Nerding Day: Lidsville 🌭 (Patreon)

When H.R. Pufnstuf didn’t get picked up for a second season, Sid and Marty Krofft knew exactly what went wrong. The concept was almost there, but it didn’t feel enough like a fever dream brought on by near-fatal mercury poisoning and the kind of childhood trauma they make into a movie based on the novel Push by Sapphire. They could try again, and they could do something even darker for the kids. Kids love terror! It took them two years after H.R. Pufnstuf ended to get their freaky little brains in peak condition to drop the show Lidsville, which has basically the exact same plot as H.R. Pufnstuf but with more hats.

I’ve seen a lot of upsetting things for this website, but the theme song for this show really left an impression on me. It takes up almost a full two minutes of the twenty-two-minute-long show. Almost ten percent of the show is required to get across the concept of the show. It’s about a child who wanders into a magical world and ends up trapped there, menaced by an evil figure. Sid and Marty had one concept of the show, and it was whimsical child imprisonment.

The main character, Mike, attends a magic show at Six Flags. The magician pulls a bunch of stuff out of a hat during the show, and all the children watching look both fascinated and terrified by the hat's power. Mike decides he simply must sneak backstage after the show and observe the power of the hat up close. When he touches it, the hat grows to roughly child-imprisoning size, and Mike, who has no self-preservation instinct, is like, “I should crawl right in there!”

Within the hat is naturally a world populated by sentient hat people. They live in hat houses, which really freaks me out because now I’m picturing humans living in houses that look like human bodies. There’s also an evil magician who looks exactly like the human magician from the intro but with green makeup on. He’s called Horatio J. Hoo Doo, and he wants the hats to pay taxes to him, but they refuse, so he’s split them into two factions: bad hats who work for him and good hats who oppose him. Here’s a picture of The Brady Bunch meeting Horatio J. Hoo Doo on set. Look how much fun they’re having.

The hats all sort of have the personality of the kind of person who would wear the hat. The pirate hat talks like a pirate. Fedora smokes a cigar and talks like a 1930s gangster. The vampire hat is a vampire. The executioner's hood carries a big ax. Guess which one of those I made up? None of them. These are all actual villain hats from the show about a boy trapped in a hat with hat people who have an economic dispute with a magician.

The show has some issues with its good hat people too; some of them have to do with the era, like, of course, there are some racist hats. There’s also a genie who is in slightly modified brownface. The most surprisingly upsetting one, though, is Pierre Le Sewer: an entity that lives in the sewer and pops up from the ground wearing the sewer grate on his head, and the sewer grate is a beret. He’s always lurking down there, like the clown from IT, underneath every scene, and he always knows what’s going on so he can hear them. When he finally emerges from the sewers, I am certain his lower half will be a giant spider.

Other good hats include a party hat, a cowboy hat, a fireman's hat, a propeller beanie, a nurse's hat, a chef's hat, a pith helmet, and a motorcycle helmet. The motorcycle helmet is my favorite character. She’s an elderly woman named Mother Wheels, fully decked out in leather, who calls everyone honey.

From the moment Mike arrives in Lidsville, he’s in peril. The bad hats immediately capture him and accuse him of being a spy for the good hats. They take him to Horatio J. Hoo Doo, who has a house full of violent living decor that pitches torturing him or chopping him up. In the end, Hoo Doo decides to just imprison him with the help of his genie named Weenie, a part played by the same woman who played Witchiepoo in H.R. Pufnstuf. It’s one of the few non-witch roles she ever played after that. She clearly hated being a genie and longed to menace the kid who played Mike rather than befriend him.

Mike escapes with the genie and almost drowns in the shampoo river (because the genie’s magical powers barely work). They are rescued by the propeller beanie, who can fly, and brought to the good hats who will let Mike stay in their homes but not Pierre Le Sewer, because they know the truth about his lower half. Speaking of the puppets' lower halves, about halfway through the season, the tone of the show really changes when it answers the question of whether the hats fuck by showing Hoo Doo relaxing with a Play Hat magazine. This suggests that Hoo Doo is sexually attracted to hat people and Mark is trapped in a magician's fetish world. No wonder the hat people don’t want to pay taxes, they’re already paying with their flesh.

Mike is always trying to escape the sick magician's fuck world, and Hoo Doo is always trying to prevent him from leaving. Whatever his sick thing is, Mike is part of it now, I guess? Also, he really doesn’t want Mike to get away with the genie, who is barely helping Mike at all, by the way. He should totally jettison the genie and make a break for it.

​Somehow the genie makeup, the accents on the Asian chef and Native American hats, and the nod to pornography in a children's show are not the only crimes against humanity this show committed. In the credits of the very first episode, there was one title that stuck out to me.

The WHO?

Sorry, everyone else gets a name, and then there is a group of performers all listed together as The Hermine Midgets? Well, maybe it’s marginally less upsetting than I’m thinking. Maybe they’re a family of little people who perform together under their shared last name. Do you think that’s what it is? Or do you think the biggest nightmare in hat world is the crimes they were committing behind the scenes?

The uncredited little people belong to Hermine. They were a vaudeville act that moved on to working in film and television. They were such a big deal that they even got their own magazine. Couldn’t get their own name, though.

So these headgear monsters were being piloted by little people entrapped in foam and wobbling around because there were clearly no eyeholes. There are several fight scenes where the hats sort of wobble at Mike and flail their arms as he gently positions them where they need to go while trying to pretend to fight them. Mother Wheels is significantly less radical when you have to wonder if the person they duct-taped to a motorcycle to puppet her could see well enough to drive.

I don’t think I need to tell you that this show was canceled after one season. You immediately knew that children weren’t delighted by the whimsical adventures of a boy imprisoned in sex hat world. Usually, in this type of adventure show, the main character is looking to escape something in their life and is excited at first to arrive in a new magical world, but Mike immediately wanted out of Lidsville. Maybe it’s because he was attacked by a vampire hat right away, or maybe he can spot a magician's fetish better than most people. Whatever the reason, Mike has always hated Lidsville, and now he lives there for all of eternity, sleeping under an issue of Play Hat magazine, and hoping that rumbling from the sewers isn’t really getting louder every day.

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