How Fraggle Rock Tried To Save The World
Plus last call for free beer, the Canadians who fought in the American Civil War, and more...
It all started at the Hyde Park Hotel in London, England. It was 1981 and Jim Henson was there with some of his writers and puppeteers. For the last five extraordinary years, The Muppet Show had been filmed in a nearby studio, but now it was coming to an end. Henson wanted to brainstorm ideas for a new children's television series. And he made it clear right from the very beginning: this one was going be even more ambitious. Years later, one of the puppeteers remembered the moment it all began: "Jim walked into the room and said, ‘I want to do a show that will change the world and end war.'" That's how Fraggle Rock started.
For the next three days, Henson and his team worked on the concept for the show, which would continue to evolve over the next few months. Fraggle Rock would be about peace and understanding; it would teach children that everyone has a different perspective, that even the scariest monsters have thoughts and feelings of their own. Colourful Muppets living in an underground world would see that their lives were connected to the lives of others — whether it was the huge and terrifying Gorgs, the tiny construction worker Doozers, or the humans of "Outer Space."
"By seeing how the various groups in the world of Fraggle Rock learn to deal with their differences," Henson explained, "perhaps we can learn a little bit about how to deal with ours."
It was a message urgently needed in those Cold War years, particularly since the Reagan White House had deregulated children's television, prompting a flood of violent programming meant to sell action figures (like G.I. Joe, He-Man and Transformers). And Fraggle Rock wasn't just going to be for kids in North America, either. It was going to be one of the very first international co-productions — specifically structured to connect with the lives of children all over the world. In the United States and Canada, the hole in the wall that led into the tunnels of Fraggle Rock would be found in the workshop of an inventor. In England, it was in a lighthouse. In France, a bakery. Over the course of the next few years, the show would be broadcast in more than 90 countries and translated into 13 different languages. Henson's message of peace and understanding would have a truly global audience.
And so, they decided to film Fraggle Rock in one of the most multicultural cities on earth: Toronto. "Given the show's commitment to interdependence and a global consciousness," one of the producers later explained, "I can't imagine it being filmed anywhere else."
"When we came up with the idea of doing it in Canada we all just loved it," Henson once agreed. "It seems right for the program."
By that point, the Muppets already had a long history in Canada; they’d been shooting in Toronto since the 1960s. Usually, Henson would use the Robert Lawrence Studios in Yorkville; that's where specials like Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince and Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas were filmed. When he first came to Yorkville, the neighbourhood was still ground zero for the '60s counterculture in Canada, filled with hippies, greasers and weekenders and some of the country's best poetry, folk music and rock & roll. The scene didn't last long — by the early 1970s, the authorities had teamed up with developers to replace the hippies with fancy boutiques and restaurants — but through it all, the TV studio survived. And Henson kept using it.
So that's where they filmed Fraggle Rock. The caverns of the Fraggles and the Doozers, the castle of the Gorgs, and the hole in the wall of Doc's workshop were all built on Yorkville Avenue (just east of Bay, one block north of Bloor). The neighbourhood that had once been home to the likes of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and William Gibson was now home to a whole other kind of eccentric Bohemian peacenik: The Muppets.
For the next four years, some of the Muppets' greatest performers were hard at work in Toronto trying to make a puppet show so amazing it would change the world.
Three of the Fraggle puppeteers were relative newcomers to the Muppet family. Kathryn Mullen, who performed as Mokey Fraggle, had most notably been responsible for Kira the Gelfling in The Dark Crystal — and had assisted Franz Oz with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. Karen Prell, who was doing Red Fraggle, had played some minor roles on Sesame Street. Steve Whitmire, who did Wembley Fraggle, had worked on The Muppet Show, mostly taking on relatively minor characters like Rizzo The Rat.
The three other puppeteers performing major roles on Fraggle Rock were already responsible for some of the most popular Muppet characters ever:
Dave Goelz was the human behind Boober Fraggle and Uncle Traveling Matt. Before that, he was The Great Gonzo and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on The Muppet Show, along with Zoot, the saxophonist from The Electric Mayhem band. He got an apartment in Yorkville just a couple of blocks from the studio (on Hazelton Avenue). His first adventure with Uncle Traveling Matt was filmed right outside the studio (on Scadding Avenue). Many of his adventures took place in Toronto, along with locations all over the world. At one point, he lays claim to the CN Tower in the name of Fragglekind. "The ultimate Doozer construction,” he writes. “It looked absolutely delicious, but it tasted terrible.”
Richard Hunt had been responsible for Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums and the heckling old Statler on The Muppet Show, as well as Janice from The Electric Mayhem band. On Fraggle Rock, he was one of two people tackling the role of Junior Gorg — the huge Gorg puppet was so complicated that two people were needed to operate it at all times. While Hunt was in town, he stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel just down the street (at the corner of Yorkville Avenue & Avenue Road).
Jerry Nelson was the human behind the star of Fraggle Rock — Gobo Fraggle — as well as Pa Gorg and Marjory The Trash Heap. On Sesame Street, he was The Count and the original Snuffleupagus. On The Muppet Show, he was Lew Zealand, Robin The Frog, Camilla The Chicken and Sgt. Floyd Pepper of The Electric Mayhem band. In honour of Canada, he gave Gobo a distinctly Canadian accent, complete with plenty of "eh"s. During his years in Toronto, he seems to have developed a particular fondest for The Pilot Tavern (on Cumberland near Yonge). "Jerry would often hold court at The Pilot with cast and crew members at the end of a busy week shooting the show," Prell (Red) later remembered, "regaling all assembled with songs, stories and jokes in a range of hilarious voices until the late hours."
Many of those members of the cast and crew were Torontonians. Some of them worked for the CBC. (Canada's public broadcaster was co-producing the show with ITV and HBO; it was one of the American cable network's very first original series.) Others were local writers, artists and musicians.
The producers had a particularly challenging task in finding someone to write the music for the show — the songs were going to be an incredibly important part of Fraggle Rock. Hundreds of Canadian musicians submitted their children's music. Jerry Juhl, who had been the head writer on The Muppet Show was taking on the same role with Fraggle Rock. His desk was piled high with hundreds of cassette tapes.
"I listened to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs that were children's songs," he later remembered, "[but] we were looking for Fraggle songs... And one morning the alarm went off in my hotel room, and I got up, and before even going in to brush my teeth I picked up a cassette... shoved it into the machine... And I just remember walking back into the bedroom, frozen, because for the first time there was Fraggle music. It was so different."
The song was by Philip Balsam and Dennis Lee.
By then, Lee was already a famous Canadian poet. His children's book, Alligator Pie, became an instant classic when it was published in 1974. He'd co-founded the House of Anansi Press, played an important role in the experimental education at Rochdale College, and would go on to become Toronto's first ever Poet Laureate. He and Balsam were writing songs for fun; Balsam composed the music and Lee wrote the lyrics. But it was just a hobby. They hadn't even submitted the cassette for consideration; a CBC executive gave it to Juhl. When the Fraggle Rock writer offered them the job, he says Lee tried to talk him out of it. But Juhl was convinced the mix of innocence and wisdom was a perfect fit for the show. He wouldn't take no for an answer.
It was the beginning of an unbelievably productive period for the songwriting pair. Almost every single one of the 96 episodes of Fraggle Rock featured multiple songs. Balsam and Lee wrote almost all of them — an average of more than one song every week for more than four straight years. And they were good, too. "I can't remember ever rejecting a song," Juhl recalled years later. The Fraggle Rock theme song even became a Top 40 hit in the UK.
On occasion, Balsam would team up to write a song with another Torontonian poet: bpNichol. Most of Nichol's work was breathtakingly experimental: he was best-known for his visual concrete poetry and his performances of sound poems as a member of The Four Horsemen. But he became one of the main writers on Fraggle Rock, penning scripts along with a team that included several award-winning Canadian novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. They'd go on to work on everything from Sharon, Lois & Bram's Elephant Show to Street Legal to Little Mosque on the Prairie. "It wasn't the kind of staff that you would normally think would be assembled for a children's television show," Juhl admitted, "Because we, in fact, weren't thinking of ourselves as a children's television show. We were trying not to label ourselves... we were looking for really interesting people."
Jim Henson would also personally work on some episodes of Fraggle Rock. He directed several himself and performed a couple of relatively small recurring roles (Convincing John and Cantus The Minstrel). But for the most part, he spent the early 1980s focused on making and promoting his new movies: The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and The Muppets Take Manhattan. And so, Fraggle Rock became the very first Muppet production that he didn't personally oversee on a day-to-day basis. Instead of spending all of his time in Toronto, Henson trusted the show to the all-star team he'd put together.
"I think we all felt a sense of pride about that," Nelson (Gobo) said. And the cast and crew took it to heart. Making the show was a process that took all seven days of the week; some of those days lasted long into the night. But by all accounts, it was incredible fun. Creativity ruled. Collaboration was everywhere: in the writers' room, in the songwriting, in the design of the sets and the characters, in the way two puppeteers were needed to bring many of the characters to life. In fact, an article in The Awl once suggested that Fraggle Rock provides the template for "the ideal creative workplace." In articles and in interviews and on blogs, one after another after another, members of the cast and crew remember Fraggle Rock as the best job they ever had.
"We shared the values of the show, as you may expect," producer Larry Mirkin recalled, "but we also shared the same values in how you go about creating a show... There was never an argument on the set. We all just believed that in order to make the show, we were going to make it by means of this joyful process."
That joy is easy to sense when you're watching the show. It helped to make the series an unqualified success. A generation of children all over the world was raised on Fraggle Rock — and on its message of peace and understanding. Since then, it has continued to air in syndication, inspired a spin-off animated series and a new CGI show about Doozers. In recent years, the show has been rebooted twice. Decades later, it's still revered as one of the greatest children's television shows of all-time: "a high-water mark for children's television;" "unrelentingly smart;" "exquisitely crafted... unrivaled in terms of craftsmanship and character development."
It was still breaking new ground years after the final episode aired: in 1989, Fraggle Rock became the very first North American television series to be shown in the Soviet Union. Within months, the Iron Curtain had crumbled. "We always joke that Fraggle Rock led to the end of the Cold War," a Henson archivist later said. "By the end of the year, as the show's lessons of tolerance and understanding wafted through the airwaves, the Berlin Wall came down."
By then, the show was over. But Henson's relationship with Toronto continued throughout the 1980s. Before his death in 1990, he returned to Yorkville over and over again, filming Muppet specials like The Muppets – A Celebration of 30 Years, The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show ("she gets caught up in a love triangle involving George Hamilton and John Ritter") and the pilot episode of The Jim Henson Hour.
The cast and crew who worked in Toronto during those years also continued to play an enormous role in the world of The Muppets beyond Fraggle Rock. When Henson was making Labyrinth, he had Dennis Lee write the first draft of the film's story. Four of the five main Fraggle puppeteers would all perform characters in the movie. And all five were there on the sad occasion of Henson's funeral, performing in character as part of a musical tribute dedicated to his memory. Goelz (Boober) and Whitmire (Wembley) would go on to star in The Muppet's Christmas Carol as Gonzo and Rizzo The Rat. Whitmire had only been in his early 20s when took on the role of Wembley Fraggle, worried that his career had already peaked; when Henson passed, he became Kermit The Frog.
So, it wasn't really the end when Fraggle Rock finally stopped filming in 1986, but it was still a bittersweet moment. Henson wanted to end the show while it was still at the height of its power. The night after the final day on set, the cast and crew gathered for a wrap party a few blocks from the studio — at the Sutton Place Hotel at the corner of Bay & Wellesley (today it's the Britt condominium). That night, the show ended the same way it had always been made: with joy and creativity. The invitation to the party was covered in Doozers. A video showed what the Fraggles were going to do now; Red signed a contract to play hockey for the Leafs. Balsam and Lee wrote a new version of one of their songs, turning it into a farewell to the show sung by the Fraggles and their puppeteers. The crowd rose to its feet in applause and sang along.
Jim Henson gave a speech that night. At first, he joked around, did his Convincing John voice, had to wait for the whoops of laughter to die down. But the room grew quiet as he began to reminisce about his years in Yorkville and the work they'd done there. "This whole project of Fraggle has been a joy from the beginning," he said. "It's fun when you start out trying to do something that makes a positive statement... I think the body of work of Fraggle Rock is something that's going to stay around. And I think it's something we're all going to be proud of for a long time. And I think that's... that's really nice."
A version of this story originally appeared on my old Historical Ephemera blog. You’ll find lots of sources and related links there.
The Canadians Who Fought in the American Civil War
We’ve just released another new episode of Canadiana! This one is our most ambitious yet, the first in a big two-part exploration of the immense impact the American Civil War had on Canadian history — and the impact Canadians had on the battlefields south of the border, as well.
Filming took us to ten different cities in five different provinces, and the editing and animation has taken months of incredibly hard work by my dizzyingly-talented collaborators (who also took home an award from T.O Webfest this week for Best Special Effects).
And as I say, it’s just the first part of the story. While in this episode we’re mostly focused on the Canadians who supported the Union, in the Part Two we’ll be exploring the stories of Canadians who supported the Confederacy, including pirates, spies and some of the most celebrated politicians in our country’s history.
As always, the new episode is free to watch on YouTube. It’s already one of our most popular ever:
Last Call for Free Beer! And The Boozy History of Toronto…
I’m bringing back one of my most popular online courses — and this time it comes with FREE BEER!
Alcohol has always been a dramatic part of life in Toronto — from the days of colonial treachery to modern debates over drinking in parks. In this four-week online course, we'll meet drunken rebels, beer-bashing mayors, notorious bootleggers, and alcoholic politicians. We'll witness booze-soaked murders, prohibition-era shootouts, and the kidnapping of one Canada's wealthiest brewers — plus, the bitter fight over whether drinking should be allowed at all. To truly understand Toronto, it helps to understand how this city has been shaped by centuries of people getting drunk.
The course is being sponsored by the wonderful people at Great Lakes Brewery, who got in touch asking if they could give the students FREE BEER! Of course I said yes! So, if you’re logging in from Toronto, you’ll get a grand total of eight FREE BEERS to go along with the course — two for each class. (And if you’d like to do a little of your own research ahead of time so you know what kind of tasty beer you’re in for, you can check out the Great Lakes Brewpub at 11 Lower Jarvis or find them on offer in bars and restaurants around the city.)
The course begins this Wednesday, September 27, and runs for the next four Wednesday nights. As always, paid subscribers to the newsletter get 10% off. And if you have to miss a class, don’t worry — all the lectures are recorded so you can watch them whenever you like!
The Toronto History Weekly is only able to survive thanks to those of you willing to support it with a few dollars a month. If you’d like to switch to a paid subscription, all you have to do is click the button below. Only about 4% of readers have made the switch so far, which basically means that with your subscription, you’ll be giving the gift of Toronto history to 25 other people — in addition to getting perks like 10% off my online courses:
The Fight Over One of Toronto’s Oldest Apartment Buildings
This weekend I was lucky enough to attend the world premiere of a new documentary about one of our city’s most remarkable buildings. Spadina Gardens was built all the way back in 1906, among the first apartment blocks in Toronto. It’s a spectacular place filled with delightful Edwardian details and has been home to fascinating historical figures, including Sir Henry Pellatt (the crooked knight of Casa Loma, who moved there after his corrupt empire collapsed) and opera singer Maureen Forrester. Tenants have hosted literary parties attended by everyone from Gabriel García Márquez to Ian McEwan; it’s where Atom Egoyan met Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter. Salman Rushdie even stayed as a guest during a top secret surprise visit to Toronto back in 1992. It’s been connected to the fight against the Spadina Expressway and today it’s still filled with creative and passionate people who’ve been fighting a more recent battle of their own.
Charlotte’s Castle os directed by Jamie Kastner (who also did the recent doc about the Norval Morriseau forgery ring, There Are No Fakes) and tells the story of the residents’ struggle to preserve the building’s heritage and avoid getting renovicted under a new owner:
Charlotte’s Castle will be screening at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema a couple more times this week:
Wednesday, September 27 — 4pm
Friday, September 29 — 6:39pm
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
THE DESTRUCTION OF ONTARIO PLACE NEWS — Last week, I wrote about Raymond Moriyama’s extraordinary legacy and mentioned that it’s currently under threat on more than one front, including The Goh Ohn Bell at Ontario Place. This weekend, the dismantling of the award-winning shelter he built for the bell began. It’s a gift from Ontario's Japanese-Canadians and commemorates the centennial of Japanese settlement in Canada, but is being forced out of the way by the Ford government’s plan to turn much of the public park over to a private spa. Read more.
IF YOU’VE GOT $8,000 NEWS — The old bar from the famous/infamous Brunswick Tavern is up for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Read more.
HANLAN’S POINT PODCAST NEWS — As a guest on the Toronto Star’s “This Matters” podcast, historian Ed Jackson talks about the important role Hanlan’s Point has played in Toronto’s LGBTQ+ history. Listen to it.
TORONTO’S MAYORAL HISTORY PODCAST NEWS — And the “This Matters” podcast also chats with Mark Maloney about his new book that dives into the often strange history of our city’s past mayors. Listen to it.
CLAY NEWS — The ground floor of the Gardiner Museum is going to be undergoing a"full-scale reimagining," which will include the creation of “a new fully equipped makerspace, a community engagement centre, and an Indigenous gallery space.” Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
THE 130 YEAR HISTORY OF AN EAST TORONTO HOUSE
September 27 — 7pm — The Beaches Sandbox — The Beach & East Toronto Historical Society
“The Beach & East Toronto Historical Society in partnership with The Beaches Sandbox presents Canadian golf historian Ian Murray with Paul Nicosia. The 130 years history of an East Toronto house and its remarkable family of stonecutters and golfers.”
Free!
THE BOY ON THE BICYCLE REVISITED: AN OVERLOOKED WRONGFUL MURDER CONVICTION
October 3 — 6pm — Online — International Wrongful Convictions Day Committee
“On September 15th, 1956, a seven-year-old child was murdered on the deserted grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in Toronto. The main suspect was a teenage boy seen near the crime scene on a bicycle. The Toronto Police arrested fourteen-year-old Ron Moffatt. … The real murderer, Peter Woodcock - a sex offender and serial killer - remained at large, preying on new victims. Mr. Woodcock murdered two other children and one adult in addition to Wayne Mallette on the CNE grounds. Journalist, author, and advocate, Nate Hendley, published a book about the wrongful conviction.”
Free with registration!
TORONTO AS COMMUNITY: FIFTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHS
October 5 — West Toronto Junction Historical Society
“Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s presentation on his new book ‘Toronto as Community: Fifty Years of Photographs.’ Those who attended Vince’s presentation of photographs in October 2022 on ‘The Stockyards Then and Now’ will be thrilled to have another session with him and his wonderful photos and commentaries.”