John Tartaglia has been living inside the Fraggle Rock universe since he was a teenager, which means he’s spent most of his life holding onto a very specific kind of magic without letting it curdle into nostalgia. That’s a harder trick than it sounds. Tartaglia joined the Jim Henson family at 16, learned at the elbows of the original performers, and decades later found himself in charge of bringing the whole thing back with Back to the Rock. Now there’s The First Snow of Fraggle Rock, a holiday special that has to do the impossible: feel cozy without feeling embalmed.
“We have a really unique situation,” Tartaglia said. “We’re kind of this alternate universe of Fraggle Rock. We don’t try to say we’re after the original series or before it. We just say we’re in the same world.”
That distinction matters, because Fraggle Rock has lore — real, deep, early-’80s television lore — and Tartaglia treats it less like a rulebook and more like a box of cherished toys. “We look to the original series often as inspiration, or for little beats we can throw in for the fans,” he said. “Little moments that acknowledge episode 70 or something. Things that make people happy because they feel seen.”
For The First Snow, that meant looking directly at one of the original show’s emotional touchstones. “We wanted to do something kind of like The Bells of Fraggle Rock,” Tartaglia said. “That was a must-see every year for me. If I didn’t watch it, the holidays didn’t feel complete.”
The goal wasn’t just festive vibes, though. “It’s got that heart, that really deep metaphor, that moment where everyone’s singing together in the Great Hall,” he said. “It looks blue and snowy and holiday-ish, but like all of Jim’s work, it has something bigger to say.”
That “something bigger” almost got derailed by a joke that refused to stay a joke. There’s a scene where Tartaglia, the human, encounters Gobo, the Fraggle — a meta collision that could have gone sideways fast. “When it was pitched, I thought it was a placeholder,” he admitted. “Something in the script to make me laugh.”
Then it stayed. Draft after draft. “I was like, ‘No one’s going to want to see this.’ I was vocally unsure.”
And then they shot it. Outside. In the cold. “We were in Canmore, there’s this beautiful sunset behind the mountain, and suddenly I’m standing there talking to Gobo Fraggle,” he said. “It was my childhood dream come true. It’s different when he’s on your hand and you’re interacting with him. It was very, very weird.”
That strangeness folds neatly into Tartaglia’s approach to performing Gobo, a role forever tied to the late Jerry Nelson. “I always keep a little bit of Jerry in my head,” Tartaglia said. “He was one of the first people I got to work with when I started with the Jim Henson Company. I was a sponge, just absorbing everything.”
Gobo, as Tartaglia plays him, is optimism with a spine. “He’s the eternal optimist, but he’s stubborn about it,” he said. “He can get caught up in his own hubris. He wants to put his foot down. But he also carries this weight as the leader of the Fraggles.”
That responsibility hits close to home. “Getting to produce Fraggle and run the set, I can relate to that feeling of wanting to keep everyone happy, to keep things moving,” he said. “Gobo’s optimism actually makes me a braver person.”
Braver, but not reckless. “If I found myself in a brand-new world like Gobo does, I’d probably be panicking in the fetal position,” Tartaglia laughed. “He just sings a song and heads down the street.”
That’s the secret sauce, really. Fraggle Rock survives because it insists, gently and stubbornly, that curiosity beats fear. Or as Tartaglia put it, carrying the spirit of Jim Henson forward without turning it into a museum piece: “That optimism — that belief that there’s nothing to be afraid of in exploring a new world — that’s the thing worth protecting.”
And, improbably, it still feels fresh.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
