After creating costumes for characters in the live-action portion of "The Banana Splits Adventure Hour", Sid and Marty Krofft were asked to develop their own Saturday morning children's series for NBC. The plot was recycled from "Kaleidoscope", a live puppet show the Kroffts had staged in the Coca-Cola pavilion of the HemisFair '68 World's Fair. It included several key characters from this show, such as Luther the dragon and a silly witch. Other ideas were cultivated from Sid's life. As a child, he had charged friends buttons, not pennies, to view puppet shows in his back yard; buttons were standard currency on Living Island. Sid and Marty had toured with their puppets as the opening act for Judy Garland, and they based Judy the Frog on her. Ludicrous Lion bears more than a passing resemblance to Irving, the eponymous lion in a pilot they had made in 1957 called "Here's Irving".