\u201cI went back through the canon of the original [1983 HBO] series and then our reboot [Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock<\/em> for Apple TV], and I was like, \u2018Wait, Uncle Matt never really questioned what\u2019s beyond, because he thinks he\u2019s done it all.\u2019 He\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019ve explored outer space\u2019\u2014that\u2019s what the Fraggles call our world, right? So he\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019ve done it,\u2019\u201d said John Tartaglia, the show\u2019s director, writer, and choreographer as well as creative supervisor for Fraggle Rock at the Henson Company, in an interview with collectSPACE.com.<\/p>\n \u201cSo for him to have his mind blown that there\u2019s something even beyond that, I thought that was such a fun way to push that character\u2019s journey forward,\u201d said Tartaglia.<\/p>\n John Tartaglia, at right, wrote, directed, and choreographed Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure<\/em> for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Tartaglia is also the creative supervisor for Fraggle Rock at the Henson Company.<\/p>\n Credit: To differentiate between the Fraggles\u2019 use of \u201couter space\u201d\u2014the land where the \u201csilly creatures,\u201d aka, us humans live\u2014and our \u201couter space,\u201d the show refers to the latter as \u201couter outer space.\u201d (It is unclear if that concept will live on beyond the NASA show. \u201cI think it could be,\u201d Tartaglia said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t explored that yet.\u201d No pun intended.)<\/p>\n As Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure<\/em> opens, Gobo, Red, and their friends are still at home, and we \u201csilly creatures\u201d are at Kennedy Space Center. The trick, said Tartaglia, was finding ways to bridge that gap while staying true to both realities.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cWe always want to stay true to the world,\u201d said Tartaglia. \u201cYou have to justify why the Fraggles are there.\u201d<\/p>\n The Doozers offered one way. The show\u2019s small, green, industrious creatures are, in their more modern incarnations, technologically adept and have developed DoozerCam, a FaceTime-like video call system that is able to connect Fraggle Rock with outer space.<\/p>\n As the show opens, the DoozerCam shows the Fraggles in the midst of a familiar scene\u2014the title sequence from the show, complete with their theme song\u2014until they notice the audience of humans watching them.<\/p>\n \u201cNASA, wisely, really wanted people to immediately get into that vibe of Fraggle Rock,\u201d Tartaglia told collectSPACE. \u201cWe could have just written a show where it all takes place at Kennedy Space Center, but I think people really want to peek in and see Fraggle Rock, so it just felt like the appropriate, rule-based way to do it that felt right to the world, but also kept Fraggle Rock a cool, distant mystery place that you want to go visit.\u201d<\/p>\n But to really bring the Fraggles to Kennedy required a postcard\u2026 and a change of scale.<\/p>\n In the series, Traveling Matt wrote about what he had encountered in outer space through postcards that he sent to his nephew, Gobo, back at Fraggle Rock. Gobo would then share his uncle\u2019s adventures with his friends, including Red, who particularly loathed them.<\/p>\n In Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure<\/em>, a postcard with a photo of a \u201ccookie\u201d leads Traveling Matt, Gobo, and Red through a \u201cFraggle hole\u201d to Kennedy Space Center. It is there that they meet a representative of NASA\u2019s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) division and learn of outer outer space and that the cookie is really the Moon.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n (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 \u201cso forward-driven\u201d that he never bothered to look up.)<\/p>\n A postcard with a picture of a \u201ccookie\u201d helps lead Gobo, Red, and Uncle Traveling Matt to learning about the moon and how NASA\u2019s Exploration Ground Systems team is enabling astronaut missions to the lunar surface.<\/p>\n Credit: 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 \u201cwalk-around\u201d characters. And to remain to scale, that meant up-scaling another character, too.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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\u2019re teeny, and now they get to have their glory as hand puppets,\u201d said Tartaglia, who also voices Gobo for the show and performs as him when in puppet size.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s central character, the plot came together fairly quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s a great character to learn from because he is so oblivious, and he thinks he knows everything, and he really doesn\u2019t. So he\u2019s a great character to use as a bridge for the audience to be able to learn all these awesome facts and figures about NASA,\u201d said Tartaglia.<\/p>\n He and his team also came to appreciate how much Fraggle Rock<\/em> shares with the space agency, its activities, and goals.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all started talking and realized really quickly that Fraggles and Doozers and the whole message of Fraggle Rock<\/em>\u2014especially about Uncle Matt\u2014is 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,\u201d said Tartaglia.<\/p>\n \u201cSo our two worlds that on paper wouldn\u2019t seem connected, made a lot of sense to connect,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Move over Snoopy, because NASA has a new character helping to promote its deep space exploration plans. His name is Uncle Traveling Matt. No really, move over. Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure has taken over the same theater the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida previously used for All Systems Are Go, featuring the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43422"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Costumed](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/news-020426b-lg-640x360.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nA funny thing happened\u2026<\/h2>\n
\u2026 on the way to the Moon<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/news-020426c-lg-640x360.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nDown at Fraggle Rock<\/em><\/h2>\n