Make Believe

 The flags in Lidsville are hanging at half-mast. Half of the creative genius that brought young Mark to a land ruled by sentient headwear, Marty Krofft, has passed. 

If you grew up in the sixties and seventies, you were legally required to spend a certain amount of time each week in front of a television set playing some if not all of the programming brought to the cathode ray tube by Marty and his brother Sid. The first trip down the Nuevo-psychedelic tunnel the brothers Krofft offered up was H.R. Pufnstuf, the tale of a young man who wakes up in a land controlled by a lizard mayor, and he's the good guy. 

After that, the die was cast. Young people were being forced into existence with oversized puppets of floppy foam on a seemingly endless basis. The Bugaloos, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, The Lost Saucer and Far Out Space Nuts continued the trend. It was Marty Krofft who summoned the former A-list talent like Jim Nabors, Bob Denver, and Jody Whitaker to the family studios to perform for an audience of children who had never experienced Gomer Pyle, Gilligan's Island, and A Family Affair. 

And then there was The Banana Splits. The Splits' theme song may be one of the most fiendishly devised earworms of all time. The rest of the show didn't matter. These anthropomorphic animals in their baggy costumes were our ersatz Beatles. Each week Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorky provided us with a new song and comedy skits that provided a wraparound for additional Krofft Kontent that was sandwiched within. No child alive at this time missed an episode, but oddly enough, no one can recall what any one of them was about. They can sing the theme song, however. Endlessly. 

Then there was the matter of the Bradys. After a very successful run on their half-hour sit com, it was someone's ingenious notion to take the disparate talents of the Brady Family, who were not actually related, and spit them back out in a variety show format, surrounded by the World of Sid and Marty Krofft. This combination of influences should be an historical marker in time, warning all those who view it about the evils of cocaine. 

But now, Marty Krofft has passed. His contributions to pop culture are forever locked away in the hearts and minds of all of us who grew up, mesmerized by the magic he and his brother brought to our Saturday mornings. While it might be unfair to say that Marty stomped on the Terra, it would be correct to say that he truly wreaked havoc with all our sensibilities while he wandered the lands in the brothers' imagination. He will be missed. And eventually forgiven.