"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 2, Episode 8: "All Work and All Play"

Identity has been a major theme so far here in Season Two of "Fraggle Rock".  We've already talked about Boober and Sidebottom.  I will let a more knowledgeable/qualified person discuss the apparently genderfluid nature of the Trash Heap in "The Trash Heap Doesn't Live Here Anymore".  And in the (considerable less heady) episode just previous, "Mokey and the Minstrels", we learned that wanting to be something hard enough doesn't necessarily mean you get to just be that thing you want to be.

And in some respects, today's episode appears to underline that point in red crayon.  It is a hell of a lot more interesting and moving, though.  First of all, this is the very first time we get to enter the hidden world of the Doozers.  Turns out they had a tiny city tucked away within the walls of Fraggle Rock all this time, and we finally get to go inside and meet these little bug-gnome creatures on a more intimate level.  Up until now, the Doozers have always been kind of alien, but this episode sets out to make them more endearing.

I like how Flange from "The Great Radish Famine" is still kind of our emissary into this world; that's great continuity that is!  But the hero of this episode, and in fact the Doozer we will be primarily familiar with for the rest of this series, is his daughter Cotterpin.  As an important side-note, if you've been paying careful attention to this series so far, you'll notice that Cotterpin is our fifth well-rounded female major character in a series full of awesome female major characters and Goddammitsomuch mainstream fiction writers, look at how easy this is!!!

Anyway, Cotterpin is "different".  She's never really been interested in building towers out of radish candy sticks.  Cotterpin, much to the consternation of her parents who are both builders and wish for her to be a builder too, wants to draw in her Sketchbook instead.

Oh, tais-toi, mon coer... 😪

The problem is, building towers out of radish candy sticks is kind of the defining trait of the entire Doozer species.  So Cotterpin decides, instead of going through with Doozer Confirmation, that she'd rather be a Fraggle when she grows up (oh, honey child...)  She has some reason to think this could happen; there is an old Doozer legend where a Doozer who stopped working and started playing all day transformed into a Fraggle.  Now, Cotterpin befriends Red during this misadventure and it is basically the most adorable thing ever.  (Not least because Cotterpin shares a voice/puppeteer with Mokey.  Subtle and awesome, that.)  Red loves to swim.  Doozers are physically incapable of swimming.  And Cotterpin realizes in shame that she'll never be as awesome as Red -- but Red promises there's no reason they can't stay friends.  And excuse me while I turn into a blubbering wreck.

Anyway, Cotterpin returns to the Doozer city in deep shame and has a long talk with an adult Doozer.  And here's where a brilliant episode has its most wonderful moment, since it isn't her father or her mother that she meets upon returning.  It's the Architect, the leader of the Doozers.  And while he has been an authoritative figure towards Cotterpin so far in the episode, here he says that he's realized that he and she have an awful lot in common, and... and...

Aw, damn, here we go again:



I hope you like that .gif; we're going to be seeing it a lot in this series.

Season two, it turns out, has many episodes that further the overarching plot of the series, notably "A Friend in Need" and "A Cave of One's Own".  This one, by far, is the best of them all. 

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 1, Episode 19: "The Great Radish Famine"

So before we get into the big ideas in this episode (about which, in the good old bad old days of the Internet, essays were written.  Long ones), let's talk about world building.

There are, generally speaking, two approaches you can take with creating a setting.  You can do what most shows do and focus on the story and just make stuff up along as you go, making sure you keep everything moderately consistent -- or not.  Or you can do what the writers of "Fraggle Rock" apparently did: invent an entire imaginary world from the ground up and then play in the giant sandbox. 

That's kind of amazing.  I can't think of another children's program that sinks so much energy in creating a consistent fantastical ecosystem.  "Great Radish Famine" is the first episode that spells out explicitly the fact that we've been exploring a completely realized interconnected world.

There's a damn good reason why they spent so much time on this world, and you can think of this episode as the "Fraggle Rock" writers' thesis statement.

Up until now, we've been primarily concerned with Fraggles.  We have only very briefly visited the Gorg World, and the Doozer World.  Both Gorgs and Doozers have been presented to us from the Fraggles' point of view as mildly interesting (or dangerous in the Gorgs' case) Others.

This episode marks our first extensive visit to the Gorg and Doozer worlds.  In particular, this is the first time Doozers become actual people to us viewers.  Up until now they had about ten lines of dialogue in total and were basically fantasy Mound Termites -- if Mound Termites were adorable little bug-people who build their giant nests out of piles of candy.  They'd be developed even more in later episodes, as would the Gorgs (we'll get to them tomorrow).

The key concept in this series is that all three of these species are intelligent, noble, profound, and dependent on each-other in some way or other -- and each one thinks that they have nothing in common with the other two.  And the brilliant thing is that, in point of fact, Fraggles are very different from Doozers who are in turn very different from Gorgs.  This episode throws them all into a crisis with apocalyptic stakes and if they're ever going to survive it, they need to at least acknowledge they each depend on the other while having to deal with their differences.  (Note how parts of this episode illustrate the sheer difference in scale between the three worlds!)

The very greatest scene in this episode happens in the last few minutes.  We get one of the most genuinely sweet songs of the entire show in a scene that honestly gets me every damn time.  And immediately afterwards, we see a hilarious and surprisingly cynical dip into (dare I say?) political satire.

And here's the wonderful part.  After all that, we get some reassurance from a voice of authority character that even though that last scene looked bad, very bad, things are going to be alright.  This was the big turning point because the various worlds are now at least aware of each-other.  They know they have at least one thing in common, and it set the stage for more crossovers between the three -but really, four- worlds.

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 1, Episode 1: "Beginnings"

"We're Number One and we've just begun and now it's time to play!"
 - Fraggle Chorus

The camera flies through a broken panel in a window of a workshop where a friendly-looking gentleman and his shaggy dog are hard at work on something.  The camera then swoops through the cozy room and down into a strange-looking, jagged crack in the wall.  It's lined with bricks and clearly goes down into the foundation.  The camera dives right down into the hole, which turns out to be the entrance to a series of colorful tunnels.  And very suddenly, the music picks up and we're right on the tailfeathers of a creature racing towards a big, central cavern.  The cavern opens up and it is huge.  It resembles the Crystal Caves of Bermuda that inspired it, but with a key difference - it is inhabited.  The cave is filled to the ceiling with dozens of Muppet characters and each and every one of them looks unique.  And they proceed to sing one of the best-loved television themes of the decade.

The opening sequence of "Fraggle Rock" is remarkable.  In about a minute you're introduced to nearly all the major characters and species, you get little hints of everyone's personality, and you're given a geographical layout of the series' multilayered world.  In some respects, the pilot episode of "Fraggle Rock" was almost redundant.

But what a fantastic pilot episode it is!  "Fraggle Rock" was truly a series that hit the ground running at full tilt.  There's a whole fantastical world to be set up here in only twenty minutes, and while they only hint at the ways these different creatures and lands are connected, they do manage to cover a lot.  The characters aren't yet established as well as they'd be in subsequent episodes, but they each get their own little character moment.

The more I think about it, the more I'm kind of in awe of "Fraggle Rock" right from the beginning.  Already Uncle Traveling Matt gives us a very funny -and yet, also kind of poignant- take on the humans through alien eyes trope.  We have our first visit to the Trash Heap, who is a delightfully bizarre character even for a Muppet production seeing as she's basically an oracular compost heap that sounds vaguely like Steven Tyler - this was all based on the idea that the most informative items found by archaeologists are in ancient trash heaps, since they tell us more about daily life in ancient times.  We get a surprisingly long sequence of Doozers building a bridge and it not only establishes what Doozers are and what they do, it's also Muppet technician Faz Fazakas saying, "Look at what we can do NOW!"  The whole thing is already fantastic and -once again- remember we're only twenty minutes into the series.

Now, there are a LOT of excellent episodes in this first season and not a single dud episode in the lot.  I'm going to have to limit myself to reviewing my very favorites, but know that season one as a whole is terrific, especially once we're halfway through the season...