Dance your cares away...

I have now seen the entire first season of Fraggle Rock, and I am sad. Why am I sad, you ask? Because I have watched them all and they are all done. Fortunately, I own the entire first season, so I can watch them again whenever I want. YAY!
If you were to ask me, I would say that this was possibly the best kids show ever. There are so many things about this show that are amazing, and not really seen anymore. Every show featured two songs at least, sometimes three (on the rare occasion, there was only one), and the songs were all completely natural. By that, I mean they weren't cheesy or forced. They always seem to fit perfectly with the stories and the characters. And they were really good songs too. Especially Boober's songs. He seemed to get a number of jazzy/bluesy songs, which really entertained me.
In typical traditional Jim Henson muppet fashion, the show is really quite funny. I quite often laughed out loud. Wembley and Boober are my favourites. One can never make up his mind, the other is pretty sure that he is going to die soon, and painfully. The trash heap, who is their oracle, was also quite amusing. She was rather out in left field at times, giving advice that had little to do with the problem, but she still managed to entertain. Her two shills, Gunge and Philo were also rather amusing, completely agreeing with Marjorie (the trash heap) no matter what she said.
But the best part of the show is how it deals with issues. As is common with most kids shows it is more than just entertainment; it tries to teach children while being entertaining. The difference between Fraggle Rock and most other kid's shows is how these issues are dealt with. Most children's shows are very obvious about the lesson being learned. At the end of the show, once the conflict has been resolved, the moral of the story will be explicitly stated ("You're right Mr. Tommykindobins. It is bad to steal. I'm sorry..."), and it can get extremely cheesy at times. That never happens in Fraggle Rock, or at least with far less regularity than other shows. Each episode features some sort of conflict, as is the case in any show, and then the conflict is resolved. At the end of the show, there has been a lesson taught, but in such a way that the child probably won't really notice they just learned something. As much as anything, it is a case of imitation more than statement. If a kid comes across a similar situation as the Fraggles faced, he or she will know how to resolve said problem by doing what the Fraggles did. Actions speak louder than words, and that's the Fraggles - pure action!
The other big difference is the issues being dealt with. There is no taboo, no tippytoing, no dumbing down. Jim Henson started Fraggle Rock as a method of stopping war by teaching children how to properly resolve conflicts, and the show pulled no punches when it came to handling problems. They did not avoid the topic of death or make everything too nice or perfect. As I said before, Boober was completely obsessed with death. He always talked about getting killed in different ways, and was a very morose character in general. Yet it was never frightening or over the top. It just was. When the chips were down he would always come through. There were things about the show that were vaguely creepy. There were monsters and danger all over the place. There was talk more than a few times of things that had happened in the past that resulted in the death of different Fraggles. Everything was handled, and handled very well. It was like they simply put the show out there and expected the kids to learn from it, or be entertained by it as they chose.
I guess this really struck me because I feel that children's media these days is being too tightly censored. I'm not against censorship per se, but I do think that in some ways we've gone backwards in some ways. I watched this show and was surprised at them getting away with some of these scenes these days. I remember hearing criticism about Aladdin (the Disney animated movie) as people said that it was too scary for kids. Having watched the Fraggles, I can't think of anything in Aladdin that was as scary as the Fraggles got, and Aladdin came out 1992, five years after Fraggle Rock went off the air. Only five years, and already it is too scary. Also, a line in the opening song that says "Where they'll cut off your ear if they don't like your face" has recently been changed to something that cast a less "offensive stereotype of Arab people". Fraggle Rock never had that problem. I guess it helps in dealing with entirely fictional creatures. It also helps that they were allowed to air without censorship. That doesn't mean they weren't checked, it just means that they were never told that something in the show had to be changed. It just feels to me like we are becoming overprotective and over sensitive. We can't let kids see anything that is negative, and all we're teaching them is how to be offended by things they don't like.
Well, bah! I say. Bah! to the whole lot of you. Well, maybe just the people that are overly sensitive. Kids need to learn good lessons, and those are being denied them because it's not politically correct. Sigh. Ah well. I guess all anyone can do is the best that they can.
Until then:
"Dance your cares away. Worries for another day. Let the music play. Down in Fraggle Rock!"