Wow! KCET is now The Sid and Marty Krofft Channel!

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but last month KCET, Los Angeles' former affiliate for PBS, dumped decent educational programming to replay really, really old, campy re-runs of the same crap we laughed at in the 1970s.

Amazingly, here's what's on my former PBS station right now: January 2, 2011:

Lidsville (TV Series 1971–1973)

A  '70s show about a boy who is trapped inside what appears to be a bad acid trip in Burbank where scary hats yell and jump about and sing loudly at you about nothing remotely sensible.

There's Weenie the Genie (aka, Billie Hayes, who was Witchiepoo on H.R. Pufnstuf) who, I am willing to bet, was an inspiration for Pee Wee Herman's "Jambi."  Just a hunch.

The lead boy, "Mark," is played by Butch Patrick, who formerly played Eddie Munster.

But, the show also features a very ugly, green-headed Charles Nelson Reilly who mostly chuckles loudly and yells really bad songs at Mark, and the camera, ad nauseum.  I do believe they, other than lead lost boy, Mark, are the only non-hat characters.  Every one else is a hat.

Here's a more serious description of the show from IMBD.

Storyline

Young Mark sneaks backstage at a magician's show and manages to fall into a HUGE top hat. The hat is apparently a gateway to another dimension where all the inhabitants are talking, ambulatory hats. The evil magician tries to capture Mark, while Mark and his hat friends try to find a way to get him back to the real world.

Okay, like I said, what it really is about, is another "far out" '70s world where lots of scary hat people yell and sing a lot at poor Mark who cannot find his way back home to the crappy amusement park where he accidentally fell down a magician's hat to begin with.   (Just say "no" to drugs, kids.)  

If you don't, the hat people will suck out your soul out and your mother will morph into Witchiepoo, or worse, Weenie The Genie (Billie Hayes) and your father will start chuckling non-stop and show up everywhere wearing green-face singing really loudly, just like, say, Charles Nelson Reilly!   At which point you will be so shit out of luck that you may as well just stay in Lidsville for all eternity and rot.


But, still,  Masterpiece Theater got dumped for this stuff?  Really?  Not that I'm really complaining.  (But, I'm a mom, so I know I should be.)

Now there are some of us, such as Squidoo, who will rejoice with me to celebrate the return of such hits as Lidsville and H. R. Pufnstuf...but, to dump LA's PBS programming for Sid and Marty?  Isn't Hulu the place we're supposed to watch this crazy '70s stuff now?  Instead of bumping Sesame Street and Frontline, Nova and Masterpiece Theater?  For Sid and Marty Krofft?!! 

Because it was Christmas week at the time I didn't fully appreciate the magnitude that our biggest PBS station (and also, interestingly, one of the biggest in the country) could actually make such a bizarre move.  

PBS really now has become the Sid and Marty Krofft Channel. (For one person's tribute to Sid and Marty Krofft, click here.  For the same site's examination and tribute to Lidsville, click here.)

As I write this I am now watching Charles Nelson Reilly in a green mask sing "it's fun being rotten" to dancing hamburgers, I mean, hats that could look like burgers to a starving crack addict.

Wow.  I seriously just heard a pink, obviously Asian dancing hat person just exclaim "Ah So!  Maybe Weeee-Neeee  tink of something!" under his long Fu Manchu mustache.

Now, there's a PC step forward for children everywhere!  Talk about confusing stereotypes and messages.  And, man, do I ever I feel sorry for people trying to tune into KCET from hospital beds right now.  Shows like this would make coming out of anesthesia really challenging.  

But, please don't pull ALL the Sid and Marty junk off the air too quickly.  I want to download it now to remember just how bad it all used to be in the olden days.

It is astonishing.