#WorldsFair64: Sid & Marty Krofft’s Naughty Puppet Show

Before they conquered Saturday morning TV, the Krofft brothers came to the World’s Fair with a racy puppet show.

by Rich Watson 

During the seventies, puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft created live-action children’s shows that made them superstars of Saturday morning television. Before that, their puppets entertained adults in prime time. 

Their live theater show played World’s Fairs. A show that featured more risqué material.

Sid & Marty Krofft’s early days

The brothers from Montreal have lived a showbiz life through their puppetry. 

Sid Krofft had a puppet act within the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. In the forties, he graduated to a one-man puppet show. He toured around the world with his father. Marty Krofft, in addition to working puppets with Sid, learned the business end.

Eventually, Sid became an opening act for artists like Judy Garland and Liberace. By the fifties, he and his brother were full-fledged partners who wanted their own company, to do more than children’s entertainment.

Les Poupées de Paris takes off

Sid’s time touring Paris made him think of revues like the Folies Bèrgere. The cabaret show was known for its lavish costumes and sets, suggestive music and near-naked women.

With this as their inspiration, the Kroffts’ created Les Poupées de Paris, a combination of marionette celebrity caricatures with original creations in a musical revue for adults. 

Music and lyrics were by Jimmy van Heusen and Sammy Cahn (the soundtrack received a Grammy nomination). Among the puppets included caricatures of Garland, Gene Kelly, Pearl Bailey, Liberace, and a topless Mae West.

Les Poupées debuted in 1961 at the San Fernando Valley theater Gilded Rafters before moving to LA. It appeared on The Jack Paar Show and The Bell Telephone Hour on TV. 

The next year the Kroffts took Les Poupées to the Seattle World’s Fair. This interview with the Kroffts describes what happened when the Reverend Billy Graham saw the show there.

If it played the Seattle Fair, why could it not also play the New York Fair in 1964?

What? No midway?

As popular as the 1964 New York World’s Fair was, one thing it lacked which many fairs and carnivals had was a midway.

According to the 1964 World’s Fair book Tomorrow-Land by Joseph Tirella, Fair Director Robert Moses was against the very concept of a midway, especially one devoted to more adult entertainment:

The Master Builder flatly refused to allow anything ribald or what he judged “bad taste” anywhere near Flushing Meadow. As Judge Samuel Rosenman, one of Moses’ most trusted confidants, told The New Yorker months before the Fair opened, “You can have gaiety and amusement without any obscenity.” 

Midways with naughty exhibitions had a long history prior to 1964. The 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, for example, had an “Amusement Zone.” It included, among other things, a live show called “Living Magazine Covers.” (NSFW) For a fee, one could watch models voguing for fifteen seconds a pose—topless.

Lake Amusement Area: Moses’ anti-midway

The closest thing to a midway the Fair had was the Lake Amusement Area, located next to Flushing Meadow Park’s Meadow Lake. 

This was where Les Poupées played, alongside such family-friendly attractions as the Carousel Park, the Log Flume ride, and the International Wax Museum.

While the Kroffts’ risqué puppet show was successful, many other exhibits in this part of the Fair were not. Those producers blamed Moses for not cultivating a traditional midway environment. Moses, however, wouldn’t budge from his stance. From Tomorrow-Land:

…[Moses’] Fair was “essentially educational” he said again and again, and had no room for the cheap, puerile, and déclassé. His conservative stance won him praise from like-minded citizens and clergy, like the Reverend John P. Cody, a high-ranking priest from the New Orleans Archdiocese, who within a few years would become Cardinal of the Chicago Archdiocese, one of the most important positions in the US Catholic Church. “Can we survive without vulgarity, just escaping censorship and police intervention?” Moses wrote to Cody. “We have chosen the side of the angels.”

According to this New York Times review, the Kroffts presented a less racy version of their show at the Fair.

After the New York Fair

Les Poupées toured the country throughout the sixties, including the San Antonio Fair in 1968. The Kroffts estimate the show was seen by nine and a half million people. 

The puppets also appeared on The Dean Martin Show for a brief time before Martin, feeling upstaged by them, got rid of them.

In 1967 television producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera offered the Kroffts the chance to design costumes for a live-action kids series called The Banana Splits. It led to a series of children’s shows created and produced by the Kroffts.

But that is another story.

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Did you see Les Poupées de Paris at the World’s Fair?