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 (voiced by Daveed Diggs) to find the brightest light. Along the way, through songs and merriment, the Fraggles learn that maybe they do have more in common with the smallest of Doozers and largest of Gorgs than they realized, as the true meaning of the holiday becomes clear.

During this 1-on-1 with Collider, executive producer John Tartaglia, who also voices Gobo, talked about what it’s been like to be so involved with the return of Fraggle Rock, the dream of helping bring this world to life, updating aspects of the series and characters while still staying true to the original ideas, how the holiday special came about, creating a holiday that everyone can enjoy, what it’s been like to have Diggs’ involvement, how it felt to voice Gobo for the first time, and how 2023 will be the Year of the Fraggle.

Collider: We last spoke for the Fraggle Rock: Rock On shorts, which was the initial reintroduction, but those episodes were a little bit different because of COVID. Now, here we are with this full series, Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock. As someone who has admitted to being a Fraggle Rock fanatic, at any point in your puppeteering career, while this show had been off the air and no one knew if it would come back, had you ever thought that this would be a thing you’d end up responsible for doing?

JOHN TARTAGLIA: No, absolutely not. If you had given me a winning lottery ticket and been like, “Here’s your 50 billion, what do you wanna do with it?” I would’ve been like, “Let’s make Fraggle Rock.” It was always a dream to happen. You always hear people say, “Oh, my gosh, that level of puppetry production and that level of quality for a major kid show will never happen again.” It really did take someone coming along, who ended up being our friends at Apple TV+, who were like, “We wanna make Fraggle Rock.” I still remember the day that Halle Stanford, my executive producer and the President of Television at Henson called and was like, “We got greenlit.” It took me 30 seconds for my brain to take it in. I was like, “So, we’re gonna make the show?”

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. It’s taught me to never take anything for granted, and that anything can happen. Life really is that unpredictable.

What would that kid version of you think of what you ended up doing? Would his mind just have exploded, if you had told that kid that he was going to be making Fraggle Rock?

TARTAGLIA: Oh, yeah. I was on set with Karen Prell, who was the original Red Fraggle and who’s come back to play that character for the reboot, and I was watching them set up this giant special effect shot with 35 Fraggles and animatronics, and all this crazy stuff. She came over and rubbed my back, and was like, “How are you doing?” I was like, "I’m good. I just remember being in my bedroom at 6, 7 and 8 years old, with a tape recorder and taping my original Fraggle Rock stories, which I’m sure were not original, and doing all these voices, making these sock puppet versions of the characters, and creating my own little Fraggle Rock world in my bedroom, dreaming so strongly of getting to play in that world, but also getting to create. I’m just standing here realizing that I don’t know if it’s the power of manifestation, or it’s just complete dumb luck, but somehow we’re here."

It was just this wonderful moment of realizing my seven-year-old self would be losing his mind. And I don’t think I would’ve believed you. If you had come to me and said, “Hey, just so you know, in 30-something years, you’re gonna remake Fraggle Rock, at the highest level possible. Good luck!,” I would’ve been like, “What?!” I would’ve thought you were crazy. It’s still something that, even when I see it on Apple TV+, when I scroll, by I’m like, “Oh, my God, we made Fraggle Rock.” It still feels like a dream.

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. Starting all of this up again, were you ever worried that it wouldn’t connect with people, that people wouldn’t care anymore, or that they wouldn’t remember who they are?

TARTAGLIA: I am, if anything, an intense optimist, which probably drives a lot of people nuts in my life. It’s funny, I never thought about that so much as I thought about the responsibility we had of reintroducing them to the world because there hadn’t been anything new with Fraggle Rock in 30 years. It’s always been the cool kid show. There were rock bands that would come to the Henson lot, years ago, and they’d always say, “Where are the Fraggles?” Every rock star knew Fraggle Rock, which probably had an impact on them. What’s really fascinating to me is, if you’re Canadian, because it aired on the CBC, which is their version of PBS, everyone knows Fraggle Rock in Canada. In the States, it depends on whether you had premium TV and whether you had reruns.

If anything, it gave us a chance to say, “Okay, we’re really making the show for two different groups. We’re making the show for the super fans who grew up with it, who know it, who love it, and who maybe didn’t know everything about the show, but who knew the theme song and knew about the Gorgs, and stuff like that. And then, we’re also making it for a brand-new audience that doesn’t know the show, at all. We have the responsibility now to make it cater to them.” When the show came out in the early eighties, it was revolutionary because it was dealing with issues for kids, at that time, like war and death and racism, and things that most Saturday morning kid shows weren’t necessarily talking about. We felt like, “Okay, if we’re gonna make Fraggle Rock now, we have to do the same thing.”

We have to deal with what it’s like to have a platform online and how to use it responsibly. What’s an echo chamber? What is understanding someone with different challenges than you face in your life? It was really about, what are the issues that kids today are dealing with? Sadly, a lot of the ones in the eighties are still very relevant today, so we had to revisit those, as well. But I think we felt like it was a great opportunity to rediscover the world and also make some tweaks and bring certain things out of characters, that maybe weren’t as established and developed in the original series.

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.

When we were making the first season and I was in Canada, it was a big secret. We couldn’t talk about it. We couldn’t let anyone know. I was at a local grocery store where I was staying in Canada, and I had my Gobo t-shirt on, and the cashier was like, “Fraggle Rock! That’s the best show, ever! Oh, my God, I miss that show. I love that show so much. Oh, my God, I showed my kids the old episodes, and they loved it.” I so badly wanted to tell that person, “Just wait a few more months, and you’re gonna have your dreams come true.” But it was wonderful. It was right in the middle of our season, so we were all tired. It was a good reminder that it means so much to people.

You talked about the outward appearance of Mokey and her personality changing a little bit, and you’ve changed the Doc and Sprocket relationship. Is there a sense of freedom with this, where you can make those changes where you feel like they’re needed, or do you have to walk into a room and try to convince a bunch of people that you need to make changes? How does that work?

TARTAGLIA: I will give credit to Lisa Henson and to Halle Stanford, who lead us in television at Henson. They were like, “Listen, we wanna make a show that is true to the original series because it’s so beloved, but we also have to make a show that is gonna appeal to kids today.” It’s hard. Kids today, what they expect is so different than those of us who grew up in the eighties, where things were slower and writing was a little bit more pondering. It wasn’t quite as quick and sharp as kids expect today. So, we felt a great weight on our backs to make sure that we got it right. Luckily, I’m such a nerd and such a Fraggle encyclopedia that oftentimes we would be in the writers’ room, and they’d be like, “Can we do this?” And I’d be like, “Actually they did that in Season 3,” and I’d be able to bring up things that might affect the canon. We really tried to respect the canon, but we were given a great freedom to go beyond.

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. What were things when they wrapped the original series that they never got to do? What were things that they were stuck with because of their production limitations, the size of the studio, or because they were making a show a week, at the time? What were things they wish they could have done, that they just weren’t able to? We got to absorb all that from the original team, some of whom still are working on the series now, and we said, “Okay, we’ve got all these beautiful ingredients to make a brand-new dish. What do we use?”

We wanted to expand the world of the Doozers and make the Great Hall ever greater. Everyone had wanted the great hall to be great, but they just didn’t have the space in the studio they shot at. Luckily, we had the space in Canada. So, we were able to mix and match things. With Doc and Sprocket, there were some things that we could make even better and even stronger. It’s silly to say, but it’s true that people’s relationships with their pets have been changed, over 40 years. People used to let the dogs sleep outside overnight, now most people can’t even imagine that. Their dogs sleep in the bed with them. I know mine do. So, we rethought Doc as a scientist getting her degree, where her dog truly is her best friend because for so many of us, our pets are our best friend. And Sprocket has these little fantasy moments that are really funny, where he sees himself as a star dog. We just had the opportunity to make things a little bit more relevant for today, but he’s still Sprocket, and she still has that relationship with him where sometimes she’s a mess, and he’s looking at the camera, putting his paw on his forehead. A lot of the things that people loved about that original relationship are still there. With Mokey, not every kid understands what a hippie-dippy character is, but they do understand a New Age yoga lover, in touch with the universe, so that’s what we morphed Mokey into. It’s still the same character and the same intentions, but just a little bit more what a kid would experience in 2022.

I’m a fan of holiday episodes. I love them so much that I will watch shows that I have never seen any other episode of, just because they have a holiday episode. Did you specifically want to do a holiday episode of Fraggle Rock? How did that come about?

TARTAGLIA: If you wrote out the top three impactful things in my childhood, Fraggle Rock would clearly be one of them, and one of the other ones would’ve been the holidays. Christmas and the holidays were a huge part of my childhood. I come from a divorced family. I come from a family that didn’t have a lot of means, but the holidays, no matter what, were always a highlight of whatever year we were going through. I always loved the holiday. The original Fraggle Rock holiday special, “The Bells of Fraggle Rock,” was one of my favorite episodes and was very impactful for me. I watched it every holiday. I made my family, sometimes begrudgingly, sit down and watch it with me. It was the best thing ever. So, I always loved holiday specials. I grew up watching the Barbara Mandrell Christmas special, and I remember every sitcom’s holiday episode. That was always a highlight of the year.

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. It was a brand-new story that had nothing to do with any specific religion, so it was appealing to anybody, and I thought that we could do the same thing. We knew we were gonna enter literally all over the world because of Apple, so I felt this need to make a new special that would appeal to everyone, no matter what you celebrate. That’s where the very, very basic idea of Night of the Lights came from. And then, Alex [Cutherbertson] and Matt [Fusfeld], our amazing head writers and co-executive producers, took that and ran with it, and wrote this beautiful special.

I was really excited while we were filming it because it had this very old-fashioned holiday special feel to it because of all the lights. Everything that we ever loved about holiday shows growing up, we tried to capture for this, with that sense that there’s something greater beyond us and that what unites us all, during this time of year, is that warm and cozy feeling. And the Fraggles look so darn adorable in anything holiday. They all have their winter sweaters on and it’s so cute. We even got to make ugly Christmas sweaters for the Gorgs, which had never been made before. It was just an opportunity to find out what’s a holiday the Fraggles celebrate, that we don’t know about, that happens around this time of year and that really means a lot to them. It was one of my favorite things that we did, honesty. Every day we shot that holiday special, I was in Candyland, I was so happy.

I love that it’s a non-denominational holiday that feels inclusive of everyone. The medium-sized Fraggles, the little Doozers, and the very large Gorgs can all celebrate the same holiday.

TARTAGLIA: Yeah. We had a really fun time talking about how all three of them would appreciate it differently. One of my favorites is the Gorgs because, when I grew up, on my neighborhood block, it was about who put up the most lights. Every year, I was that kid that was like, “We need more!” It never felt like enough. We were like, “Okay, the Gorgs would totally miss the point of the holiday and just make it about the morest lights ever.” And then, they circuit them out, and they finally see the thing that really matters, which is this beautiful light that unites all of us. So, it was fun to think about how each of them would appreciate it. That’s very true to how we all look at the holidays. Everyone’s got their different thing that they love or hate at the holiday season, and it was just fun to explore that.

It captures such a beautiful spirit and essence of the holidays.

TARTAGLIA: At this time in the world, we went into production, literally a week or so after the January 6th insurrection, and we were still in the height of COVID. The world just felt unbearable, at that time. As we were filming the holiday special, it was towards the end of our production, so the vaccines were starting to roll out, and it felt like the world was opening up, I guess is the best way to put it. It really affected the special quite a bit, with the hope that was there and the optimism.

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. It really is that beautiful moment of how sometimes all people need is to know that they’re loved and cared for, which is really what the holidays should be and are supposed to be. It was a nice reminder, to put that in there. Out of everything else in the special, that’s my favorite part because it’s the thing that we all strive for. We don’t always remember it because we get so caught up in the expectations behind the holidays, but that’s really what it’s about.

You also have Daveed Diggs doing a voice in this episode. What’s it like to incorporate someone like that, who doesn’t have a puppeteering background, but he comes in with his performance background?

TARTAGLIA: When we first knew that we were gonna have celebrity guest stars on the show, we wanted to infuse them in a very natural way to the show. Jamdolin, who’s the character that Daveed plays, is very much based on a wonderful character that Jim Henson used to play, called Cantus. We knew we didn’t wanna have someone do an imitation of Jim as Cantus because it felt like that character was such a part of him since it was written for him. So then, we had the idea for a new character that looks like Cantus and is maybe Cantus’ nephew. And then, we wanted to get someone who has a very distinctive sound and voice like Jim did, but has that wisdom, and Daveed has that. When Daveed walks in the room, there’s this incredible wisdom about him. And he’s such a fan of the show.

He comes in with joy to his recording sessions. I remember the first time we showed him the picture of Jamdolin, he lost his mind because he loved that we had given him similar hair, and he loved the outfit. He was like, “Oh, my God, I know that guy.” He’s really become part of the Fraggle family, in a very natural way. I think he is a Fraggle. He just loves doing the voice. It’s really a beautiful collaboration between a puppeteer named Andy Hayward, who puppeteers him on set, and Daveed doing the voice in the booth. They really have found this incredible rhythm. They just understand each other’s rhythms.

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. I love watching the little subtle moments we gave Jamdolin, where he’s watching the Fraggles have this big realization, and he’s three steps ahead of them. But then, there’s the joy he feels in watching them realize it. He’s just a great character, and Daveed is the absolute best. We couldn’t ask for a better new Fraggle.

What do you remember about the first time you voiced Gobo? Was it an instant connection, or did it take some time to find?

TARTAGLIA: The honest to God truth is that I was petrified. I had the honor of getting to know and work with Jerry Nelson, who originally performed Gobo, for a few years on Sesame Street. Jerry was this mythical person. He was this older, legendary puppeteer that had done every project that I ever cared about. At that point in his life, he would sit in the corner of what we called the Muppet Hut or the Muppet Room, which is this small room where all the Muppeteers would hang out. He’d just play guitar, and every now and then, he’d have these cosmic things that he would say, and we’d all be like, “Yeah!”. He was just super wise. But his voice was so singular. There was something about his voice that was very specific.

So, when they called and said, “We want you to audition for Gobo,” I was like, “What?!” That voice was something I’d never really tried to imitate, but also, to me, that was Jerry. So, I was so scared. When they said I got the role, I didn’t believe them. I asked them six times. I was like, “I feel that you’ve made a terrible mistake.” My first day of shooting was a series of promos for Fraggle Rock on another network. It was me and Karen Prell, who I’ve gotten to know over the years, here and there. She’s also a legend to me. At that point, I didn’t know her as well as I do now, so I was so nervous. I was like, “I’m gonna be next to Karen Prell as Red Fraggle, one of my heroes, doing Gobo Fraggle. What is happening?” I remember, I didn’t sleep the night before. I was such a mess.

So, I put him on, I was standing next to Karen as Red, and we just started improvising stuff. I don’t know if it’s because I knew the original series so well or what, but it felt oddly natural. Our interplay felt very normal. It felt very like we’d been doing it for years, and she said as much on the set, which of course was a huge relief to hear. That started it. I used to always be super aware of what I was doing. I had to think about the voice, every time. Now, I just try to really trust that it’s there. I have to believe that the character’s there and I try to stay as true to him as I can be, with what’s been done before, but also acknowledging that there'll never be another Jerry. Jerry was one of a kind. All I can do is just take the most beautiful, accessible parts of what he brought to Gobo, and make it my own. And I’ve gotten to add little things that are me to him, which I’ve been encouraged to do. It’s nice to have that blessing.

It sounds silly, but it’s true that you really are carrying on someone’s childhood. It’s a bigger thing than just playing a character. There’s a responsibility. There are people who I know tuned into the reboot going, “All right, let’s see how much you messed it up.” I felt this incredible need to get it right. And every now and then, when I have him on my hand, I go, “What is this?! When you were seven, you stared at the TV, wanting to be part of this world, and now you literally have a puppet on your hand, and it’s the real Gob. This is what’s happening.” The word honor is the closest I can get to how I feel. It’s just an honor, every time I get to do it. I love that character so much.

So, what’s next for the Fraggles? Is it more of Back to the Rock episodes? Are you looking to do other things? Are we ever going to get more merchandise?

TARTAGLIA: There’s a bunch of stuff. There’s some new merchandise coming out. There’s a line of really cool action figures that was announced, which are beautiful. I’ve gotten to take a look at them, and they’re so detailed. They’re collectors items. There are some other new surprises. We have a vinyl record of our first season soundtrack that’s beautiful. There’s some fun things in store. I’ll get in trouble if say anymore. I’m joking, but I’m also serious that I feel like 2023 is the Year of the Fraggle. It will actually officially be the 40th anniversary of the show. I feel like there’s some really good, awesome things coming. The fans have spoken. The reaction to the show has just been beyond our wildest dreams. The fact that we got nominated for four Emmys is just mind-blowing to me. I’m still pinching myself over that. It’s a good time to be a Fraggle fan.

Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock is available to stream at Apple TV+.