Sid and Marty Krofft are Canadian-American brothers who built a television empire on life-size costume puppetry, beginning with H.R. Pufnstuf in 1969.
They came from puppetry, properly
Sid was a marionetteA marionette is a puppet controlled from above by strings or... performer working nightclubs and variety before television, and the brothers’ early work included large-scale puppet productions and a puppet theatre at an amusement park. The Saturday-morning shows came later and grew out of real craft.
The form they popularised
is the walk-around costume character — full-body suits with oversized heads, worn rather than held. H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and The Bugaloos all ran on that construction.
The building problems are the interesting part
A performer inside a full costume cannot see well, overheats quickly, and has extremely limited facial expression available. Krofft characters solve this the way costume puppetry always must — enormous eyes, huge mouths, exaggerated silhouettes, and physical performance carrying everything the face cannot.
Why it looks the way it does
The visual style — saturated colour, bulbous shapes, oversized everything — is partly aesthetic and partly a direct consequence of what reads on a camera when the performer is sealed inside a suit.
They also built for theme parks and live shows
, including large-scale character productions, which is where much of that construction knowledge came from and went back to.
For a builder
, the Kroffts are the American reference point for costume character construction, a discipline distinct from hand puppetry and much closer to mascot work.
The scale of it
At their peak the brothers had multiple series running simultaneously plus touring live shows, which meant maintaining dozens of costume characters in constant use — a production problem as much as a creative one.