Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

an enormous ringed binder labeled Things We Know About the Fraggles, the team polished and expanded on the parameters Jim had laid down in the Woozle World treatment, transforming the “old codger” and his cluttered room into the kindly tinker Doc (modeled, Juhl admitted, on Muppet technowizard Faz Fazakas) and his workshop, adding a sentient trash heap, and renaming and refining the other species with whom the Fraggles interacted, from the gigantic and dim-witted Gorgs to the tiny, hardworking Doozers. “We sat around and talked about the fact that we wanted to try to create a childhood fantasy world that had the sense of richness that we all felt in the [L. Frank Baum] Oz stories from our own childhoods,” said Juhl. “Worlds like that are incredibly rich.”