Rachael Albert, Senior, Assistant Editor
There are many genres of television, and many media to create them, but none compare to those which show entire worlds and huge casts of characters. Those which are the result of entirely out-of-box thinking, risks, and rewards. The only time I see shows like this is when watching some childhood favorites like talking hand-puppets. The Muppets and Fraggle Rock represent different points in creator Jim Henson’s career, but both have a charm that no other show can replicate. We will never see a world like Henson’s again.
As the story goes, Henson found inspiration for Kermit the Frog – and by extension, the rest of the Muppets – when he cut up his mother’s green coat and stuck ping-pong balls on for eyes. The only reason The Jim Henson Company is as big as it is today is because a high school kid needed a creative outlet for all the ideas infesting his brain. Television is forever in debt to that kid. Fraggle Rock had more input from its co-creator, Michael F. Frith, who, according to Smithsonian Magazine, was inspired by the crystal caves, a “‘magical world’ resting right beneath his feet.”
The inspiration for the shows does not stop at the creative in charge; the characters also have their own motivations for joining the show. As stated by Kermit, himself, in a 1985 interview, “Frogs don’t have many opportunities… one could either go into a French restaurant or into show business. I decided to go into show business.” The muppets are an extension of Henson, each having their own lives and dreams. Television shows where the creator shows their inner worlds are common, but none do it at Henson’s scale.
How The Muppets and Fraggle Rock are staged differ from one another but are still unmatched in magnitude. Several forms of media use stages and intricate sets, such as stop-motion animation or live-action television, but none play with scale the way Henson does. None have the opportunity to. The sets of The Muppets and Fraggle Rock house multiple settings at a time, and the entire things are connected so the puppets interact with creatures both smaller and larger than them, including a heap of garbage on Fraggle Rock. For The Muppets, much of the set resembles a stage, giving the show a Vaudeville feeling. Fraggle Rock has a more closed-off set, being the inside of a cave. This show, however, has an expansive world where each set is – or at least appears to be – connected through tunnel systems.
The settings in both shows are theatrical and let the viewers fully immerse themselves in the worlds. Henson’s love for his work helps with this immersion as well, and he said in an interview talking about his creations that “my feeling about puppetry relates to stylization, simplicity, boiling down to – it’s a wonderful form and I really love it.” The way the shows are designed give such opportunity for scale, which Henson never missed. Henson introduced new ideas into television, but no mind has produced work like his.
Henson’s work evolved throughout his career, and unfortunately Fraggle Rock was one his last creations before his death. There is no doubt that we would still be seeing his work today if not for his sudden passing in 1990. Alas, we will never see a mind as great as Henson’s. The scale and importance of his work does not go unnoticed, but no one can build the worlds that he did. His shows are unlike others, and that is why we love him.