It's the Sid and Marty show

"Look at this place. I never thought I would live to see one of our shows become something like this," Marty said as he shaded his eyes from the sun. He nodded toward the trailers, tents, cameras, sets, props and a small army of crew members. "They spend more in one day than we spent in a year of making our shows."

That's a common pattern these days. Any character ever featured on a child's lunchbox is fair game for a big-budget Hollywood treatment. Superhero films, of course, are a full-on bonanza, with "The Dark Knight" setting box-office records by the day.

The movie adaptation of "Land of the Lost" looks like the last great hurrah for the Kroffts, but if you listen to Marty's relentless pitch, the windfall is just the beginning. He said the Krofft library may now be worth as much as $25 million and could become "the next Marvel Comics," a reference to the comic-book company that has watched its 1960s creations (Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, etc.) take flight as 21st century blockbuster films.

"The Krofft era," Marty declared, "is starting right now."

Perhaps, but not all the Saturday-morning shows in the Krofft library are easy fits as feature films. The brothers say they have a former writer for "The Simpsons" working on a script for "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters," the show that had Billy Barty portraying a skittish little marine monster with tentacles (he resembled a pea-colored SpongeBob SquarePants with seaweed for hair) who is taken home by two boys. A movie could be a sort of meld of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Splash," the Kroffts hope.

Most of all, the brothers would love to make a feature film of "H.R. Pufnstuf," the show Sid describes as "our first baby." The plot was about a teen, portrayed by Oscar-nominated "Oliver!" star Jack Wild, who finds himself on Living Island (where everything -- houses, books, plants, candles -- can talk). He meets the title character, a rotund dragon, and matches wits with the shrill Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo.

The brothers, by the way, deny the popular perception that they were gobbling major amounts of LSD while making the shows. "I'm a runner, and I thought of them during my runs on the beach at Santa Monica," Sid said. "That's where they came from."

After watching Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Marty knows who he wants to see wearing the witch's crooked nose. "How great would Johnny Depp be as Witchiepoo? Maybe he'll read this, right? Look, all we need is a star. And a story. Hey, you know what Michael Eisner has said about the Kroffts for years? He said, 'The Kroffts always have one more show in them.' "