Sid and Marty Kroft were responsible for some of the weirdest, most imaginative kids shows in the 1970’s. Their creativity still influences programs today.
Land of the Lost was a strangely good show. Amazing the special effects we use to put up with.
96 is one hell of a run.
H.R. Pufnstuf was arguably the weirdest and trippiest children’s show ever to air on mainstream TV (even measured against Pee-wee’s Playhouse). Even weirder was the fact that McDonald’s chose that show to rip-off in creating their McDonaldland series of commercials, for which they were successfully sued by the Krofts.
I enjoyed a lot of the Krofft shows when I was a kid, especially Land of the Lost and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. They got a lot of bang for their buck - minimal, cheap special effects, but often compelling stories.
Also have a vague memory of a nightmare I had from LotL. A few years ago I was watching some episodes online and saw the very scene from my dream, which was the tyrannosaur peering into the cave Marshall, Will and Holly lived in (from their POV) . This was probably just a cheap puppet, but it struck me as really menacing and scary when I was little.
The Krofft brothers did some really interesting work. It was a good time to be a kid.
I remember shows like Pufnstuf, Sigmund the Seamonster, Bugaloos, Land of the Lost, and Lidsville, but I think they reached their apogee with the multi-feature Krofft Supershow. Particularly Doctor Shrinker and Wonderbug.
Didn’t watch Electra-woman and Dyna-Girl because that was for GIRLS. I mean, if you’re going to watch a show like that you may as well watch shows featuring phrases like “zephyr winds which blow on high, lift me now so I can fly”
Anyone remember Lidsville? I was a big H.R. Pufnstuf fan as a kid of 5 or 6, and Lidsville was a follow-up to HRP. Charles Nelson Reilly played the ‘Witchiepoo’ style bad guy in a town populated by large sentient talking hats. There must have been a lot of Marijuana (or something stronger) consumed in the writers’ room for those shows.
ETA: Curses, ninja’d by Cardigan
I remember watching HR Pufnstuf*, Lidsville, and Banana Splits, but for some reason never got into Land of the Lost. Maybe I had aged out of kid TV by then? But yeah those were some weird surreal shows.
* Puffin’ stuff? There’s your big clue right there.
The dinosaurs didn’t bother me, but I was terrified of the Sleestak.
The Kroffts (both of them) always denied that any drugs were involved, saying that you can’t consistently produce television if you’re high all the time, and that the weirdness was just how their imaginations worked.
Land of the Lost was actually much more science-fictionally sophisticated than it appeared at first glance. It wasn’t just that these people had traveled back through time to the Cretaceous, or whatever. They seemed to have been transported to some kind of alternate dimension, which was really surprisingly well thought-out. The mysterious “pylons” which seemed to control everything hinted at extremely advanced, perhaps extraterrestrial, technology. I remember one episode where the Marshall family was on top of a mountain and looked into the distance through their binoculars, only to spot the distant figures of themselves, seen from behind, suggesting that they were in some kind of self-contained alternate universe. They hired linguist Victoria Fromkin from UCLA to create the language of the Pakuni. An incredible amount of thought went into that Saturday morning “kiddie show.”
Elder millennials who missed out on most of the Krofft productions mentioned above may still remember the early-90s Land of the Lost remake.
One of the items on my Time Machine Bucket List is to see a performance of the Kroft’s nudie puppet show at the 1964 World’s Fair.
“… Can’t do a little 'cause you can’t do enough.”
Strangely, I appreciate these shows more now that I’m an adult than I ever did as a kid.
Remember D.C. Follies? Genius.
I also remember that episode.
I went to their theme park a couple, three times as a kid. It was fun the first time, but a bore the last time… and I don’t recall if this was because it just didn’t have that much to do, or if I were aging out of it.
I just looked it up… it was only open for about 6 months, so I’m pretty confident that I didn’t age out of it.
“and plunged them down 1000 feet below”
1000 feet isn’t really that far down. Why couldn’t they see the upper part of the world just by looking up?
Why were there scenes that made it look like there were 2 moons?
They weren’t just in a valley or low spot on Earth. That fall sent them through some sort of dimensional portal, and they wound up in an alternate dimension, populated by both creatures that had existed on Earth (dinosaurs), and creatures which had never existed on Earth (Sleestaks, Pakuni).
Which also explains:
The first time I heard about HR Puffenstuff was in the November 23 1970 Time magazine cover story about Sesame Street, when I was 13. The two shows came out about the same time, and as the article describes, joined shows like Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room. When I got around to watching it, I kind of grew up a bit, because it was definitely not Romper Room.
The article is a fun read.
Even if they weren’t on drugs themselves, the Sixties psychedelia was so heavily influential on the shows, indirectly you can still pretty much say drugs were involved.
My favorite was Far Out Space Nuts, with Bob Denver. (“I said lunch, not launch!”)
And speaking of Bob Denver, why was the plot of almost all their shows about the main character(s) stranded somewhere and trying to get home?
I’d never really put that together; I wouldn’t say it was “almost all,” but they sure did use it a lot:
- H.R. Pufnstuf
- Lidsville
- Land of the Lost
- Far Out Space Nuts
- Lost Saucer
- Dr. Shrinker
- The Lost island