Examining Sid Krofft’s legendary TV legacy ahead of Planet Comicon Kansas City
Sid Krofft. // Courtesy Krofft
“I’ve been in this business, and it’s been the only job I’ve ever had for 83 years,” says 94 year old Sid Krofft.
“I do lectures for young kids. They don’t know who I am. Right off the top, I tell them you don’t know who I am, this old guy talking to you. I said take your phones out and you should be doing this every day. Call your mom and grandma and just ask them ‘who Sid Krofft is.’ Did they grow up with my shows? And they did. I’ve worn so many hats.”
That’s appropriate for the co-creator and co-producer for Lidsville, a 1971 TV series where former Munster, Butch Patrick, falls into a magician’s hat and winds up in a land of headwear who act like the people who would normally wear them.
Krofft and his brother Marty are responsible for H.R. Pufnstuf, Bugaloos and Land of the Lost on Saturday morning and Donnie and Marie and D.C. Follies in primetime.
Even the stuff they made for older audiences involved puppets, which Krofft has been operating since he was a youngster in Canada.
He sounds elated to finally meet the fans he’s accumulated at the 25th anniversary of Planet Comicon Kansas City from March 8 through March 10.
The crowds at Bartle Hall will be able to see the face behind all of the great work, something early audiences never had the chance to do.
Before he and his brother had successes on television, Krofft operated or supervised marionettes in venues like Ringling Brothers Circus (with whom he played Kansas City in the late 1940s), the Ice Capades, and Six Flags amusement parks, and his puppets even opened for Judy Garland and Liberace.
The siblings were officially business partners in 1959, and their 1960, Les Poupées de Paris, featured burlesque dancers who literally had strings attached, featuring 12 operations and over 200 puppets.
If audiences never saw Krofft’s face in the early years of his act, it was for a good reason. “All the nightclubs were owned by the mafia, and so I was too young, and my agent would book me in nightclubs, and I couldn’t take a bow. They had booked me for a week, and my dad was the manager, and so my dad didn’t want me to lose the $60,” he says.
“Halloween was a couple of weeks, and since I was all dressed in black and I didn’t work on a puppet stage—I worked on the floor—he said, ‘He’ll put on a mask, and nobody will know what’s behind the mask.’ But it was such a big hit, and nobody had ever seen anything like it.”
Their contributions to the Hanna-Barbera series The Banana Splits led to their debut production H.R. Pufnstuf, which featured Jack Wild as a lad who has been whisked away to land where the mayor (the title character) just happens to be a dragon.
“H.R. Pufnstuff was a character in a huge puppet show for Coca-Cola in the San Antonio World’s Fair. The character was called ‘Luther.’ He was a dragon, but he was a different color. He didn’t have arms, so I used the whole idea for the show. We never did a pilot. I did a beautiful, huge art book with all the characters. (The networks) always bought our shows,” Krofft says.
“Wild had just finished a movie. It wasn’t even out yet, called Oliver!. He was the Artful Dodger. We were sitting in the screening room, and this kid came up, and I said, ‘Lionel (Bart), who’s this kid? He said, we found him in a schoolyard. He never did anything before.”
Krofft says that similar bits of good fortune struck him during the creation of his most popular series, Land of the Lost. For a series that was aimed at youngsters, the brothers Krofft were able to assemble some of the best sci-fi writers, like D.C. Fontana, and makeup artist in the business.
“I had a horseshoe up my butt,” said Krofft. “What happened was Star Trek had just got cancelled. We were shooting a show, and I heard that on the next stage was, oh my God, was Gene Roddenberry. I’d never met him. I wanted him to be the head writer. He said, ‘I’m so busy, but there’s this kid, he’s 22.’ That was David Gerold.”
Krofft says that he and his compatriots wanted to give kids of the 70s the same chills he had as youngster.
“Disney scared the little kids with everything. The mother always died,” Krofft explained. “I was 10 years old, and the second movie I ever saw in my life was One Million B.C. It scared the shit out of me with the dinosaurs eating people.”
Krofft also recalls scaring standards and practices officials at the networks or the FCC. Seemingly innocuous material in shows like Lidsville seemed dangerous to the wrong people.
Krofft said, “On Lidsville, it was a grandma on a motorcycle, and her name was Grandma Hot Wheels. They said she had to wear a helmet. I said, ‘Did you see the character? She is a helmet!’”
Krofft also showed courage in pursuing material that didn’t initially seem kid friendly. He and Marty produced the acclaimed if under-appreciated Pryor’s Place, where the hilariously foul mouthed comic demonstrated an astonishing finesse with material aimed at juveniles.
“I talked to him just after he had been burnt. He went up in flames with the cocaine and everything. I approached CBS, and he will always be the greatest comedian, and everybody learned from him. It wasn’t successful because it was too educational because of the FCC. They wanted the toys, too many commercials with toys,” said Krofft.
Because of the bright colors and jaw dropping images, Krofft shows sometimes come off as psychedelic or at least drug friendly. According to the producer, the association was not intentional.
“I’m the one that created all those shows, and we had absolutely zero knowledge,” Krofft said emphatically.
To prove his point, he cites a bizarre Donnie and Marie duet to Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the Years” where the middle of the number features figure skaters. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen would probably never have come up with those images in their, um, journeys.
Krofft provided a disappointingly mundane explanation for the sequence.
“(ABC Network) said, can you do it in a week? The reason I had ice skaters is because I was in an ice show (Ice Capades).”
Krofft briefly thought he was experiencing something surprising, if not trippy, when he received a fan phone call about D.C. Follies, where puppet versions of Washington powerhouses came to have their drinks served by the gifted wisecracker Fred Willard. Foam versions of the Kroffts played news vendors. Apparently, Ronald Reagan found the show funny.
“The last day he was in office, we got a call from the White House. I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I thought it was the guy on that did his voice (on the show),” he recalled.
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It’s hard not to compare the Kroffts to the Kansas City-raised siblings Walt and Roy Disney.
Like Walt, Sid ran the creative end of his studio, while Marty Krofft and Roy took care of the business operations of the companies.
The Disney brothers kept coming up throughout the 90-minute conversation. Krofft is still looking for a letter received from Walt when he was boy and wanted to put on a puppet show based on Pinocchio. He later met the animation mogul. The Kroffts also built the electric parade for Disney on Parade. 
“We had lunch with Walt Disney, and he said always put your name above everything.” Early in his career, Uncle Walt lost his character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit when others stole the popular bunny, who was later eclipsed by another rodent, Mickey Mouse.
While the Disney brothers needed each other to succeed, Walt and Roy sometimes avoided each other even though they toiled at the same company.
Similarly, Sid recalled, “I hadn’t talked to Marty in four years. There was no need to. He was running the company. He was in the hospital for three weeks. He hadn’t lost weight in his face. He looked like Marty. I talked to him for two and a half hours. I had a picture of him when he was three years old. He was the cutest kid. I dressed him all up for Halloween as a paper boy. I gave him my cap, and it was too big, so I put in on him sideways (laughs).
I said, Marty, ‘I’ll see you in my dreams,’ and shortly after, he passed away.”
The work of both brothers lives on on the Internet. Krofft hosts a live talk show Instagram, Sundays with Sid, where his guests have included Corey Feldman and burlesque goddess Dita Von Teese, and his YouTube channel reveals that some of his work has transcended the Me Decade.
“I just put up something from The Brady Buch Variety Hour, and we got a million and a half hits on it.
