But if we’re a hit in the morning, we’ll be a smash.” Witchiepoo the witch (Billie Hayes) campaigns for mayor on her Vroom-Broom with vulture copilot, Orson, and her hairdresser, a spider named SeymourĭON’T MISS: The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ Broadway musical pretty much looked like nightmare fuel While an early Sunday evening time slot might be more logical for a bigger audience, Sid Kroft says he’s not too unhappy about Saturday morning: “If we were a semi-hit at night, we’d just be another semi-hit. “She’s not too bad,” he says in his thick, Northern England accent, “but she keeps treating me as if I was 12 years old.”Īnd that, in a living capsule, is an introduction to Pufnstuf and his friends. Jack can’t wait to say, “I’ll be 17 in September.”īecause California laws require a teacher and social worker on the set when “children” are involved, Jack, even though he has completed high school in England, finds one around. Sid Krofft says they would like Jack to say he is 15.
You want to believe your eyes and talk to a kid, but you must keep reminding yourself you are really talking to an aware, bright young man. He has a face worth a billion dollars, with a turned-up nose, blue eyes and shiny, long, brown hair that is always flying because he is always on the run. I spoke to him and right then decided he was the one for our show.” “Then at intermission, I saw him in the lobby. “I saw Jack Wild in ‘Oliver’ at the premiere,” Sid said. They were told they could get any kid to play the part and spend a lot less money for him. Getting Jack Wild to star is typical of the expensive way the Kroffts think. So far, the Krofft brothers, Sid and Marty, successful puppeteers branching into their first television with this show, have invested $350,000 of their own money in the show.
Hr puffin stuff tv#
There are 86 different characters.ĪLSO SEE: Sid & Marty Krofft’s ‘Land of the Lost’ TV show & their amazing amusement park (1975) There are 38 different sets which can be used, and they, cost $1 million. Pufnstuf, pronounced “puffin’ stuff,” is the name of a dragon, the mayor of Living Island, to which Jimmy (Jack Wild) comes after a storm shipwrecks him.Įverything on the island is alive, including the forest, which has hippie trees, social trees, old-men trees, Indian trees. I visited the set in Hollywood and met the show’s star, Jack Wild, an Academy Award nominee for his performance as the Artful Dodger in “Oliver.” The result: Enchantment!ĪLSO SEE: The Banana Splits Adventure Hour intro, theme song, lyrics & more on this trippy retro kids’ show In a new children’s TV fantasy the only “real” character is a boy, Jimmy, played by Jack Wild, shown here with show’s namesake, Pufnstuf (right), and some other puppet friendlies. Pufnstuf will have to change the viewing of habits of adult America if he is going to grab them for an audience.įor Pufnstuf and his friends visit NBC-TV for 30 minutes at 10 a.m. Pufnstuf may be the greatest boon to adult television viewing since Kukla, Fran and Ollie.īut unlike that delightful children’s show, which was telecast in the early evening and which had such a huge following of sophisticated adults, H. HR Pufnstuf: Saturday morning dragon could attract adults (1969)īy Joan Crosby, The Times Herald (Port Huron, Michigan) September 19, 1969 The show is the creation of Puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft. Blinkey mixes a potion to soften and bend Witchiepoo’s magic wand. Jimmy tangles with Talking Skull in a lab where Dr. Pufnstuf is an Oz-like fantasy about a real boy, Jimmy, who is kidnapped and spirited to an isle of people-sized puppets (played by real people) where the mayor, Pufnstuf, is a friendly dragon, his constituents forest types like Judy Frog, an owl, and some talking trees.įor 30 minutes, houses sneeze, doors flirt and a way-out witch is lightly thwarted.Įlsewhere, the old violent TV scene is not exactly vaporized - outer-space maniacs are still trying to suck nitrogen from the universe.īut Pufnstuf saves Saturday - and other puppets should make kids’ weekday TV worthwhile, too. Pufnstuf, a million-dollar puppet show that bowls over kids as effectively as any biff, pow or zap. Though routine cartoon violence has been replaced often by shows that are merely routine, one children’s program substitutes genuine charm for alarm - NBC’s H. The bad old times may be going bye-bye this year on Saturday morning TV. Pufnstuf charms away the Saturday morning violence: Bye-bye to biff, pow and zap (1969) The program - with its human-sized puppets, garish sets, and cartoonish antics - really earned its cult status through reruns that aired through the ’70s and into the ’80s.
The kitschy kiddie TV show debuted in September 1969… and the final episode aired just four months later. Despite its oversized spot in the memory banks of Gen Xers, there were actually only 17 episodes of H.
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