Letters to the Editor
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Psychedelic Sid & Marty
Thanks, I enjoyed that piece. The phrase "neon Narnia" is a hilariously clever desciption of the Kroft style.
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Love it!
The HR pufnstuf movie was on a few weeks ago, and provided a few hours of entertainment (didn't realise Mama Cass was in it!)
I never watched it as a child, but it sure was a fun way to spend Sunday afternoon as a 25 year-old :)
I just hope that the fun classics from my childhood like Labyrinth and Dark Crystal don't get replaced with some lame politically correct computer-animated dinosaur or something.
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Nothing like them, before or after!
I'm part of that odd generation that grew up watching the Krofft shows. I was born in 1964. My wife is a few years younger than me, and she'd never heard of them - although she'd watched more TV than I did, as a kid.
Any time I meet anyone born in 1964, though, I always find that we speak the same language: Krofft. We all dreamed about those shows, and our imaginations were forever changed - twisted? liberated? - by them.
So I bought the complete Pufnstuf and Lidsville series on DVD for my little boy. He's going to have the same bizarre images as I have floating around in MY subconscious. That may seem domineering, but have you looked at modern television for kids? It's either gross-out animation in the spirit of Ren & Stimpy (but without the talent) or the same perky-happy-crappy garbage that has been churned out for defenseless kids practically since the medium began.
Yes, I'm talking about you, Dora the Explorer, Little Einsteins, Hannah Montana, and the atrocity of the Winnie-the-Pooh shows featuring an animated perky AMERICAN GIRL in place of Christopher Robin (who was, damn it all, ENGLISH!). I'm talking about YOU, Disney! Mickey Mouse was NEVER funny!
And every single goddamned show is backed up by millions of dollars worth of focus groups, psychological research, and products to buy, buy, buy.
It's sanitized. It's sterilized. It's televisual pap! And what is that doing to the minds of our children?
Take a look at a random episode of Lidsville. It would never be made or broadcast today. The evil Hoodoo the Magician (Charles Nelson Reilly) having lost his "zap" powers to Raunchy Rabbit (I swear to God I am not making this up) dresses up as a female bunny and seduces the hapless lagomorph out of his powers!
Adults cringe in amazement at the sight of the tutu-wearing girl-bunny-disguised Reilly rolling around on a chaise longue with a little person in a bunny costume. But kids love it.
It feels as if Sid and Marty Krofft got a gang of brilliant maniacs together, said "hey gang, let's put on a show!" and made it happen. They're incredibly lose and amateurish compared to modern shows. There are obvious mistakes; for example, take the opening of Lidsville. Butch Patrick's fall into the giant hat was visibly botched - you can see his foot kind of bouncing there as he hits the padding upside-down at the bottom of the hat.
TV executives today would fire anyone for suggesting that a mistake like that be broadcast. But god forbid that even a smidgen of the creativity and imagination that the Krofft's displayed in almost every episode get on the screen now! Our screens must remain sterile...as sterile as our children's minds. I think that the time will come when we realize that raising our children in an ideologically pure and sterilized environment destroys their mental immune systems just as raising them without exposure to germs and dirt destroys their resistance to physical disease. Both are a cruel disservice to the next generation.
Pufnstuf and Lidsville were the purest of the divine Kroftt madness, in my book. They give us a window into a brief time when American culture was on the edge of becoming something truly, fundamentally different. Instead, that change was assimilated, digested, and eliminated.
Land of the Lost was a fun show (as a kid I loved it), but didn't have the essential Krofft craziness; that seems to have required giant-headed puppet-costumed. Sigmund & the Sea Monster verged on the weirdness, but somehow never quite reached the same level of strangeness and magic (probably, I think, because unlike Pufnstuf and Lidsville the child-protagonists of Sigmund were never taken away to another, magical world; their California world expanded a little to include sea monsters and other creatures, but it retained a link to reality that somehow made everything seem a little flat.
As for the Bugaloos, I didn't watch it much as a kid. And when I tried to watch it as an adult, I just couldn't take it. Yes, it seems to be the true Krofft quill...but maybe you have to have first seen it with the eyes of a child to be able to really enjoy it.
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Ah, memories!
I remember one Pufnstuf episode that ended with Witchiepoo's castle catching fire and her desperately trying to blow out(?!) the flames.
"In the middle of the summer, in the middle of a park
There began a great adventure for a boy whose name was Mark..."
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The Altered State of Druggachusets!
The entire Krofft genre was nailed on Mr. Show with this sketch. Unfortunately, on the Mr. Show Season One DVD set, this sketch is hidden in the extras - basically a "best of" show that was run before the second season of the show, which contains this sketch.
Another parody, not as detailed and longer but still worthy, was done as Saul of the Mole Men on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. It was traitorous (it was not a cartoon, but an amateurish sketch show done on green screen) but it at least attempted to reproduce the Krofft Land of the Lost with even cheaper puppets and worse gags.
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You think the shows were weird, you didn't attend the World of Sid & Marty Krofft in Atlanta
Of all the quixotic endeavors the Krofft brothers pursued, the most dubious was their decision to open the world's largest indoor theme park inside downtown Atlanta's Omni (now CNN Center)in 1976. Though it opened with immense fanfare, broken rides and perhaps most importantly, location led to its downfall. This was when Atlanta was in the throes of white flight and any venture inside the perimeter after dark was viewed with paranoid fear. It closed in less than a year.
Though it closed, the park remained pretty much intact on the top floor for awhile. Back then, there was an ice skating rink on the bottom floor of the Omni, and I recall as a six-year-old in 1979 looking up and being freaked out by the whole setup.
But were on the verge of cultural reawakening (or reinhalation?) of the Krofft's talents. There is a "Land of the Lost" movie with Will Ferrell in preproduction, and when it comes out, momentum may start to bring back H.R. Pufnstuf and other classics. Actually, there was an attempt to bring back "Electra Woman and Dyna Girl" in 2001 with Markie Post as an older alcoholic Electra Woman (Dyna Girl ran off with her husband). Alas, the pilot wasn't picked up, but you can find it on You Tube.