Marty Krofft, Pufnstuf producer with absurdist touch, dies at 86

Marty Krofft, who partnered with his older brother Sid to become a king of Saturday morning television in the Nixon era and beyond, producing trippy, off-kilter children’s shows such as “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “Land of the Lost” as well as prime-time variety hits like “Donny & Marie,” died Nov. 25 at a hospital in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles. He was 86.

The cause was kidney failure, said his publicist, B. Harlan Boll.

For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Krofft and Sid created an entire universe of short-lived, brightly colored children’s shows, typically featuring addictive songs, oversized puppet heads and anthropomorphic creatures ranging from a googly-eyed marine critter in “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” to an owl with a medical license in “H.R. Pufnstuf.”

The fanciful subject matter, along with names like “Pufnstuf,” which some older viewers interpreted as a reference to marijuana, generated endless speculation that Mr. Krofft and his brother were in altered states while devising the shows. Mr. Krofft insisted there were no drugs involved — “We’re bizarre, that’s all,” he once said — but acknowledged that the shows he worked on were often far less gentle than “Sesame Street” or “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

“We screwed with every kid’s mind,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016, recalling the effect of shows like “Lidsville,” which was set in a psychedelic land of living hats. “There’s an edge. Disney doesn’t have an edge.”

While Sid focused on the creative side, Mr. Krofft was the business force in their creative partnership, which took the siblings from vaudevillian puppet shows to big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. They started working together in the late 1950s as puppeteers, including while opening for Judy Garland at Las Vegas’s Flamingo casino, and turned to television a decade later, creating the costumes for “The Banana Splits,” a Hanna-Barbera children’s show, before launching “H.R. Pufnstuf” in 1969 on NBC.

The show featured a shipwrecked boy — played by Oscar-nominated “Oliver!” star Jack Wild — as well as a talking flute and a friendly dragon, the titular Pufnstuf, who serves as mayor of Living Island. It was an apt name for a place where virtually everything walks or talks, including the trees and clocks and the castle lair of Witchiepoo, a cackling villain who rides a Vroom Broom.

Although the series ran for only 17 episodes, it persisted for years in reruns and syndication and led to a 1970 film featuring Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas. When TV Guide compiled a 2007 list of the top cult TV shows, “Pufnstuf” came in at No. 27.

In part, the show’s creators said, “Pufnstuf” endured because of its elaborate sets and costumes. “With ‘Pufnstuf,’ the network gave us $54,000 a half-hour,” Mr. Krofft told the New York Times in 2006. “They cost us $100,000. But because we spent 100, ‘Pufnstuf’ lives forever.”

Mr. Krofft and his brother went on to produce shows including “The Bugaloos,” an insect-themed version of “The Monkees”; “Far Out Space Nuts,” starring “Gilligan’s Island” actor Bob Denver as an accidental astronaut; and “The Lost Saucer,” with Ruth Buzzi and Jim Nabors as time-traveling alien androids.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the Kroffts also launched variety shows such as “Donny & Marie,” which aired for three years on ABC and starred the singing siblings Donny and Marie Osmond. Later came “The Brady Bunch Variety Hour,” which featured original “Brady Bunch” cast members alongside guests including Milton Berle and Tina Turner, and “Barbara Mandrell & the Mandrell Sisters,” which ran for two years beginning in 1980 and capitalized on the success of one of country music’s most popular singers.

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The Kroffts also made a sitcom, “D.C. Follies,” which ran for two seasons in the late 1980s and starred Fred Willard as a Washington bartender who welcomes politicians and celebrities, all played by puppets.

Still, the siblings remained best known for their children’s shows, which often featured young characters cut off from their family and the wider world — a situation that mirrored the producers’ own childhoods, according to Mr. Krofft.

“My brother and I didn’t have much adult supervision growing up,” he said in an interview for Rob Owen’s book “Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place.” “My brother was out touring with his puppets, my dad died when I was 12, and my mom was not that involved.”

One of the siblings’ most beloved shows, “Land of the Lost,” premiered in 1974 and starred Spencer Milligan as the father of two young children who find themselves transported to a mysterious world inhabited by dinosaurs and primate-like creatures called Pakuni. The series ran for two years and was revived in 1991, with Timothy Bottoms, before being adapted into a 2009 film starring Will Ferrell and a bevy of computer-generated beasts.

The film flopped, although it helped spur renewed interest in the work of Mr. Krofft and his brother, who served as producers. It cost an estimated $100 million, or as Mr. Krofft put it, “more, probably, than the whole career we did.”

The youngest of four sons, Mr. Krofft was born in Montreal on April 9, 1937. According to Boll, the family was of Russian descent, although the Krofft brothers often said they were Greek to get around anti-Russian sentiment during the Cold War. The siblings acknowledged in a 2008 interview with the Los Angeles Times that several details from their biographies were made up, including the oft-repeated claim that they were fifth-generation puppeteers.

Their mother was a homemaker, and their father was a clock salesman who moved the family south to Providence, R.I., and then to New York City. Sid was eight years older than Mr. Krofft, and performed with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus before touring with his father and eventually performing with Mr. Krofft.

Together, the brothers developed a touring puppet show for adults, “Les Poupées de Paris” (“The Dolls of Paris”), that premiered in 1961 and featured dozens of marionettes, some topless. The show drew national attention, especially after its nudity was condemned by the Rev. Billy Graham, and played at world’s fairs in Seattle, New York and San Antonio, helping the brothers get a job making live shows for Six Flags amusement parks.

In 1976, the siblings opened an amusement park of their own, the World of Sid & Marty Krofft. Promoted as the first high-rise theme park, it occupied more than six floors of the Omni International complex in Atlanta but closed after about six months.

Mr. Krofft and his brother fought at times behind the scenes — “We’re both high-strung people,” he told the Associated Press when their park opened — but continued to work together for decades. They launched a new live-action children’s series, “Mutt & Stuff,” on Nick Jr. in 2015 and were presented with a special lifetime achievement honor at the Daytime Emmy Awards in 2018.

For about 50 years, Mr. Krofft was married to Christa Speck, a German-born model who was once Playboy’s Playmate of the Year. She died in 2013. Survivors include their three daughters, Deanna Krofft-Pope and Kristina and Kendra Krofft; his brothers Sid and Harry Krofft; five grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

“My brother and me, in our whole careers, we never watched other TV,” Mr. Krofft told Tablet magazine in 2017, while promoting a “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” reboot for Prime Video. “We created our shows out of our nightmares and whatever else. We never said, ‘Oh, let’s do a show like ‘The Beverly Hillbillies!’ I think that’s why our shows live on. They’re originals. They’ve survived this long; they’ll survive another 100 years.”

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