Before I begin in on one of my favorite after school TV shows, I want to point out there are so many worlds of psychedelic weirdness in the shows of Sid and Marty Krofft, that one article simply will never be enough. Instead I am starting with the programs I remember being the most wondrous and frightening as a child; shows that managed to transcend the tiny 13″ color TV we owned at the time and still contribute to my earliest HorrorBuzz foundations.

Butch Patrick was already a fixture in Horror Comedy as little Eddie Munster in the TV Classic “The Munsters” when Sid and Marty Krofft cast him to be the only true “human” character in their third television production ABC’s Lidsville.

Now as an adult in 2016 it is impossible not to recognize the drug fueled imagery of the brightly rainbow colored world of living hats and the fact that “lid” was slang for 3/4 of an ounce of marihuana only reinforces those suspicions, but as a child of the 70’s it didn’t really register. In fact as a child I would have to say the villain of the series Horatio J. HooDoo (Charles Nelson Reilly) was honestly prevalent in several of my early remembered nightmares. (Must have been the creepy evil laugh…”uh huh huh!”)

As with the best of children’s television from the time, the entire premise of the show was found within it’s opening song. A teenage boy named Mark visits an amusement park (Six Flags Over Texas) and see’s the magic show of Merlo the Magician (also Charles Nelson Reilly, but not creepy green and bent on hat domination.) After the show he sneaks backstage all alone, finds the magician’s magic hat, touches it and it grows (“and grow and grow and grow and grow….”) until it fills almost the entire dressing room. Now rather than be afraid (the child in me screaming stay away from the hat Mark!!!!) Mark climbs up on the brim, falls in and is trapped in the land of living hats and his evil hatred of Mark.

The world of Lidsville is filled with so many (acid fueled) colorful characters here is a list of some of them:

• Horatio J. HooDoo (Charles Nelson Reilly) – Evil magician and wannabe dictator of Lidsville. He believes Mark is a spy for the good hats and will never let him escape. He is always flying over Lidsville trying to “Zap” the residents with magic bolts from his flying top hat, the Hatamaran
• Weenie the Genie (Billie Hayes) – An genie with a confidence problem (probably from years of HooDoo’s abuse) who’s magic never seems to work quite right.
• Mark (Butch Patrick) – A teenager just trying to escape Lidsville and get home. He steals HooDoo’s ring and ends up Weenie the Genie’s master and friend.
• Raunchy Rabbit (Walker Edmiston (voice) – HooDoo’s rabbit in the hat, who serves as the dim-witted comic sidekick (and often causes more problems than he helps HooDoo with his evil schemes)
• Jack of Clubs (Walker Edmiston (voice)) – A Walking deck of cards with the Jack of Clubs on top. Both rightside up and upside down faces could talk (creepy even as an adult.)
• And one of my personal favorites The Hat Band – A musical group that lives behind a wall in HooDoo’s top hat mansion and seems to delight in taunting HooDoo in song parroting whatever he has said at the moment.

And then there were the hat inhabitants some good hats and some baaaaaad….

The Good Hats:

• Rah-Rah (Lennie Weinrib voice)) – A football helmet. Always throwing Footballs at
• Madame Ring-a-Ding (Joan Gerber (voice)) – The social butterfly party hat and center of Lidsville’s party scene
• Mother Wheels (Joan Gerber (voice)) –Leather clad, grandmother hell-on-wheels. “Hiya, Hon-ees”.
• Nursie (Joan Gerber (voice)) – First responder to just about any trouble in Lidsville
• Twirly (Joan Gerber (voice)) – A flying beanie hat. Rescues Mark and Weenie quite often when they get stuck in hard to reach parts of Lidsville
• Colonel Poom (Lennie Weinrib (voice)) – He is the very model of a British Pith Helmet. Also owns the only offensive weapon the good hats really have, an old war cannon.
• Tex (Lennie Weinrib (voice)) – A cowboy hat who is always eager to hit the trail and take the fight to HooDoo
• Tonsilini (Lennie Weinrib (voice)) – The opera hat who sings EVERYTHING
• Hiram (Walker Edmiston (voice)) – A farmer’s straw hat who carries a small piglet with him everywhere

The Bad Hats – A group of four hats who work for HooDoo.
• Mr. Big (Lennie Weinrib (voice)) – A gangsta fedora who is the leader of the Bad Hats. “youse guiez….”
• Captain Hooknose (Lennie Weinrib (voice)) – The pirate hat with parrot on brim and with a hook for a nose
• Bela (Walker Edmiston (voice)) – Kind of a vampire bat and 70’s pimp hat combination. (I guess the creators had something on their mind besides all the drugs)
• Boris (Walker Edmiston (voice)) – The executioners cowl. He wields the big axe and ever seems to hit anything with it.

The series only lasted one season (1971) and produced 17 episodes, but they replayed on afternoon TV for years. I remember so well the laugh track that made the really bad jokes stick out, and also remember hoping Mark would find some way to escape to the real world with Weenie. And it turns out that he might get a chance as Dreamworks Animation has had Alan Menken working on original music for a Lidsville CG movie. I don’t know if it will ever make it out of development and into production but we can hope that HooDoo and Wennie have enough combined 70’s psychedelic magic to make it happen.

Here is the first episode of Lidsville – World in a Hat:

I don’t know if we can ever be totally certain how we become haunt and horror fans. I know I always liked monsters and fantasy and things that were a little off center when I was growing up, and I have decided to explore some of those things in a series of articles. If you have ideas of things that you think contributed to your early HorrorBuzz please feel free to write and we will try and write about them as well.