Sid Krofft has left us at 96 and taken with him the last living connection to one of the most genuinely enchanted chapters in the history of American childhood — the Saturday morning world he and his brother Marty built across the 1970s that millions of children woke up early for, planted themselves in front of the television for, and carried with them into adulthood in the specific and indelible way that the things which reach you before you have any defenses against wonder tend to stay with you forever.

There was nobody else like Sid Krofft in the children’s television landscape of his era and there has been nobody like him since — a man who came from the world of elaborate theatrical puppet shows and brought that sense of handmade, fully committed, slightly otherworldly magic directly to the Saturday morning screen without diluting it or softening it or making it safe in the ways that television executives traditionally insisted upon before they would hand over the airwaves to someone’s imagination. H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost, Lidsville, The Bugaloos, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters — each one a world complete unto itself, each one carrying the unmistakable fingerprint of a creative sensibility that trusted children to be as strange and as open and as genuinely hungry for something real as they actually were, and each one now carrying, in the memory of the adults who grew up watching them, the particular golden quality that the best childhood experiences acquire over time, the quality of something that was exactly right at exactly the right moment and that no amount of nostalgia has ever been able to fully replicate or replace. Saturday mornings will never be quite the same without the man who made them magical.