(When asked why Traveling Matt might not have recognized the Moon during his time in outer space, Tartaglia said that perhaps he had seen it, but only as a thin crescent, and did not compare the two. Or perhaps it was that he was “so forward-driven” that he never bothered to look up.)
A postcard featuring a picture of “Cookie” helps Gobo, Red, and Uncle Traveling Matt learn about the Moon and how NASA’s Exploration Ground System team is enabling astronaut missions to the Moon’s surface.
Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
A postcard featuring a picture of “Cookie” helps Gobo, Red, and Uncle Traveling Matt learn about the Moon and how NASA’s Exploration Ground System team is enabling astronaut missions to the Moon’s surface.
Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
As Gobo, Red and Traveling Matt step through the Fraggle Hole onto Kennedy’s stage, they are no longer hand-operated puppets but full-bodied “walk-around” characters. And to stay on the scale, it means leveling up the other character as well.
“When we made the Fraggles costume-sized so they could dance and move just by being puppets, we realized that one of the Doozers would have to be puppet-sized. It was really fun to do that because the real Doozers are six inches tall, and they’re animatronic. They’re tiny, and now they get their glory as hand puppets,” said Tartaglia, who created Gobo for the show. It also makes sounds and performs like a puppet when it is in shape.
land on Fraggle Rock
When NASA first approached The Jim Henson Company about bringing the Fraggles to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Tartaglia and his team knew it would be a good fit. And once they decided to make Uncle Traveling Matt the central character of the show, the plot came together fairly quickly.
“He’s a great character to learn from because he’s so clueless, 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 amazing facts and figures about NASA,” Tartaglia said.
How much appreciation he and his team received Fraggle Rock Shares with the space agency, its activities and goals.
“We all started talking and very quickly understood that the whole message of Fraggles and Doozers and Fraggle Rock– especially about Uncle Matt – is about exploring new worlds, making discoveries, and entire fragile ecosystems. All these different worlds need each other and want to work to learn more about each other. “It all seems in line with what NASA does and the whole purpose of space exploration,” Tartaglia said.
“So our two worlds, which on paper don’t seem connected, have a lot of meaning in connecting them,” he said.
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