Jim Henson's Creature Shop: Back to Fraggle Rock

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0:43It's New York, autumn 2025, and I'm heading to a special workshop. The directions to get there, well, you get a pretty ordinary subway that takes you to a pretty ordinary street. There's a building you enter, you get the elevator, dial in at the door and you end up somewhere pretty extraordinary. Hey there, Sean at the door.

1:10Hi. Hi, guys. Hello, you made it, you made it. Come on in. This is a workshop like no other, where they make characters come to life from fabrics and materials. Working on a new project, we can come to the drawers first, you know, and use what we have. So we have everything organised by colour and, you know, by type. Like, so fur and then colour. You know, and then we just stitch it on and see how that can become that. What does it look like? What does the profile look like? What does this look like? You know, it's moving around and with a human hand inside the head, manipulating the mouth, right?

1:43How do we make this into a puppet? Welcome to Jim Henson's Creature Shop. I'm Sean Allsopp, and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service. for in the studio I'm following the creative minds who are bringing puppets to life with fabric foam and a lot of stitching I've always been mesmerized by these characters that came from this workshop along with millions around the world and the story starts in 1955 when Jim Henson and his wife Jane Henson began performing puppet shows on TV across the decades them and other creatives revolutionized puppetry and achieved worldwide success with characters from Sesame Street, Dark Crystal and The Muppet Show.

2:30To keep up with the growing productions, the Creature Shop opened in 1979. Today, there are two Creature Shops, one in LA that focuses more on animatronics and digital puppetry, and this one in New York City that creates your more traditional character with fabrics and materials. The world of puppetry. Now everything inside the workshop, if you turn around and we walk that way, that's all going to be things just lying about. The different parts are kind of spread about because it's being worked on. This is Melissa Creighton, the director of The Creature Shop. The workshop is bustling with builders working away with different tools.

3:06They are very busy making puppets of all sizes for TV, film, theatre and more. You know, a lot of people think Jim Henson, Muppets, hand puppets, TV. but we do so much more. We build puppets for theme parks and cruise ships, tiny little puppets. We build huge walk-around puppets. A walkabout puppet is basically a character costume that a performer will wear, similar to Big Bird from Sesame Street or the bear from Bear in the Big Blue House. And those huge walkabout puppets are exactly what I'm here to see as I join them in production. Yeah, I mean, we're right in the middle and it feels good. Let's see, we have the bodies and the feet and the arms and the hands and the pods.

3:48The heads are arriving today. They may be here. We should step out and look. Hey, Fiona, did Valley Courier deliver? Yes. Can we open the boxes? The heads are... Oh, they're out. Okay, great. Let's go look at them. So here they are. Oh, my goodness. So they were backed up? Yeah. Okay, so these are the back-formed heads, right? So this is, you know, we need like a hard, hard head, like a solid thing for the stage show. So that's what this is. Yeah. Oh, wow. So. Oh, it still smells. Oh, my goodness. So. They're cheering because the squirrel is going out. Oh, do you do that there when you. Oh, yes.

4:38You're smelling. Yeah. I love it. All of it. It's really fun to see it all come together. It's a lot of hard work that goes into it. A lot of hands, a lot of creative hands. That's why we ding that bell when we're done. Just to have that. Hooray, we did it! I've been given access as they work towards ringing that bell for their latest build, making walkabout characters for a Fraggle Rock live show. Fraggle Rock began as a TV show that aired from 1983 to 1987. Fraggles are small, colourful creatures, made of fabric with eccentric hair and tails, who love to sing, play and dance their cares away.

5:22The show was unique in that some scenes were filmed separately in countries where it aired, so audiences had its own tailored version, such as France and Germany. The show's core message is that peace comes from different communities, learning to understand one another and work through their differences. Someone who was there during development of the series was Jim and Jane's daughter, Cheryl Henson, who's the president of the Jim Henson Foundation. I was already working on The Muppet Show and Dark Crystal, and it was when we were on Dark Crystal that the team started talking about Fraggle Rock.

5:57The success of The Muppet Show all around the world, and particularly in countries that we didn't know very much about. All over, the Muppets were able to be dubbed into the local languages and to be embraced as characters that they really cared about and loved. So the idea with Fraggle Rock was to create a show that would be an international show. Around that same time, I remember being in Moscow with my father, and because of the success of the Muppet Show, Kermit was invited to be a part of many different events around the world. That was right around the time when he was really excited about Fraggle Rock and the idea, there was a lot of hope, there was a lot of belief that the world could be, could get along and that we could all listen to each other, we could all come to a better understanding, we could come to appreciate the fact that we need each other to survive.

6:59The show went on to become a worldwide hit, and in 1989, it even became one of the first Western programs ever broadcast on Soviet Union television. Then, in 2022, Fraggle Rock returned with a full television revival, Fraggle Rock Back to Rock, bringing the beloved characters to a new generation of fans. And now, the Creature Shop is expanding the franchise once again, creating a brand new Fraggle Rock show based at the Kennedy Space Center in Orlando, Florida, called Fraggle Rock, A Spacey Adventure. So these were the puppets that we created for the original series. Leading the creation of the Walkabout character builds for this new production is creative supervisor Jason Webber, who's been with the company since 1985.

7:46He showed me how the builds begin by looking back at the original hand puppet fraggles. So you see a lot of interesting design details about all of these characters, such as the extended snout. Everybody has their own shape to them. The bulbous eyes on top of the head, whether they have eyelids or no eyelids. there's this loose free very emotive hair so what we were tasked with doing was to capture their essence and then enlarge them to human form so this is where we started you know this is what the characters looked like and now why don't we head over to where we're enlarging them Jason shows me to the body pods and costumes being worked away.

8:39These foam body pods are the foundation of every character. This is where the transformation begins, scaling up the tiny hand puppets into full human-sized forms, while still keeping their iconic proportions. If the silhouette is right here, everything else falls into place. As Jason shows me the work Kenny the costumer is working on. We have our team that is creating the understructure of the body size. How big are the hands? How big is the tummy? How big is the tail or the feet? So we would first mock these up so that we get the proportions correct. Then you have the challenges of how do you translate the human body inside of them, especially if the character has teeny spindly arms, you know, how do you put a human arm in there and not lose the essence of the character?

9:30So that's a little bit of translation you have to do. This is well underway. Kenny, who is this one? That, I believe, is Traveling Matt. Great. So he's our new character that we're doing for this production. And we've already mocked it up. We've already approved the proportion and everything with our producers. and so now we're making it for real. Obviously, none of this is shown, but you can see how we're trying to do it out of meshes or putting holes in foam so that there's ventilation. These do get very hot, you know, of course, because they're basically insulating our performers inside of them, but we want to give them as much air movement as possible.

10:20Different body pods are shaped in their own kind of like way. All of the fraggles have their own specific shapes, you know. So we really try to like make them big, make them round, make them, you know, as puppet-like as possible. So we started with our bodies, built the shapes, and from there we moved on to arms and legs. As the foam body is being carefully sculpted, Jason shows me how they are making other fraggle parts. And we meet with James, a puppet builder, working on a distinct fraggle feature, an upright tail. One of the things he was doing was helping us realise the tails. This is mounted into the body pods that Kenny's making, this little plate here.

11:09And then there's another mount that is attached to this that then connects to these points. I don't think I've ever seen so much foam in my life. I know, right? We have lots of foam, lots of different kinds of foam. For the Fraggle Live shows, the first one and now this one for Kennedy Center, I've been working on the feet, and I've also re-engineered the tail structure for this one. We wanted to make something a little lighter and a little more durable. The real test of this, of course, will be once we put fur and the Fraggle tuft at the end of the tail, but they seem to be holding up well. One thing that we have to take into consideration is gravity, you know, and what supports the shape, you know, because the bigger you make something, the more gravity wants to pull it down and distort the shape, which is why you may think, why is this tail so sharply curved?

12:03But by the time we create the shape, cover it with the fur, gravity starts pulling on it, you know. The initial mock-up was just the foam with some supports, and then we realized that that was going to kind of just fall. I mean, there's so much, you've got to cover this in fur, all of that adds weight, all of that would have sunk it down, but these seem to be robust enough to bounce about free. Next, Jason introduces me to David, a builder working away at the creature shop. And then David has been working on those mechanisms that created the mouth movement. Right now he's printing out the eyes and then sanding them for preparation for the ones that we're making for the Kennedy Center.

12:50But he was doing some preparatory work for deciding how we were going to create the hinges, if we were going to do it the same way or change it. And I'm not sure, have we come up with a decision about? There are multiple changes. There are. I think I put it over in the other room. Oh, OK. Just adding the context as well, that you might sound a bit muffled because you've got a face mask. I'm sanding and I'm not breathing it in. Most traditional hand puppets use the performer's hand to move the mouth directly. But for these walkabout characters, the team needed a different approach. They've designed a mouthpiece operated by a lever inside the performer's hand, allowing them to control the mouth mechanically.

13:34It's another great example of the creature shop's knack for finding innative ways to make these creatures feel alive. We have a metal C-stand. It's got a tripod base, an adaptable shaft that we can raise and lower. Right now it's simply supporting with a single arm through a vice grip here. We've clamped an upper mouth plate that is unmoving. And David has the hinges on it. And then with the pull, we show how it animates. Now, of course, we've got padding around it. And you won't hear the clicking of the mouth plates. and these are just plywood and we use an ABS plastic in ours. But this just shows how the performer, this is embedded in their performer's hand so that even though they're moving their arms around, they've still got their hand movement inside the palm of the character where they're operating this.

14:42I come from a building family. I'm about family builders and I never found the appeal of like carpentry or using sort of ever ingesting that in this sort of world where like you're making mouths and making sort of full bodies like oh well no instead I was just making walls and like I did enjoy breaking bricks with a hammer but that's just like boyish sort of stuff. Well there's some satisfaction in that I'm sure.

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15:41You're listening to the documentary for the BBC World Service. I'm Sean Orsop, and we go behind the scenes at the Jim Henson's Creature Shop for In The Studio. I've been able to see some of the key design choices up close. How they keep the tails moving, the mechanics behind how the mouths work, and even how the overall body shapes are engineered. Another crucial element is colour. The fraggles are a bright, vibrant bunch. To achieve this, the team uses a process called fabric dyeing. Now, dyeing involves submerging fabric in hot coloured liquid to achieve the exact shade they need. And because the fraggles are so colourful, the attention to detail here has to be incredibly precise.

16:27Here we are in the dye room. So, at the moment, I've got two dye vats going. This is actually where Jason first started when he joined the company, long before he became a creative supervisor. and watching him work, I got to see a different side of him. This is something he still loves to do himself whenever he gets a chance. This is going to be for a travelling mats jacket and shorts. I've already dyed the piece for his shorts, but I needed to do another piece because we're limited with how big these pots are. I can't do more than five yards or six yards at a time. And then the other thing I'm working on is actually Gobo's fleece.

17:09so this I've already dyed Red's fleece and Traveling Matt's fleece so now I'm doing Gobo as the third character this is the first piece I have to do two pieces of five yards each so this is the first five yard piece which I'm actually trying to sorry that was noisy I'm trying to match this is a swatch of the puppet's fleece that we have so I'm trying to match that color I've never seen anything quite like it. It's like a school cafeteria, that sort of size. The big soup kitchen, right? You know, we have smaller pots and smaller burners for, you know, other things. So I've finished this one, I've finished this one, I've finished these two.

17:53This is what I'm working on now. I just need the second piece, and then I have to do both pieces of this. So that's what I'm working on. You know, now that I'm actually the creative supervisor here, It takes a lot of my attention, you know, to just through paperwork and budgets and meetings and estimates and all that sort of thing and supervising the crew and making sure all of the work is getting done. So it's difficult for me to also then take on assignments such as dyeing all of the fabrics that is needed or making the costumes. So a lot of those assignments need to be reassigned to other crew members, but it is difficult.

18:42I tend to get a little perfectionist about things. So sometimes if we're finding someone who's doing work for me and it's not getting done in the right way, I may take it over and finish it. It's because I've got the experience in it. And I've been working with these dyes. I've been getting these colours. And even if they've changed fabrics and materials on me, I still know how to get the colours I need. Jason has been a key player in the workshop for years, and his career started here in 1985. I definitely watched Sesame Street as a child, and probably older than their demographic, but I loved it, so I watched it, and certainly The Muppet Show.

19:30I never missed an episode, and it wasn't necessarily calling to me, but I was fascinated by what I saw. I had just recently come to New York. I was starting my graduate program for theatrical costume design and being asked if I wanted to join the Jim Henson Company's costume shop as they built their summer productions, Sesame Live. So again, the human versions of a lot of these well-loved shows. I spent my summer with them, learned a lot, sort of dive in at the deep end, but it was great. I sort of learned that I had an affinity for it and that I was good at it. So they were happy with my work and they asked me back.

20:23And I just continued every summer until I graduated. And then they kept me on as long as I possibly could. I found I really loved it. And they kept me as the fabric dyer. And I would just help out in the other departments, gaining experience here and there, learning how to do things. And it was pretty incredible. I found that I was fascinated. And even though I had come to New York to be a theatrical costume designer for Broadway, that's what I was going to do. I just found there was so much exciting work to be done in this company. So I kind of stayed as long as they would have me. Next, I speak to Builder Victoria to hear how they still make the hair look vibrant on the walkabout puppets.

21:09I'm Victoria Ellis, and I've been here for over 30 years building puppets. I have built the hair that sits on all the characters made out of horse hair, which has to be dyed, and then supported by these internal styrene rods that also get coloured. So each piece is put in by hand. It's put into a base, which is covered underneath with some fur, but styled towards the puppet's head. And they're pretty secure, and they're tapered off at the end with some hot glue. But it reflects what is happening in the smaller puppet too, the original. We tried to duplicate the same look with the colours as well.

21:53But why is it made of a different material then? It is a smaller model. Well, this reads better at a long distance. You wouldn't read something like that, fine feathers at the distance here. It would all be more of a blob. But here you've got some life. You can see how these will move and support themselves too. so it's better to be giving a broader stroke. What is it about this world which, you know, you've been doing this for so many years, what is it that still makes you do it all this time? Well, I think in any project it's still the magic of pulling something off the page into a three-dimensional form and it's the challenge of doing that in materials and build.

22:38It's the curiosity to know how something can put together. Next, I head over to the sewing station to speak with costume builder Linda. She's working on the fraggle hands. Well, first I made these foam hands and the partial arms for the fraggles. And then once these are made, we make the fleece covers. So this is, I'm doing a mock-up right now in white to test the pattern. And then once I know the pattern is good and correct, I will go to the colour that corresponds with each character and create the final skin, so to speak. It's a combination of a lot of hand sewing and machine work. I'm going to the machine and I'm just double checking that I have this exact stitch length and width that I want.

23:28And I'm going to sew up my test pattern for the new Fraggle hand cover.

23:47this part's a little thick so i'm just gonna take a little extra time on this part to make sure it's really strong that's i think these costumes they have to be really strong they get used multiple times a day they get washed constantly so part of this is it has to look beautiful and just like the character but it also has to be really strong built like a tank almost to withstand and there you go one side is done do you mind if I give this a try in my hand? oh my god please do it's funny because there's only four fingers I know I'm getting used to it but you actually have quite a bit of movement as you can see.

24:35It's funny because there's not many opportunities people get to wear a full body costume or an arm. No, how tall are you? Maybe give you a fit model. Five foot eight. Now in what I assume is a first for the BBC World Service, I'm becoming a fraggle. I've been recruited to help with a build by serving as a fit model for the body, the hands, the feet and even the tail. Kenny and Sarah, the costumers, are dressing me piece by piece so they can evaluate how the build is shaping up so far. Ready to start suiting you up. Very exciting. You ready? Yeah. You ready to get dressed? Get the right leg in first.

25:12That's a regular one. All right. Excellent. And those go up to your waist. That's the body pod. I'm going to pod you up. And it's got this great little tail on it, so you're soon going to be hitting things with your beautiful fraggle tail. Oh, I was seeing James make it yesterday. Right, so... This is Gobo. You're our hero. I'm going to zip you in. Awesome. Look, now you've got a fraggle belly. All those radishes. I know, it's yum, yum, yum. I put on the body pod that Kenny and Sarah have been working on, the feet and tail that James was working on, the hands that Linda made, and to my surprise...

25:51Oh, no way, no way. Yeah, way. It's his jumper. The jumper. Gobo Fraggle's distinct red and yellow jumper. Look at you. Wow. I love your joy. That's what it's all about. Excitement aside, keeping track of every detail is key to making the build work. So while I'm standing here dressed as Gobo Fraggle, Sarah and Kenny can check the measurements and compare how everything is coming together. But that looks really nice. Everything's hitting in the right place, which is good. How do you feel about that? That looks a lot better. I think I still... They still have a little bit extra on the sides. I'm wondering if the fleece, like, or maybe if maybe I was altering the pattern and it's just...

26:36Okay, I am noticing one thing, though. When you look at the shirt, is there a lining on the shirt that we set in? We have not put the lining in this. Okay, good, because I can see these circles. And I can see the mesh underneath. So we'll be flatting it to the same material. Oh, okay, good. That should take that curse off. The attention to detail on every aspect of these builds was astounding. The team has a devotion to their craft, making sure every movement, every texture, every tiny feature feels alive and full of character. It's that shared passion Jason felt while working alongside the extraordinary talent that's been in the creature shop over the years, including Jim Henson, who passed away in 1990.

27:20Jim, we did overlap about five years. And a lot of the work we were doing was stuff that he was trusting for us to just do. But whenever we created a new character for one of these shows, he would come over to assess them, approve them, review them. And he was an amazing individual. He was always encouraging, always kind, and we felt the loss at his passing. But he had gathered just the best of the best, you know? Everybody was committed to doing their best work and making sure that work got done. And this is something that was instilled in me. You do what you have to do to get the work done. you want only the best in front of that camera or on that stage.

28:18It was instilled back then, honestly. You know, my parents did it for me too, but working with this company and seeing the level of artistry and dedication and sense of responsibility that this incredible workshop of talents had that's going to rub off on you. And when a build is complete, it's on to its final tests, as Melissa explains. Well, when we finish the build, we most importantly need to do a quality check. And we go over all the elements and make sure, you know, they're A, finished, but they're B, really strong and durable, kind of, you know, give a tug at all the parts. And we say try to break it, but, you know, just really try to give it a bit of a workout, you know, before we ship it.