Trivia / Sid and Marty Krofft Productions

• The Cast Showoff: Most Krofft shows have at least one character or actor who falls into the category.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Before making it big in the Saturday morning market, the brothers were the developers for Les Poupées de Paris, a 1957 stage show featuring puppet skits that were strictly catered to adults.
• Lying Creators:
  • Up until The New '10s, both Sid and Marty were said to be fifth generation puppeteers, both of whom continued the family legacy of puppeteering from their father, who had been the owner/manager of the Krofft Theatre in Athens, Greece (where Sid was born), resulting in their names being changed from Cydas and Marshopopoulos Yolas to Sid and Marty Krofft. Afterwards, both Sid and Marty finally confessed in an interview that their father was not a puppeteer, and was, in fact, a clock salesman, and that the story of them carrying on their father's work was concocted by their then-publicist.
  • Around the same time, Marty also finally admitted that (after years of fan speculation) yes, the title H.R. Pufnstuf was, indeed, a blatant reference to drugs. Marty still swears, however, that he and Sid have never done any drugs while creating their shows, and claims the idea behind the name came more from a childish sense of humor and wanting to see if they could get away with it and slip it past the network censors. Considering NBC thought the title was a reference to a powder puff rather than reefer smoking indicates they pulled it off.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Most Krofft shows have characters like this; some specific examples include the Ooze family from Sigmund and the Sea Monsters being modeled after the Bunkers.
  • DC Follies alone takes it up a notch, as the entire cast of the show (aside from Fred Willard as himself) were life-sized puppet caricatures of politicians and celebrities who were in the news at the time.
• Oddball in the Series: Their Land of the Lost movie was notably more vulgar in tone and humor than the original 1974 series. This is one of the reasons why the film tanked with fans and at the box office.
• Shoot the Money: Mainly because networks gave them rather small and meager budgets, while their characters and settings cost millions of dollars to create.
• Word of Dante: Many have said that the Kroffts sued McDonald's for ripping off H.R. Pufnstuf with their McDonaldLand concept, when this is actually false. In a 2000 interview for the Archive of American Television, Sid and Marty said that McDonald's commissioned them to create a McDonaldLand for their commercials, which they began doing, then halfway through the creating process, McDonald's told them they decided to pull the plug on the project, so the Kroffts stopped their art department, and that was that... until the McDonaldLand commercials began popping up on television a few months later, without the Kroffts' knowledge, which led to the lawsuit.
• You Look Familiar: The Kroffts had a tendency to use some of the same actors in various different shows of theirs. For example:
  • Billie Hayes played Witchiepoo in H.R. Pufnstuf, then later played Weenie the Genie in Lidsville.
  • Lennie Weinrib did a number of character voices (most notably Pufnstuf) and also played the titular Magic Mongo from The Krofft Supershow.
  • Jack Wild was immortalized as Jimmy from H.R. Pufnstuf, but he also portrayed himself in the special The World of Sid & Marty Krofft at the Hollywood Bowl and an episode of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.