At 94, Sid Krofft is telling untold tales of H.R. Pufnstuf, topless puppets and more

Sid Krofft knows you want to ask him about “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “Land of the Lost.” Maybe “The Banana Splits” and “The Bugaloos,” or “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” and “Lidsville,” too.

Krofft, with his younger brother Marty Krofft, made a LOT of children’s TV shows at the end of the ’60s into the ’70s.

And Sid Krofft is happy to share those stories with you when he comes to events such as WonderCon in Anaheim, where he’ll have his own booth from Friday, March 29 into the early part of Sunday, March 31. But, oh, there is so much more he can tell you about if you’ll listen – like the decades he spent working before his TV career.

“There’s 30 years before ‘Pufnstuf’ and all that other stuff, the 26 television series that we did,” Krofft says on a recent video call from his Los Angeles home.

“The fans, they grew up with ‘Pufnstuf,’ but they don’t know the story on how that all happened, or of me as a performer,” he continues. “You know, the way I started, I was a street performer at 10 years old.”

Let’s pause to note that Krofft is 94 today, which means it was around 1939 when he set up on the sidewalks of Providence, Rhode Island with his puppet and a wind-up Victrola, performing to help his family get by during the Depression.

“I was in vaudeville and burlesque, too,” Krofft says of his career as a teenage puppeteer in New York City in the ’40s. “I was too young to be in burlesque, so they didn’t let me take a bow because, you know, they would raid the joint. I was in Minsky’s and all those crazy burlesque theaters.

“Two weeks ago, I went (to Kansas City) for the first time since I’d been there in the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1947,” he adds of the two seasons he spent, still a teenager, traveling across the country as a sideshow performer.

“Maybe you’ve heard little bits and pieces,” Krofft says of his life as a renowned nightclub puppeteer. “You know, Judy Garland and Liberace and Sinatra and all those people that I worked with. But to me, this is like the best thing for me. I’m 94 years old. I’ll be 95. I don’t feel it. My brain is still working.”

So in a conversation that ran more than 90 minutes, Krofft talked about the life he led before he and Marty Krofft, who died in November at 86, came to Hollywood.

And don’t worry: We’re gonna get around to “H.R. Pufnstuf,” too.

The kid with a dream

Krofft was born in Montreal, where his parents had immigrated from Eastern Europe, on July 30, 1929, practically the eve of the Great Depression. A decade later they followed family to Providence, Rhode Island, where an Irish couple in the apartment above their]s took a shine to young Sid.

“He was a stagehand that opened and closed the curtains at the Majestic Theatre,” Krofft says. “They would give us hand-me-downs and leftover food. We were really, really poor. And they loved me, because even at 10 years old I lived in a world of fantasy.”

The stagehand, after getting approval from Sid’s father, loaned the kid his trolley pass and snuck him into the premiere of a new movie that had come to town.

“It was ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” Krofft says. “I was actually a shy kid. I knew I didn’t want to be one of the characters, and I was too tall at that time to be a munchkin. But I knew that was the world that I wanted to be in.”

A week later, the stagehand came up with a ticket for Sid to see his first vaudeville show, the Meglin Kiddies, a troupe of child actors, singers and dancers, whose ranks at times included such future child stars as Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper and Judy Garland.

Krofft says he was dazzled by the opening number, a tap dance number in which the kids set off sparks from their toes as they descended a long staircase to the stage. And then:

“All the lights went out and there was a suitcase in the middle of the stage,” Krofft says. “I could just see the outline, it was a puppeteer but it was a kid. And the suitcase opened up and a little clown peeked out. I couldn’t see the strings; I thought it was a little person.”

Music played, the clown climbed out of the suitcase and blew up a balloon. The balloon burst and the clown became oh-so sad.

“I started to cry,” Krofft said. “And the audience was saying, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ the whole audience. I couldn’t stop. The ushers came down and said, ‘Is this your kid?’ ‘No, no.’ And they threw me out. I never saw the ending of the act.”

But the kid was hooked. A friend on his street had a copy of Action Comics No. 1 in which Superman was introduced to the world. Sid and his pal would read it regularly, and one day Krofft says he noticed an advertisement in the back pages for a Hazelle marionette.

“I went to my dad and I said, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,’” Krofft says. “And he said to me, ‘Three dollars’ – he never hit me, but he almost did – ‘and 95 cents? That would feed your family for a month.’ And, he said, ‘You’re a boy and you want a dolly.’ I never forgot those words.”

The ads in the back of the comic books came through again. He ordered boxes of Christmas cards to sell for 50 cents, with one nickel of profit from each sale that was his to keep. By Christmas that year, he had enough to buy his marionette. With the old Victrola the upstairs couple gave him and a record swiped from his mother’s collection, Krofft went out to do puppetry on the pavement.

From the circus to the ice rink

At one point in our conversation, Krofft pauses to ask if he’s talking too much. “I’m trying to get 10 pounds in a 5-pound sack,” he says by way of unnecessary apology. But we do need to streamline the next chapter, so let’s go to the highlights.

At 15, he joined the Ringling Brothers Circus, which provided a great salary – $50 a week – though Krofft remembers his two seasons with the show as a dark and scary time.

“It was frightening to a 15-year-old boy,” he says. “I cried every day. My dad said, ‘$50 a week? That’s $200 a month, we’re millionaires.’ I wanted to come home. My dad said, ‘No, no. You need to support the family.’

In 1949, still a teenager, he bluffed his way into a Broadway ice show starring skating legend turned actress Sonja Henie – even though he didn’t know how to skate.

“I thought I blew it,” he says of his audition. “Later, I got a call. They said, ‘You’re opening on Friday night. So then I spent hours at the rink at Madison Square Garden, all the day and through the night. I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t go backwards but I could skate.”

Through the ’50s, he performed with his puppets in ice shows at Hilton hotels around the country. He played nightclubs in the United States and Europe. While opening for Judy Garland at the Fontainebleau in Miami at the end of the ’50s, his assistant quit, which resulted in younger brother Marty Krofft taking over the job. Their partnership – Sid on the creative side, Marty handling the business – was set.

At the start of the ’60s, Sid Krofft created an adults-only music puppetry revue called Les Poupées de Paris, a show that mixed topless puppets modeled on French cabaret dancers with others modeled on celebrities.

“When we were in the New York World’s Fair, the president of the fair said, ‘You’ve got to put the bras on until five o’clock.’ And, of course, publicity-wise, it couldn’t have been a better thing to happen for us,” he says.

It was such a hit that it played through much of the decade, and in a roundabout way, got Sid Krofft hired by the founder of the Six Flags amusement park chain first for puppet shows, and then as creative director for the parks.

And that’s what going to get us to “H.R. Pufnstuf.”

‘Pufnstuf’ ‘n puffin’ stuff

Sid and Marty Krofft assembled a company that occupied a city block near the Burbank Airport to create rides and designs for the Six Flags parks. When that work was done, Krofft says he wanted to keep his employees on board and got the OK from Six Flags to work for other clients there, too.

First, Hanna-Barbera hired the Kroffts to design characters and sets for the live-action parts of the TV series “The Banana Splits.”

“NBC came in every day to watch us build because, they said, they were making a big investment for a Saturday morning show,” Krofft says. “The head of programming said to me, ‘You know, you need a straightjacket. This place, I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re nuts.’  And then he said to me, ‘If you come up with an idea for a show, we’ll buy it.’”

“Pufnstuf was the main character in a show at the San Antonio World’s Fair for Coca-Cola,” he says. “He didn’t have arms, he wasn’t called Pufnstuf, but all the characters that ended up in ‘H.R. Pufnstuf’ were in that puppet show.

“It was called ‘H.R. Pufnstuf’ because ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ was the big song. That’s where I got that from. He was the mayor (on the show) so the Royal Highness I spun around to be ‘H.R.’ Originally, Freddy the Flute was a harmonica because when I was in the circus, that was my pal, because nobody would talk to me. And then I thought it’s a little old-fashioned, and this kid is the Pied Piper, so I’m gonna give him a talking flute.”

“Sundays with Sid,” the livestream he does on Instagram at 3 p.m. Sundays, finds Krofft sharing stories like these with guests that have included everyone from Dita Von Teese and Corey Feldman to Pat Boone and Charo. It came about as an outlet for Krofft to tell stories about his life before his television work began.