YMMV / Fraggle Rock

• Adorkable: Wembley. He's sweet-natured and earnest but nervous, awkward, and lacking in confidence.
• Base-Breaking Character: Red. She's either enjoyed for being an outgoing, lively female character, or disliked for being quick-tempered, rude and insensitive at times. Ditto for Gobo, who some fans like for being a clever, level-headed and usually kind yet still relatably flawed protagonist, while others can't stand how moody and egotistical he can be. And that's not getting into their relationship with each other: either genuine rivals or playful competitors, and either a One True Pairing or Better as Friends at best.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cantus the Minstrel and Convincing John, the two once-a-season guest characters performed by Jim Henson.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • The show is much beloved in the Nordic countries (or at least the first season, which the only one broadcast and dubbed in those areas), especially Norway to the point where it has its own fansite.
  • It was more popular with the broad public in the UK than in the US or Canada, where it was considered more of a niche show for kids and Jim Henson fans. One example is that the theme song was a moderate hit on the UK chart, while it never generated enough interest to even get a North American release as a single (it was included on album and EP releases, though).
• Ho Yay:
  • In "Scared Silly" while Boober does scare everyone, he's mostly focused on scaring Wembley. Adding in that Boober kisses him later on, it's easy to conclude that he's Playing Hard to Get.
  • Much of "Mokey and the Minstrels" is about Red and Mokey's friendship, to the point that it could be interpreted as something else.
    • When Mokey finishes explaining to Red what happened during her test, her first instinct is to glomp onto her.
      Red: Am I allowed to hug a Minstrel?
      Mokey: Well... um... I don't know about a Minstrel, but you can hug me. Oh, please hug me!
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The theme for its catchiness qualities.
  • To a lesser extent, "Gee Gobo". In 2011 a viewer watching The Hub's rerun of a season 2 episode misheard this line as a (not often used) racial slur, and the ensuing complaint made headlines^note to the point where the Hub considered editing the episode to avoid any further confusion. It was subject to much mockery and debate among Muppet fans.
  • A common joke is that the series caused the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was one of the first American shows to air in Soviet Russia, and it taught children valuable lessons like respecting differences and kindness. Less than three years later, the Berlin Wall fell.
  • After HBO became well known as a bastion of quality content and naturally the subject of which of its shows were the best, fans aware that this series was actually its very first original show tend to sardonically note it never seems to be in the conversation.
  • "I LOOOOOOOVE FRAGGLE ROCK!" The infamous TV spot for the Fraggle Rock book club (circa 1987), which featured a young boy named Chris who rather overenthusiastically declared his fondness for the show - immediately after turning it off at the end of the opening credits. Since it didn't air on HBO (which was/is commercial free), the commercial is well remembered by many viewers who never even watched the original show.
• Misaimed Merchandising:
  • In the early 2000s, Sababa Toys made two "Fraggle Fun Packs", which consist of a DVD with a single Fraggle Rock episode on it and two small plushies of Fraggles important to said episode's plot. One of them, which featured "The Beast of Blue Rock" with plushes of Gobo and Wembley, was fine. The other? Plushes of Red and Boober... and the episode "Marooned", a notoriously depressing episode with such lines as "I wonder what it's like, to die?" and a plot that mostly consists of Red and Boober in a cave-in as they lose oxygen and question whether or not they will survive. Sleep tight with your plushies tonight, kids!
  • In late 2022, The Jim Henson Company would partner up with Tibles (an NFT vendor) to make a series of NFTs dedicated to Fraggle Rock. However, as many fans and Tough Pigs have pointed out, this blatantly goes against the morals of the show and its creators, as Fraggle Rock is a very pro-environmentalist show (with several episodes dedicated to protecting the environment) and one of the reasons why NFTs (and cryptocurrency in general) are controversial is due to their negative impact on the environment.
• Moe: Wembley. The other four main characters have their moments as well.
• One True Pairing: Red and Gobo for a number of Deviantart and Tumblr users. (In-series, the later episodes occasionally have subtle hints that Mokey and Gobo might have feelings for each other, but this remains unexplored.) Some fans like to ship Wembley and Boober as well; in fact, Boober does kiss Wembley in "Scared Silly", but it's done in a teasing manner, and Wembley does not seem to enjoy it at all. Red and Mokey are also shipped by fans who enjoy butch/femme pairings.
• Padding: When ABC Family ran the Christmas Episode in 2015, they extended it to 45 minutes and filled the remaining space with extra commercials.
• Periphery Demographic: Indeed, many are the fans who like it even more as adults.
  • The show had a sizeable periphery demographic of adults even while it was originally on the air, most (but not all) parents who ended up also enjoying a show their kids liked (and may have grown up themselves watching Sesame Street or The Muppet Show). This intergenerational appeal was part of what helped the show become the most popular thing on HBO for a time. Special effects director Faz Fazakas recalled that many adults he talked to, while they might openly dismiss Fraggle Rock as a kids' show, could also offer surprisingly accurate descriptions of the plots of certain episodes.
• Production-Related Period Piece: In 1983, spots ran on HBO for a sweepstakes where the grand prize was a trip for four to see the set of Fraggle Rock and a free full year subscription to HBO. The same television promo is included on the North American DVD releases of the show but with an on-screen message that the contest ended on May 31, 1983.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Steve Whitmire might be best known today for taking over the roles of Kermit the Frog and Ernie after the passing of Jim Henson, but before then, Wembley Fraggle and Sprocket (along with Rizzo from The Muppet Show) were his most popular original characters.
  • The right hand for Cantus and Convincing John (Jim Henson's characters), as well as the performer of Ma Gorg for most of the series^note taking over from Myra Fried after episode 13, was Cheryl Wagner, who went on to create The Big Comfy Couch. A fellow Fraggle veteran working on that series was Rob Mills, who had performed the bodily movements for Junior Gorg and puppeteered several minor characters.
  • Tim Gosley, performer of minor characters such as Brool the Minstrel and the Cave's Oldest Fraggle, is probably best known for playing Basil on Sesame Park and its predecessor Canadian Sesame Street.
  • Bob Stutt (Wander McMooch, The Last of the Lily Creatures, and other minor characters) later performed for Under the Umbrella Tree and The Big Comfy Couch during the 1990s.
  • Terry Angus, who performed Morris Fraggle and Brio the Minstrel and took over the role of Storyteller Fraggle from Richard Hunt, created the popular but short-lived Blizzard Island, which featured some other Fraggle alumni, for CBC in 1988.
  • Myra Fried (Ma Gorg) would later go on to become a writer for Degrassi: The Next Generation, Braceface and Captain Flamingo, as well as co-developing Iggy Arbuckle.
  • Bill Prady, creator of The Big Bang Theory, was a script writer for the short-lived animated series on NBC. He'd also previously written for You Can't Do That on Television.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: A few of the songs fall into this category, but are just unique enough to avoid copyright infringement. For example, "Fraggle Rock Rock" is an expy of "Jailhouse Rock." That didn't make the songs any less awesome.
• Wangst: Gobo occasionally falls into this, mostly based on his status of de-facto leader of the gang. As early as the first season, he spends most of the Invisible Garboil episode in the depths of a Heroic BSoD! This is even parodied in the second-season episode "Wembley and the Great Race", where Wembley has a Dream Sequence in which Gobo goes completely to pieces over losing a race.
• The Woobie: All the main Fraggles have at least one Woobie moment throughout the show.
• Woolseyism: Several of the dubs, especially when it comes to the songs, get really creative with the lyrics and in some cases slightly changes the feel of the song. Mokey's song "Why?" in the Norwegian dub is a prime example, becoming intricately more philosophical — where the original Mokey asks questions like "why do caterpillars crawl?" and "why is there a sky?", the Norwegian Mokey goes straight for the big questions: "What's the meaning of life? Where are we all going? Would people be more patient with the world if they knew it better?"

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