When I was given the gift of laughter and joy this Christmas past, in the form of the collected Fraggle Rock episodes on DVD, I could not have been more excited. And while I had to leave this cache of goodness behind when I set off adventuring about the globe, with but little re-explored, I was so woebegone that only enormous amounts of the Hensen Company channel YouTube viewing could allay my despondency.

Before this, it had been many a long year since I had visited with the colorful Muppets who lived beneath that inventor guy’s workshop, known collectively as the Fraggles. I remembered the teeny tireless construction workers called the Doozers, the enormous monster family with insatiable Fraggle appetites called the Gorgs, everybody’s strange fascination with radishes (my least favorite vegetable, then and now), the talking trashheap -- which made a recent appearance on The Daily Show, gladdening my heart no end -- and I recalled enough of the theme song to still be able to name our five main Fraggle heroes (Gobo, Mokey, Wembley, Goober, Red!). But I have to confess that with time’s inexorable passage, much of what I loved about the show had been subsumed by the minutia that make up a life, and I could no longer quite put my finger on quite why I loved this show. I only knew that I did.

The first thing that struck me, in my YouTube wanderings, was the music. How had I possibly forgotten all of the music? Indeed, as I watched more and more clips and relived more and more moments of transcendent, age-defying wonderment, it became increasingly ludicrous to me that timeless, tuneful songs like “Let Me Be Your Song” and “People Don’t Know” had somehow been discarded from my personal in-brain jukebox and been replaced by… oh, I don’t know. A panoply of Disney tunes, most likely.

Probably the episode I best remembered was the one about the smooth-talking Convincing John, which was very The Music Man-ish and had some terrific lyrics, and may have been the genesis of my very logical distrust of evangelical preachers. (Thanks, Jim Henson!) But other episodes that came back to me, slowly but surely, included the one where Wembley falls in love, the one where a group of minstrels arrive and make Red their lead singer, the one where Cotterpin the rebellious Doozer doesn’t want to build stuff, the one where Boober…

But wait! It occurs to me just now that I haven’t really detailed anything about the series at all, and on the slim chance that you are reading this and yet have no idea who these beloved icons out of my childhood are, please allow me to explain.

Living in caverns deep below the ground, in harmony with the tiny hard-hat wearing Doozers whose only goal in life is to build, build, build, are a species of sentient, happy-go-lucky thingamajigs known as Fraggles. (It’s all of their last names, you see.) The Fraggles we know well are Gobo, the sensible; Mokey, the spiritual; Wembly, the indecisive; Boober, the depressive; and Red, the intense. Above them resides a backyard inventor type called Doc (Gerard Parkes) and his dog, Sprocket; also above ground live the Gorgs, a vaguely agrarian family of shaggy monster-types who despise Fraggles and consider themselves lords of all they survey, and the “all-knowing, all-seeing” trash heap, Marjory. Then there is Gobo’s Uncle Traveling Matt, who sends back postcards to the gang from his adventures in Outer Space (our world), where he details the doings of we “Silly Creatures.”

Yes, there is a lot going on here. Singing, puppet wrangling, the occasional geography lesson and plentiful morals of the story. But it is all so much fun; nostalgic for me, certainly, but also just a really good time, regardless. If you have kids, they’ll love to watch this show with you (and you’ll love watching it more than, say, most of Playhouse Disney’s eternally sunny output), and even if you don’t, Fraggle Rock remains a worthwhile use of your time. Think of it in terms of The Simpsons and Futurama; The Muppets is the senior production of the pair and is without doubt a landmark in television history; but Fraggle Rock is the outrageous and unpredictable follow-up that has garnered itself a more discerning, more cult-like following, and continues to win over new fans even as its more mainstream cousin continues to wear out its welcome.

And if nothing else, Fraggle Rock still bears one of the best theme song opening lines ever; I mean, who doesn’t want to dance their cares away?


   -- Rachel Hyland