We spoke w/ FraggleRock: 'Back to the Rock's John Tartaglia on the 'Night of the Lights' Holiday Special, working with Daveed Diggs, and more.
The only thing better than Fraggle Rock is a Fraggle Rock holiday special, and the Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock “Night of the Lights” episode provides a huge helping of the kind of holiday cheer that only the Fraggles can deliver. Always up for a fun adventure, the Fraggles – Gobo, Red, Wembley, Mokey and Boober – are encouraged by Jamdolin to find the brightest light.
To me, it’s always been the pinnacle of what really quality family TV should be, and I just never thought we’d get a chance to bring it back, and to that scale too. It’s not even that we’re remaking the original series. We’re taking the original series, and then adding even more to it. Every day that I walk on set, I just always try to take it in and breathe it in, and remember that, even on the most stressful days, I dreamt of this when I was seven years old, and now I’m here.
When it comes to puppet characters, everyone knows The Muppets and those characters, and everyone knows Sesame Street and those characters, but over the years, when I’ve mentioned Fraggle Rock and Fraggles to people, I would sometimes get very confused looks because people don’t necessarily know them quite as well.
Mokey got a make-over because we wanted to make her more appealing to kids today. There were opportunities that we found to rediscover the show. You’d be surprised how it is a show that you mention to people who grew up with it, and they get what we call a Fraggle face. If Karen says that she’s Red Fraggle, people’s eyes pop open, and they freak out because she had such an impact on their lives. It’s really cool to see that still happening now, when people hear that it’s back.
We had this wonderful thing, at the beginning of production, that we called the Great Fraggle Gaggle. It was those of us getting to work on the reboot, and then we invited a bunch of folks from the original series too, and we all met together on Zoom, because it was still very much in the time of COVID. We really talked through the show, from top to bottom – the production of the show, the creation of the show, why Jim [Henson] wanted to make it.
So, I remember we were in production of the first season. We were probably a month or two in, and I just dropped this bomb, one day, where I was like, “Could we maybe do an extra episode, like a holiday special?” I had this very, very, very basic idea of it being about light. The thing I loved about “The Bells of Fraggle Rock” is that it was a brand-new legend.
My favorite moment is at the end, when Red and Mokey have a little exchange. Red’s been stressing this whole time about getting Mokey something, giving Mokey something and doing something for her. I do that every year with my family, where I feel like I don’t give enough, my presents aren’t good enough, and I forgot somebody. You put that stress on yourself.
He’s one of my favorite characters, so we knew that he had to be part of this special. We would always say on set that he knew exactly how it was gonna end up, which is one of the beautiful things about how Jim played Cantus. He would come with this challenge or this riddle for the Fraggles, that he already knew the answer to. It’s like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. She already knows what’s gonna happen, she just lets it play out. That’s what Jamdolin does in this special.
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