Trippy TV pioneer Sid Krofft is in Orlando for the rescheduled Spooky Empire

In the summer of 1939, a 10-year-old boy in Rhode Island sneaked into a screening of a brand-new film called The Wizard of Oz and was instantly entranced; the next week, he saw his first vaudeville show, where a puppet disturbed him so badly that he was thrown out of the theater for crying. With nickels saved from selling Christmas cards, he sent away for a marionette advertised inside the first-ever Superman comic book, and was soon supporting his family as a street performer. From that humble beginning, Sid Krofft, with his brother Marty, went on to build a brand that left an indelible mark on Generation X through trippy television programs like H.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost.

At age 95, Krofft still hosts a weekly “Sundays With Sid” Instagram Live show (@sidkrofft), and makes appearances at fan conventions like Spooky Empire (spookyempire.com), which was rescheduled after Hurricane Milton for this weekend at the Orange County Convention Center. Our Zoom interview ahead of his Florida visit lasted double the allotted time — and could have continued twice over again — because Sid has almost a century of celebrity-stacked anecdotes and strong opinions to share, including about …

His lifelong Florida connections:

In 1946 I came to Florida at the end of our tour — I was the world’s youngest puppeteer in the freak show of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. … Florida played a huge, huge part in my career, [especially] Miami, because I played the vaudeville house downtown with Mickey Rooney and Spike Jones and the City Slickers… I was the opening act for Judy Garland’s first national tour [and] her last performance on that tour was at the Fontainebleau [hotel in Miami Beach]; then I worked there with Liberace twice, so I have a great love for Florida.

Creating puppet shows with grown-up appeal:

When I chose to be a puppeteer the rest of my life, I knew in order to have my 15 minutes of fame that I had to “go left.” I tell everybody, “Go left, because everybody goes right.” I took the plunge, and it wasn’t always successful. … I knew that nobody took that craft and took it into the adult world. I did, without being naughty or anything like that, [and] it was a plunge, but it became something like no one had ever seen before. So that’s always been my goal.

I was really nervous after we edited the first [H.R. Pufnstuf] show: “We’ve ruined our whole career. Little kids [will watch] that are 4 or 5 years old, but it’s so psychedelic, it’s so adult!”

Terrifying children with monsters like Sleestaks:

Walt Disney always scared the hell out of you, right at the opening usually — Bambi or whatever — and I picked up on all of that.

The network would always say to me over and over again, “We take a lot of flak from the FCC. We need to put some educational things in there.” I said, “No way … I’m not doing it. They go to school five days a week; this is their day, Saturday morning. I’m going to entertain them and fascinate them.” I don’t want to scare them [but] of course, kids got a little scared. I had to do that to get their attention. I know about getting your attention from being in show business.

Remakes and reboots:

I hate, hate, hate reboots. I don’t like [them], and there’s usually a problem in Hollywood when they screw up a book so many times. … Look what they did to Land of the Lost [in] 2009; it was a $200 million Saturday Night Live joke. We just licensed it to Universal, and I knew right at the beginning this is going to be a big flop. Where’s my heart, where’s my baby dinosaur, where’s my family? And I asked that question. “No, we know what we’re doing.” Well, a lot of people got fired at Universal for that movie; there’s always someone to blame, but I had nothing to do with it.

His partnership with Marty, who died in 2023:

He was only 19 or 18 years old when he came out to assist me, because in his yearbook, he said, “I want to be a puppeteer” — he wasn’t a puppeteer — “like my brother, and I want to change my name to Krofft.” So I thought, “He’s family.” I brought him out here, but from the very first day, we did not get along, ever. It’s sad to me. I didn’t even really know that he was leaving us until two days before; no one called. We hadn’t spoken in four years. The last time was when we got our star on the Walk of Fame.

I’m very sad about all of that, and so [are] most of the people that are still with us that saw it happen. That’s my statement, and I have to before I leave the planet straighten all that out. My legacy: That word is really important to me. Nobody’s going to change that.

Making convention appearances at 95:

The main reason I do [conventions] at my age is because I need to touch the fans. I never did that. Their hearts, how they pour it out to me on what it meant to them growing up: It’s my fuel right now, I’m born again. … I can’t wait to come to Orlando. I really hope there are people there that remember me.

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