Ooh, Gobo actually got injured by Junior Gorg!
The Hairy Chested Batworm was amusing!
As was Wembley's Philo and Gunge impression.
Nice episode. And with that, season 1 draws to a close. Some overall thoughts:
Well, it's a really great, fun show. I'm enjoying it. I don't want to carp on some of what I perceive to be as problems, but here are some of my questioning thoughts.
The presence of Frank Oz is missed. Ditto for Henson, though we at least get him every now and then. All the performers are very good, and I'm especially enjoying Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire this season. But the anarchic comedic spirit of Oz would really liven things up.
As I've mentioned before, I feel the Gorgs' role in the show is somewhat ill-defined. We follow the Fraggles, so most of our attention is on them. When we see Doozers, they're always working, so at least we know what they're doing. But the Gorgs kind of seem to hang out, waiting to be used as a plot device in the Fraggles' story. It seems the creators want things to be a bit "existential" with the Gorgs, for lack of a better word. Pa Gorg is a king, but of what and of whom is never made clear. I guess this is supposed to represent the folly of allowing power to go to your head, but it makes the whole Gorg storyline muddy. There's no sense of their life off-camera, as there is with the Fraggles and Doozers.
But I think the main problem I have with the show lies unfortunately in the music. The best of Philip Balsam's songs are very good, but there are plenty that are not near his best work. Perhaps the style hasn't aged particularly well. But really, I think the task of writing something along the lines of 50 songs for a season is too much for anyone. I take Bear in the Big Blue House as an example of children's television done almost to perfection. And that show had great music, much better than Fraggle Rock's in my opinion, and it was written by several different composers. Heck, they had David Yazbek, who's written a couple of great Broadway scores! They should have had several different songwriters, just as they had several different screenwriters.
But an equal problem to the songs themselves is how they are integrated into the stories. Far too often -- really, almost always -- the action grinds to a complete halt while a character sings about their feelings. Watching the special DVD features, it seems that the songs were sometimes assigned when there was only a vague idea of what they were to be about. So they left a hole in the script for the song, then they got the song, and perhaps it didn't quite fit the needs of the changing script, but they shoehorned it in anyway. Really, the scripts and songs need to be developed side by side, which would necessitate using different composers and lyricists, which I feel is what they needed anyway. That way the music could be used to advance the plot, rather than to slow it down.
Okay, enough carping. It really is a great, brave, noble, charming, funny show. And this was only the first season! There's much more to come, and I'm quite eager to see how things changed and grew. Bring on Season Two!
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