Sid Krofft, who alongside his brother Marty created some of the most gloriously bizarre children's television in history, has died at 96. If you grew up in the 1970s, your Saturday mornings were probably soundtracked by fever dreams disguised as entertainment.
H.R. Pufnstuf. Land of the Lost. Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Lidsville. Shows that made absolutely no sense and yet burrowed into your brain and stayed there for decades.
The Krofft aesthetic was unmistakable: psychedelic colors, rubber-suit creatures, plots that felt like they'd been assembled from random words pulled out of a hat. A boy and his magical flute trapped on an island run by a dragon mayor. Time-traveling humans befriending dinosaurs and sleestaks. A land entirely populated by living hats.
None of it made sense. All of it was unforgettable.
What's remarkable is that the Kroffts weren't trying to make cult classics—they were making Saturday morning kids' shows, subject to network censors and toy company sponsors and all the compromises that entails. They just happened to be deeply weird people with a background in puppetry and a complete disregard for conventional narrative logic.
Sid and Marty got their start in puppetry, creating elaborate shows for nightclubs and amusement parks before transitioning to television. Their first major success was H.R. Pufnstuf in 1969, a show that adults immediately assumed was about drugs and children accepted as perfectly normal television.
"We never understood why people thought our shows were drug-influenced," Sid told an interviewer years later, with what had to be deliberate irony. "We were just making fun shows for kids."
Sure, Sid. Sure.
But here's the thing: whether or not there was actual pharmaceutical inspiration, the Kroffts understood something fundamental about children's imagination. Kids don't need stories to make logical sense. They don't need consistent worldbuilding or explanations for why a talking hat is evil. They just need color and movement and characters who are distinctive enough to tell apart.
The shows had a handmade quality that's been completely lost in the CGI era. You could see the zippers on the monster suits. The sets wobbled. The rubber masks had limited mobility. None of that mattered because the sheer creative audacity overwhelmed the technical limitations.
They also ventured into variety shows—Donny & Marie, The Brady Bunch Hour—with the same psychedelic sensibility applied to more mainstream entertainment. The results were... let's say "of their time."
Marty Krofft survives his brother. Their influence on children's television is incalculable, if only because it's impossible to quantify the impact of deliberate strangeness on developing brains. How many future filmmakers and artists trace their aesthetic sensibilities back to Saturday morning exposure to Krofft productions?
We'll probably never know. But every time you see someone making deliberately weird children's entertainment—Adventure Time, Steven Universe, any number of contemporary animated shows that embrace nonsense logic—you're seeing the Kroffts' legacy.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything. But Sid Krofft knew how to make children's television that doubled as accidental psychedelia, and that's its own kind of genius.
He will be missed, probably while someone is wearing a rubber dinosaur suit.
