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| Fraggle Rock |
Today, The Grandma is resting at home. She has decided to watch TV and she has chosen one of her favourite entertainment TV Series, Fraggel Rock.
Fraggle Rock is a puppet television series of Muppet creatures created by Jim Henson. The Grandma loves it and she wants to commemorate the 37th anniversary of this show whose first episode was aired on a day like today in 1983.
Fraggle Rock, also known as Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock or Fraggle Rock with Jim Henson's Muppets, is a Canadian-British-American children's puppet television series about interconnected societies of Muppet creatures, created by Jim Henson.
Fraggle Rock was co-produced by British television company Television South (TVS), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, U.S. pay television service Home Box Office (HBO) and Henson Associates. Unlike Sesame Street, which had been created for a single market and later adapted for international markets, Fraggle Rock was intended from the start to be an international production, and the entire show was constructed with this in mind.
More information: The Jim Henson Company
Fraggle Rock debuted January, 10 1983 as one of the first shows involving the collaboration of Henson International Television (HiT Entertainment from 1989), the international arm of Jim Henson Productions. The co-production brought together British regional ITV franchise-holder Television South (TVS), CBC Television, United States pay-television service Home Box Office and Henson Associates, later Jim Henson Productions.
Filming took place on a Toronto sound-stage and later at Elstree Studios, London. The avant-garde poet bpNichol worked as one of the show's writers. In the early days of development, the script called the Fraggles Woozles pending the devising of a more suitable name.
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| Fraggle Rock & Jim Henson |
Henson described the Fraggle Rock series as a high-energy, raucous musical romp. It's a lot of silliness. It's wonderful. The program proved accessible to audiences of all ages, and used the fantasy creatures as an allegory to deal with serious issues such as prejudice, spirituality, personal identity, the environment, and social conflict.
In 2009, as part of the Jim Henson Foundation's donation of puppets to the Center for Puppetry Arts, the Atlanta museum displayed many of the original puppet characters from Fraggle Rock in their exhibition Jim Henson: Wonders from his Workshop.
There are four main intelligent anthropomorphic species in the Fraggle Rock environment: Fraggles, Doozers, Gorgs and Silly Creatures. The Fraggles and Doozers live in a system of natural caves called Fraggle Rock that are filled with all manner of creatures and features and which connect to at least two different areas:
-The Land of the Gorgs which they consider part of the Universe.
-Outer Space where the silly creatures or humans live.
More information: Fraggle Rock-Youtube & @Fraggle Rock
One of the main themes of the series is that, although the three species depend on the other for their survival, they usually fail to communicate due to vast differences in their biology and culture. The series mainly follows the adventures of five Fraggles with five personalities: pragmatic Gobo, artistic Mokey, indecisive Wembley, superstitious Boober, and adventurous Red.
Some of the character's names are film industry in-jokes. For example, Uncle Travelling Matt is a reference to the travelling matte technique used with blue screen to give the impression a character is somewhere they are not; Gobo is named after a shaped metal grill placed over a theatre light to produce interesting shadows and Red is a reference to a redhead, another name for an 800w film light.
The CBC/HBO version of the series has been broadcast and dubbed in 95
countries. The series airs on Channel 7, Doordarshan, and Workpoint TV.
Others were broadcast on Coub as an uploaded video, and others
broadcast on TVtropolis (Canada), Bolivision (Bolivia), and CNC3
(Trinidad and Tobago).
After the show ended on HBO in 1987, the channel started to rerun the series. In 1988, it ran on TNT. The show aired on Disney Channel from October 1, 1992 to 1996.From 1999 to 2001, the show moved to Odyssey Network, which had recently been purchased by Henson and Hallmark. After Hallmark took full control, it discontinued the reruns. In 2010, reruns began airing on The Hub as part of the channel's launch.
In 2007, Fraggle Rock reruns aired on television in several countries. On July 23, 2007, Boomerang And Cartoonito started repeating episodes of the North American co-production of Fraggle Rock in the UK. In January 2013, ITV broadcast two episodes of this version as part of its Old Skool Weekend feature on the CITV channel.
On December 12, 2015, the remastered The Bells of Fraggle Rock episode debuted alongside Henson's remastered Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas on ABC Family in its 25 Days of Christmas programming block. Fraggle Rock is available on HBO Now in HD and in 2016 the series began to air reruns on HBO Family until September 26, 2019.
More information: Mental Floss
Music played a central part in Fraggle Rock. Every episode featured two or three original songs co-written by Canadian poet Dennis Lee and Philip Balsam, as well as incidental music. Several episodes, usually involving Cantus and the Minstrels, focused primarily on music -such as Red Fraggle's attempt to find her song for the Fraggle Medley, or the effect of music on the breaking of winter or the presence of light in Fraggle Rock.
The Fraggle Rock Theme reached number 33 on the British music charts during the phenomenon. Writers included Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and Jocelyn Stevenson, with songs by Philip Balsam and Dennis Lee.
The Star Comics imprint of Marvel Comics published two separate Fraggle Rock comic-book series in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Originally, the first series was to be drawn by Marty Taras, the creator of Baby Huey, and the cover of the first published issue of the Fraggle Rock comic is done by him. Also, at least one penciled page of his Fraggle work for that first issue has been preserved in print. However the art assignment for the series finally went to Marie Severin, who illustrated all eight issue interiors and the other seven covers. The second series lasted six issues.
In early 2010, Archaia Studios Press published its first three-issue series of Fraggle Rock. A second three-issue series was followed in January 2011. Both series were collected into hardcover editions shortly after their respective publications. No further announcements were made regarding any future volumes.
More information: Time
When I was young, my ambition was to be
one of the people who made a difference in this world.
My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.
Jim Henson
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