Appreciation: Sid Krofft's subversive and fantastical TV puppet worlds will live on

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Puppeteer, producer, self-described “artist” and “dreamer” Sid Krofft, who with his brother Marty made a wonderland of Saturday morning television through the 1970s, died Friday at 96.(Marty, younger by nearly eight years, died in 2023.) Their left-field shared fantasies included “H.R.

Pufnstuf” (magical island, with a dragon for a mayor), “Lidsville” (anthropomorphic hats), “The Bugaloos” (British pop band resembling insects), “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” (human children befriend a mild-mannered sea creature) and “Land of the Lost” (family trapped in a reality inhabited by dinosaurs and monsters).There’s a special, frictional magic to creative teamwork — Laurel and Hardy, Nichols and May, Powell and Pressburger, Rankin and Bass — amplified when the teammates are linked by blood.The brothers Marx, Smothers, Everly, Mills, Jonas, the sisters Andrews and Haim.

Walt and Roy Disney, who, like the Kroffts, split the work of having big ideas and making them possible.Broadly speaking, Sid left the business to Marty, who liked it and was good at it.

His brother, Sid wrote in The Times after Marty’s death in 2023, “helped my dreams grow which quickly became our dreams together.” They didn’t always agree: “Marty and I were oil and vinegar.We worked in different ways, but if you shook us up, we were a great dressing.” Watching them interviewed side by side, Sid soft-spoken and rambling, Marty fidgety and anxious to get to the point, their dynamic is abundantly clear.Sid, who performed professionally from the age of 10, was opening shows for Judy Garland in the late 1950s when an assistant quit and he brought Marty (who had been performing with some of Sid’s puppets back home while his brother worked abroad) into the act.

Together they mounted the adults-only “Les Poupées de Paris,” a “topless” puppet revue à la the Folies Berg�...