It's the Sid and Marty show

Their father was actually a clock salesman. He took his family south from Canada to Providence, R.I., to find more opportunities. The family ended up in New York. Young Sid's flair for puppet design and puppetry ended up opening a door for the whole family. His father joined him on tour -- which inspired the "fifth-generation" fib -- as "pretty much an apprentice," Sid said. Father and son were performing in Paris when, back in New York, Marty rummaged through his older brother's trunks and borrowed his puppets to begin making money on stage himself.

In 1958, the act was the Krofft brothers and the venue was the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, where they were opening for Garland. The critics raved about the act but, when they took it on tour, Marty was haranguing his brother every night about the bottom line.

"My brother was getting $1,500 a week from Judy Garland, and it cost $2,000 a week to travel the act," Marty said. "But always, Sid would spend what we made -- and more -- on the show."

Sid smiled. "If we didn't put everything in the shows, they wouldn't have been as good as they were. . . . That's all that people see, what's up on the screen. That's where the magic is."

In 1961, they premiered an adults-only puppet show, "Les Poupees de Paris," at a dinner club in Los Angeles called the Gilded Rafters. Mae West, Richard Nixon and Liberace were in the audience on opening night. Johnny Carson caught a performance and deadpanned that it was the only performance he had ever seen by "naughty pine."

The Kroffts began renting out their puppet and production savvy. They designed stage productions for fairs and amusement parks, took corporate work from Ford and Coca-Cola, and did some work for Walt Disney as well. Marty had crossed paths with the entertainment icon in 1959; Marty was at the Polo Lounge having drinks with Charisse when Disney stopped by to chat and gave him a bit of advice.

As Marty remembers it: "He told me, 'The one thing to remember is, don't ever sell anything you create and always put your name above the title, whatever you do. They'll fight you off from doing it, but stick to it.' The only thing he didn't tell me was how to save money."

--

Afew weeks before the Studio City interview, Marty was roaming the set of "Land of the Lost" out near the Trona Pinnacles, the eerie tufa rock formations that jut up from the desert floor past Palmdale. The spires, formed beneath the water of an ancient alkaline lake, have been used as a Hollywood location dating back to the '60s TV series "Lost in Space."