ABSTRACT
Saturday morning TV in the 1970s was dominated by a handful of studios: Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. The real-life brothers Sid and Marty Krofft entered the children's television scene in 1968 when Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera asked them to help with a new children's show called The Banana Splits Adventure Hour. This chapter focuses on Sid and Marty Krofft's productions for children and their embrace of late 1960s and 1970s counterculture ideals. For Debbie Olson, the Krofft productions worked to normalize counterculture ideologies for America's youth, in opposition to the network push for traditional children's programming. The chapter examines three of the early popular Krofft shows, H. R. Pufnstuf, The Bugaloos, and Lidsville, what David Martindale calls the "trippy trilogy," and shows how the Krofft brothers left the clear stamp of defiant counterculture ideals on the hallowed ground of squeaky-clean Saturday morning children's programming.
