Sid and Marty Krofft’s Saturday Morning Hits

Saturday Morning has been an entertainment Mecca for children of several generations. To this day, you can still rise early on a Saturday, pour yourself a bowl of sugary breakfast cereal, and plop down in front of the television for a good three hours of hyperkinetic animated programming which is enough to give you a seizure and make your spit hurt. The moods and options have altered drastically since I was a kid (despite the shameless resurrection of many 1980s properties), but the spirit is perhaps largely the same.

For those of us of a certain age, though, the names of Sid and Marty Krofft are nearly synonymous with Saturday Morning. I was born in 1978, so I’m a little behind the curve when it comes to the tentpoles of the Krofft canon, but I do have childhood memories of watching and enjoying such low-budget, special-effect-heavy TV programs like “Land of the Lost” (1974), and “Far Out Space Nuts” (1975). For those of you familiar with the Krofft canon, I need not describe the gloriously cheap puppets, the colorful sets, the surreal conceits, and the hallucinatory visuals. For those of you who have only hears the names of the Krofft family through word of mouth, luckily for you Viveni Entertainment has put out a 2 ½-hour primer DVD, collecting single episodes of seven of their hit shows. This may not be as holistic as a lot of the obsessive, complete-seasons completist collectors may like, but this is a great way of introducing yourself to – and enjoying – the works of a pair of pop culture icons.

Let’s look at each show.

H.R. Pufnstuf (1969)

A young boy named Jimmy (Jack Wild, a dead ringer for a young Bud Cort) has in his possession a magical flute named Freddy. Freddy can speak (!). Jimmy climbs onto a talking boat one day (!!), and is whisked away to Living Island by the wicked Witchiepoo (Billie Hayes), who would use Freddy for her own nefarious purposes. Luckily, Jimmy is rescued by a six-foot dragon with a big, round yellow head named H.R. Pufnstuf (voice of Lennie Weinrib, body of Roberto Gamonet). H.R. is the mayor of Living Island. The show is centered on Jimmy’s constant attempts to escape this bizarre, colorful fantasy world of living weirdos.

The episode on the disc, “Show Biz Witch,” has Jimmy and H.R. putting on a show to earn money for some magical snake oil, sold by the local giraffe. Yes, I actually typed that sentence. When talking about Krofft shows, you find yourself giving descriptions that you never thought you’d use. Jimmy sings a song about pronouns. Witchiepoo and her bumbling minions enter the contest in disguise and kidnap Freddy. Freddy manages to distract them by playing hot jazz, and Jimmy and H.R. retrieve Freddy and push Witchiepoo into a deep-fryer.

The jokes are all flat and kind of lame, and the sitcom setup does not deviate from classic TV structure one iota, and the laughtrack is just as obnoxious here as it is on any TV program. In a way, these shows set kids up for more sophisticated sitcoms later in life. “H.R. Pufnstuf” is not a witty show that adults can understand (like, say “Rocky and Bullwinkle”), so all its virtues lie in its haphazard puppeteering, and weird, weird visuals. It contains a kind of dream logic that only kids can really get behind. Even the adult members of the cast, while giving their all to the weird-ass roles, seem confused by the proceedings.

It’s been said that the Kroffts took handful of LSD while making these shows, but several times in interviews, they have refuted this. This was actually just what they liked to see. God bless them.

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (1973)

Sigmund (Billy Barty) is a bad, bad sea monster, who looks like a living pile of raked leaves. When he is kicked out of his home, he finds a friend in the humans Johnny Stuart (Johnny Whitaker, who looks like the wrong end of a Mickey Dolenz), and his little brother Scott (Scott C. Kolden). Johnny and Scott hide Sigmund in their super-secret beachside clubhouse, trying to keep him hidden from his wicked family and the prying eyes of their nosy neighbor (Mary Wickes).

If you think its hard getting past the silly sea monster costumes in “Sigmund,” just wait until we get to “Lidsville.”

The episode on the disc “Make Room for Big Daddy,” Sigmund’s wicked older brothers, Blurp and Slurp run away from home after breaking father’s shellevision, and hide out in Sigmund’s clubhouse where they resume bullying him. Then Sigmund’s father also runs away to avoid having dinner with his mother-in-law. The characters may be shambling mounds of lichen, but they behave like sitcom archetypes from “The Honeymooners.” Eventually Johnny and Scott, using their own TV set and some clever subterfuge, manage to scare the interlopers back home and deflect their nosy neighbor. Then Johnny sings a treacly song about togetherness. That is sounds like a bad Monkees b-side is no coincidence; the song’s co-writer was none other than Bobby Hart, who wrote several of The Monkees minor hits, including “I’m not Your Stepping Stone.”

Again, the show’s only virtue is the weird-ass puppeteering and the usual sitcom conceits put in the mouths of these bizarre creatures.

Bugaloos (1970)

“Bugaloos” plays like a live-action version of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon: A rock group called The Bugaloos live in an enchanted forest with their firefly friend Sparky (Billy Barty again). The Bugaloos are humans with bug wings and antennae. They are friendly, hip British teenagers who like to surf on blades of grass, and chat with the forest creatures. They are envied by Benita Bizarre (a committed but baffled Martha Raye), a shrill, would-be musician in her own right, who constantly tries to impede their blissful success. Martha Raye strikes me as a talented theater veteran who is taking this job for a quick buck, and doesn’t understand a lick of what’s going on, but will be damned if she won’t act the hell out of her scenery-chewing role.

The episode on the disc is “The Great Voice Robbery” in which Benita kidnaps the Bugaloos’ pretty ingenue Joy (the pretty Caroline Ellis, wearing a pink miniskirt, perhaps the object of many a childhood crush), and uses a magical machine to swap their voices so that Benita may record a hit record. It’s then up to the other Bugaloos to break into Benita’s lair, slip past her Nazi rat guard (who actually makes a “very interesting” joke), and swap their voices back. It’s fun to see the actors mouth one another’s dialogue.

There’s a curious trend with these shows: the heroes are all clean-cut bland virtuous types with little to no personality, while the villains are all wildly weird, cackling supermonsters with big thoughts and grand schemes, and are played by more energetic actors. I suspect that The Kroffts had a much stronger affection for the villains in their shows than they ever did for the heroes.

Lidsville (1971)

This is, in my opinion, the weirdest of the lot. A boy named Mark (Butch Patrick, also known as Eddie Munster) finds a magician’s hat at a carnival. He climbs inside, and finds himself lost in an alternate dimension where all the residents are hats. He befriends the local hat people. Hat people. People made of hats. The good hat people are nurse hats and chef hats and pith helmets and top hats. The bad hats are pirate hats and vampire hats and gangster hats. My brain aches.

The bad hats are rules over by the green-skinned magician Horatio J. Hoodoo, who is played by the legendary Charles Nelson Reilly. Even Reilly, though, who has one of the most finely-tunes sense of camp of anyone in history, still seems a little baffled by appearing in “Lidsville.” He flies around town in his giant crushed top hat, and villainously works to keep Mark in Lidsville. Mark has an aide in the form of Weenie the Genies (Billie Hayes again), who lives (like Holly from “Red Dwarf”) in a ring on his finger.

The enclosed episode of “Mark and the Bean Stalk,” and is as you’d predict: Mark finds a magic bean that grows an enormous beanstalk that allows him to reach his home world. Horatio cackles and turns into Mark and promises to take over the other dimension. Mark is spirited away to Horatio’s castle, where he is tormented by Horatio’s minions. The pirate hat is named Hook-Nose.

On a disc of already hallucinatory weirdness, “Lidsville” is a standout.

Electra Woman and Dynagirl (1974)

The three remaining entries on the disc were 15-minute short programs that were included as part of “The Krofft Supershow,” a rotating roster of various shows. The first of these three was the wonderful “Electra Woman and Dynagirl,” which earnestly continues the campy superhero tradition started by Batman a decade earlier.

Electra Woman (Dierdre Hall) is a tall, blonde bombshell with an electrocomp on her wrist that can fire blasts of electro-energy. Her sidekick is Dynagirl (Judy Strangis), a pigtailed schoolgirl type who is irrepressibly virtuous. They ioperate out of a secret lair, and do battle with colorful costumed villains. The two heroines wear read, skintight spandex, and, I can assure you, were the object of many a fetish. That Dynagirl turns evil in the enclosed episode, and wears black lipstick and purple blush only makes her sex object status stronger.

In the enclosed episode, our heroines fight Ali Baba and his wicked genie, played by a wonderfully hammy Sid Haig. Ali Baba has kidnapped a professor, who can make a perfume that turns bad people good, and good people bad. Dynagirl gets sprayed, and becomes a wicked, cackling villainess. Electra Woman’s weapon of the week was a freeze ray (just like James Bond, the heroes always find a way to use the widget of the week), and she uses it to dispatch of the villain, and restore Dynagirl. Dynawow. It’s actually a bit more involved than that, but I wouldn’t want to give too much away.

“Electra Woman and Dyna Girl” is an oddity in the Krofft canon, as that it’s the only show that’s not dedicated to sitcom conceits or comedy. This is a perfectly earnest show that banks on action and tension. The sets are markedly Krofftian, but the show feels less like a madcap cartoon and more like a primetime action series. It adds some much-needed diversity to the set.

Wonderbug (1974)

Also part of “The Krofft Supershow,” “Wonderbug” was about a trio of twentysomethings who discover a beaten-up dunebuggy in a junkyard. They fix up the engine, and give it the nickname Schlepcar. When you blow the horn on Schlepcar’s windshield, it transforms into Wonderbug, a living, thinking (but non-speaking) dunebuggy that can fly. It’s never explained how Schlepcar came into being, or where it got its superpowers, but I suppose that surreality is par for the course in this Krofftian universe.

There are two “Wonderbug” episodes on the disc, one is an old west episode, and one is a kidnap episode where an evil magician hypnotizes Wonderbug into doing ill. The human characters are flat and bland, and make horrible puns. “Wonderbug” feels like “Scooby Doo” in many ways. The humans disguise themselves as detectives at one point, and you get to see them impersonating Columbo and Kojak.

I have little to say about “Wonderbug.”

Bigfoot and Wildboy (1974)

“Bigfoot and Wildboy” make this disc worth the price of admission. If “Wonderbug” was chipping away at your reserves of tolerance, “Bigfoot and Wildboy” will restore your faith. What we have is a disco-scored superhero show with, yes, the legendary Bigfoot as the star, and a blonde hunky kid in a leather bikini as his sidekick. Bigfoot speaks a stilted ape-man language, and can run fast and jump high. He raised Wildboy as his son. They spend their time traversing the woods, saving injured animals and doing good deed. Occasionally, they have to do battle with space aliens. We have trekked firmly and gleefully in solid HFS territory. That it was shot on scratchy film, rather than the typical clear-picture Betamax only adds to its charm.

This is a show that is so in tuned with my inner 10-year-old that I found myself squealing with joy. Bigfoot is a hero. That’s so effing cool. Bigfoot is a fucking pimp.

The episode enclosed is a two-parter where Bigfoot (Ray Young) and Wildboy (Joseph Butcher) do indeed do battle with hooded space aliens who can melt rocks with their hands, and trap people in stasis bubbles. Bigfoot is a furry guy who can jump great distances. Wildboy is there to translate. Bigfoot is like the archetypal outsider of ancient legend; Like Enkidu from the epic of Gilgamesh, Bigfoot is a wildman with a good heart, who is tamed by friendship, and only interested in punishing evildoers. He is possessed of an ineffable animal intelligence that we human can never truly know. There is something classical about “Bigfoot and Wildboy” that will tap into any young boy’s imagination.

For this last show, I found myself nostalgic for the Saturday Morning’s of yore, before hyperactive Anime adaptations, and shallow retread of ’80s cartoons were the word of the day. When a wild concept like a superhero Bigfoot could be filmed and presented without a trace of irony or giggles. It was then that I reached a strange state of surreal, sugar-flavored Saturday Morning bliss. I found myself, once again, worshipping at the alter of the Gods of Saturday Morning.

Any DVD collection that can invoke such a wide variety of Proustian bizarre excesses is surely one worth seeing.