Sid Krofft died at 96 having done something that almost nobody in the history of children’s entertainment ever managed to do — he built a world so completely unlike anything that existed before it and so perfectly calibrated to the specific, surreal, slightly unsettling frequency of a child’s imagination that an entire generation of American kids absorbed it into their inner lives and never fully let it go. The Saturday morning television landscape that Sid and his brother Marty Krofft created across the 1970s —

H.R. Pufnstuf with its talking flute and its witch and its island of living, breathing strangeness, Land of the Lost with its Sleestak and its time portal and its particular brand of low-budget adventure that somehow felt more genuinely dangerous than anything with a bigger budget, Lidsville, The Bugaloos, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters — was not the sanitized, focus-grouped children’s content that the networks produced around it but something wilder and weirder and more creatively alive, the product of a man who had spent his early career building elaborate puppet shows for nightclub audiences and brought that theatrical fearlessness directly to the most watched television slot in America without softening a single edge. Sid Krofft did not condescend to children — he delighted in them, trusted their capacity for strangeness and wonder and the particular pleasure of being slightly frightened by something that was also clearly on their side, and the worlds he built for them were the worlds of someone who remembered exactly what it felt like to be a child and refused to pretend that childhood was simpler or safer or less magical than it actually is.