Fraggle Rock (also known as Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock or Fraggle Rock with Jim Henson's Muppets) is a Canadian-British-American children's puppet television series about interconnected societies of Muppet creatures, created by Jim Henson.
Fraggle Rock was co-produced by British television company Television South (TVS), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, U.S. pay television service Home Box Office and Henson Associates. Unlike Sesame Street, which had been created for a single market and later adapted for international markets, Fraggle Rock was intended from the start to be an international production and the entire show was constructed with this in mind.
Fraggle Rock debuted in 1983 as one of the first shows involving the collaboration of Henson International Television (HiT Entertainment from 1989), the international arm of Jim Henson Productions. The co-production brought together British regional ITV franchise-holder Television South (TVS), CBC Television, United States pay-television service Home Box Office and Henson Associates (later Jim Henson Productions). Filming took place on a Toronto sound-stage (and later at Elstree Studios, London). The avant-garde poet bpNichol worked as one of the show's writers. In the early days of development, the script called the Fraggles "Woozles" pending the devising of a more suitable name.
Henson described the Fraggle Rock series as "a high-energy, raucous musical romp. It's a lot of silliness. It's wonderful." The program proved accessible to audiences of all ages, and used the fantasy creatures as an allegory to deal with serious issues such as prejudice, spirituality, personal identity, the environment, and social conflict.
In 2009, as part of the Jim Henson Foundation's donation of puppets to the Center for Puppetry Arts, the Atlanta museum displayed many of the original puppet characters from Fraggle Rock in their exhibition Jim Henson: Wonders from his Workshop.
There are four main intelligent anthropomorphic species in the Fraggle Rock environment: Fraggles, Doozers, Gorgs and Silly Creatures. The Fraggles and Doozers live in a system of natural caves called Fraggle Rock that are filled with all manner of creatures and features and which connect to at least two different areas:
- The Land of the Gorgs which they consider part of the "Universe".
- Outer Space" where the "silly creatures" (or humans) live.
One of the main themes of the series is that, although the three species depend on the other for their survival, they usually fail to communicate due to vast differences in their biology and culture. The series mainly follows the adventures of five Fraggles with five personalities: pragmatic Gobo, artistic Mokey, indecisive Wembley, superstitious Boober, and adventurous Red. Some of the character's names are film industry in-jokes. For example, Uncle Travelling Matt is a reference to the travelling matte technique used with blue screen to give the impression a character is somewhere they are not; Gobo is named after a shaped metal grill placed over a theatre light to produce interesting shadows (window shapes, leaves etc.) and Red is a reference to a "redhead", another name for an 800w film light.
Cast[]
| Image | Character | USA | Mex | Jap | Can(French) | Mex(2020) | Ger | Fra | Ita | Pol | Neth | Swe | Fin | Nor | Den | Spa | Pol(1990) | Isr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Gobo Fraggle | Jerry Nelson | Braulio Zertuche | Bernard Fortin | Maciej Damięcki | Ángel Egido | Jacek Kopczyński | |||||||||||
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Mokey Fraggle | Kathryn Mullen | MaríaFernanda Morales | Michelle BjørnAndersen | Laura Palacios | Talya Barkay | ||||||||||||
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Wembley Fraggle | Steve Whitmire | Yûji Mitsuya | Edgar Givry | ||||||||||||||
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Boober Fraggle | Dave Goelz | Héctor Lee | Ryusei Nakao | JoséGilberto Vilchis | Donald Arthur | Anders Hatlo | RafaelAlonso Naranjo Jr. | Wojciech Paszkowski | |||||||||
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Red Fraggle | Karen Prell | Rocío Garcel | Chika Sakamoto | Vanessa Olea | Beata JankowskaTzimas | ||||||||||||
| Love Santini | ||||||||||||||||||
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Cantus the Minstrel | Jim Henson | Luis de León | Kazuo Kumakura | ||||||||||||||
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Convincing John | Jim Henson | ||||||||||||||||
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7-Words-Max | Dave Goelz | ||||||||||||||||
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World's OldestFraggle | Dave Goelz | Francisco Reséndez | Paul vanGorcum | Gadi Levy |