Tuesday, September 17, 2013

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 2, Episode 6: "Boober's Dream"

As we have seen in several of the episodes I've already highlighted, "Fraggle Rock" can be surprisingly psychologically dense.  So it isn't that surprising that they'd go ahead and do an episode about a major character being haunted by a nightmare manifestation of things he has kept deeply repressed.

I feel like I'm going to have to do the same kind of disclaimer I had during the "Walk the Dinosaur" analysis.  This isn't me looking for Dark and/or Edgy Subtext in Something Innocuous, this IS the subtext of the episode.  Boober has been having reoccurring nightmares about a being known as Sidebottom.  That's the "fun side" of Boober that he always keeps locked down "in the bottom".

That's fascinating.  As I said before, Boober is basically the foil for the carefree other major Fraggle characters because he cares about *everything*.  He's practically turned worrying into a lifestyle.  He never gets to let himself have any fun at all, so any normal fraggle impulses he ever had are now incarnated as a hyperactive agent of chaos.  (It just dawned on me that this is "Fight Club" with Fraggles...)  Sidebottom would come back in a couple of other episodes, both of which are very funny, but he'd lose the slightly sinister aspect of his personality, which made him more interesting.

By the way, shut up about the basic dream-sharing premise of "Inception" not being the most original idea in the world already. XD