the music area with him.

Do you have a favorite among your series?

Well, it’s always the first series that you do, which Pufnstuf, and that’s probably my favorite, and my brother’s favorite.

Land of The Lost: The Complete Series, Pufnstuf The Movie, Sid & Marty Krofft’s Saturday Morning Hits andH.R. Pufnstuf: The Complete Series are now available on DVD.

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters: Season One arrives in stores on September 6th!