Everyone once in a while, something makes me realize how very grateful I am to have grown up in the 1970s. People who were adults during that period may remember it as a hellish time of political scandal, long gas lines, runaway inflation, and impractically wide lapels — I believe Jimmy Carter described all of the above as “malaise,” which sums up the historical circumstances of that decade about as well as any other single word — but it was a great time to be a kid. It was before everyone got so paranoid, before anyone coined the term “play date,” before you had to armor up just to go ride your bike. We had real sugar in our Coke, Slurpees came in flavors that weren’t made by Coke, and candy cigarettes were actually called candy cigarettes and not candy sticks or whatever they’re called these days (can you even still get those things?). And to top it off, we had the live-action kid-vid television shows of Sid and Marty Krofft.
There are still live-action TV series being made for children today, but the ones I’ve seen all seem to be junior-size versions of adult shows — for example, there’s one on Saturday mornings about “tween”-age survivors of a plane crash that bears more than a passing resemblance to Lost, and I’ve also seen a Survivor-esque game show with kids. Other kid-vid shows, especially the ones targeted to girls, seem to be rigidly focused on “real-world” experiences, such as surviving family life and the various travails of growing up.
The Krofft shows, by contrast, were colorful, rollicking fantasies that had about as much to do with the real world as onions do with car wax. With the exception of Land of the Lost, which was more-or-less straight science-fiction, the typical Krofft series was a silly romp filled with vaudeville-style humor delivered by people in foam costumes on DayGlo sets that made up for their obvious cheapness with their sheer garishness. Watching shows like Lidsville, The Bugaloos, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters through adult eyes, I can’t help but wonder what the hell I ever saw in them, and what their creators were smoking. (Seriously, Lidsville? You can’t tell me that a show about giant living, talking hats isn’t somehow connected to drug use.) But when I was a kid, ah, yes, when I was a kid, these shows were wonderful, imaginative entertainment, and the greatest of them (aside from the afore-mentioned Land of the Lost) was H.R. Pufnstuf.
If you’re not familiar with it, Pufnstuf was kind of a psychadelic take on The Wizard of Oz. The set-up was that a young boy named Jimmy and his magical talking flute Freddie were lured to “Living Island,” a place where everything from flowers to candlesticks was alive and animate. Every week the evil but utterly incompetent Witchiepoo tried to get her hands on Freddie, while Jimmy just hoped to find a way back home. Jimmy and Freddie were under the protection of the Mayor of Living Island, H.R. Pufnstuf himself. He was a sweet-natured yellow dragon who looked a lot like those costumed mascots you see out in front of fast-food restaurants, and his mouth movements never quite synched up with what he was saying. Pufnstuf and two diminuitive fire-fighters — who I think were named Cling and Clang, or some such — always saved the day, and every show ended with Jimmy singing some sappy early-70s pop-style showtune. It was completely ridiculous, from the stale jokes to the trippy production design, but it was also terribly endearing. Although I find it very difficult to sit through a complete episode now, I’ve got very fond memories of watching the show on Sunday mornings back in the day. (Yes, Virginia, Sunday mornings; Saturday mornings weren’t long enough to contain all the kid-vid back in that pre-cable, pre-infomercial epoch.)
Jimmy was played by a kid named Jack Wild, and if you know how things are done around this blog, you can probably guess what I’m going to say next: Jack Wild died earlier this week from cancer. He was only 53, but in the photo accompanying the linked obit, he looked much older. Time was not kind to Jack; I doubt I would’ve recognized him on the street. It’s a crying shame what happens to so many former child actors after the entertainment industry has finished chewing them up. And yet at the same time, there is some redemption in the fact that a version of Jack Wild will remain forever young, living there on Living Island with the best friend a boy could ever want, a seven-foot-tall, bipedal yellow dragon with a big, friendly grin.
Like I said, sometimes I’m really glad I was a child in the ’70s. And sometimes I really miss those days…
As usual, Evanier has an anecdote about the deceased. It’s worth a click…
