Kurtzman participated in a number of film projects beginning in the late 1960s. He co-scripted the stop-motion animated film "Mad Monster Party?" (1967), a job he got through the recommendation of Jack Davis, who had been doing character designs for the film's production company Rankin/Bass. Kurtzman wrote, co-directed, and designed several short animated pieces for "Sesame Street" in 1969; he was particularly proud of the Phil Kimmelman-animated "Boat", in which a left prosthetic-legged sea captain voiced by Hal Smith orders a series of increasingly larger numerals to load into a boat, eventually sinking it. In 1972, he appeared in a television advertisement for Scripto pens.