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Everyone who lives in Lidsville really flips his lid

Saturday, 14 February 2004 04:40 PM

"Have you ever thought you liked a terrible song just because you remembered it, mistaking mere recollection for actual nostalgia? That's the way it is for me and "H. R. Pufnstuf." I thought I had fond memories of the show until I had a chance to see it again, to hear the shrieks of an angry Witchie-Poo (the actress Billie Hayes in a ketchup-red wig), to be assaulted by swirling Day-Glo colors and a Freudian plot featuring a talking flute. Turns out that when I was 7, I had really, really bad taste."

Emily Nessbaum of the New York Times Reruns: reconsiders the television legacy of Sid and Marty Krofft.

I was never very fond of most of the Krofft shows except for Lidsville, which featured Charles Nelson Reilly as an evil magician.

The TV Land website summaries the show this way: "After being wowed by a magician at an amusement park, teenager Mark is bent on learning the secrets that must be inside the illusionist’s magic hat. To his shock and surprise, when Mark gets his hands on the hat, it grows to enormous proportions and he falls in. Imprisoned by evil wizard Horatio J. Whoo Doo, Mark is befriended by Weenie the Genie, who becomes Mark's charge after stealing Whoo Do's magic ring. Mark promises to set Weenie free, so she and the good hats of Lidsville unite to help Mark find his way back home."

What I liked about it I can't recall. Maybe it was the super-sized talking hats, or the idea of an alternative world that waited to be discovered -- like the ones at the bottom of Alice's rabbit hole and through her looking glass, or Narnia inside the wardrobe.

(I'll have the theme song in my head for the rest of the week.)

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Copyright © 2004 – 2007 Cynthia Closkey