(Asked why Traveling Matt would not have recognized the Moon from his time in outer space, Tartaglia said that perhaps he did see it, but only as a thin crescent, and did not equate the two. Or maybe it was that he was “so forward-driven” that he never bothered to look up.)
A postcard with a picture of a “cookie” helps lead Gobo, Red, and Uncle Traveling Matt to learning about the moon and how NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team is enabling astronaut missions to the lunar surface.
Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
A postcard with a picture of a “cookie” helps lead Gobo, Red, and Uncle Traveling Matt to learning about the moon and how NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team is enabling astronaut missions to the lunar surface. Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
As Gobo, Red, and Traveling Matt step through the Fraggle hole onto the stage at Kennedy, they are no longer hand-operated puppets but full-body “walk-around” characters. And to remain to scale, that meant up-scaling another character, too.
“When we scaled up the Fraggles to be costume-size, so they could dance and move without being encumbered by being just puppets, we realized that one of the Doozers would have to become puppet-size. That was really fun to do because the real Doozers are six inches tall, and they are animatronic. They’re teeny, and now they get to have their glory as hand puppets,” said Tartaglia, who also voices Gobo for the show and performs as him when in puppet size.
Down at Fraggle Rock
When NASA first contacted the Jim Henson Company about bringing the Fraggles to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Tartaglia and his team knew it would be cool. And once they decided to have Uncle Traveling Matt be the show’s central character, the plot came together fairly quickly.
“He’s a great character to learn from because he is so oblivious, and he thinks he knows everything, and he really doesn’t. So he’s a great character to use as a bridge for the audience to be able to learn all these awesome facts and figures about NASA,” said Tartaglia.
He and his team also came to appreciate how much Fraggle Rock shares with the space agency, its activities, and goals.
“We all started talking and realized really quickly that Fraggles and Doozers and the whole message of Fraggle Rock—especially about Uncle Matt—is about exploring new worlds, making discoveries, and the whole fragile ecosystem. All of these different worlds need each other and want to work to learn more about each other. It sounded all very aligned with what NASA does and the whole purpose of space exploration,” said Tartaglia.
“So our two worlds that on paper wouldn’t seem connected, made a lot of sense to connect,” he said.