you need to understand that i have two sets of headcanons. there's the set of realistic headcanons based on my genuine reading of the show, and then there's me playing pretend with my dolls.
I've always wondered why the possibilities of fraggle merch aren't expanded much. Like, don't get me wrong the stuff they already put out is cute and all, but where are things like talking plushies? Or dolls and figures where you can change their outfits? Especially with the radish ball and all that! And merch of side characters who usually don't get a lot of merch that often? Lots of missed opportunities here y'all...
I don’t have a lot to add or say on why they don’t expand toy options nowdays, “cutting-edge learning tools” with more modern production capabilities but i wanted to post this page excerpt from “Jim Henson’s Fraggle rock, the ultimate visual history” on the matter of fraggle rock merchandise.
It’s a lil long but shrug. Cool ideas, and id love to see them produce stuff like his original ideas, but commercialism n bleh shrug.
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Included Picture text:
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LET THE FRAGGLES PLAY
Because MICHAEL K. FRITH Had been involved with the toy lines for Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, he had high hopes for what the Fraggle Rock toys could be, dreaming of a line of innovative educational devices that would extend the show's message of community and interconnectivity. He pictured musical instruments and music-themed activities, and kits that would take children through the phases of puppetry design and building. He imagined board games that would teach about the water cycle, and Doozer construction sets with elementary learning elements.
Heading into 1983, Henson managed to lock down licenses with the Tomy toy company for five plush dolls (Gobo, Red, Mokey, Wembley, and Boober, with Uncle Travelling Matt and Sprocket later joining the line) and four Doozer windup toys. All these products were introduced at the February 1983 Toy Fair, and were on shelves that fall. The following year, Milton Bradley released a Fraggle Rock board game, the object of which was to transport postcards between Doc's workshop, Marjory the Trash Heap, and the Swimming Hole. The Fraggle toy line would eventually expand to include puzzles, View-Master reels, and colorforms sets.
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But Frith admits he was disappointed with what toy-making technology was capable of at the time, and what the toy companies were interested in producing: "It was really, really hard to create dolls, puppets, and so forth that were true to the original characters. We had to go back and forth many, many times between our vendors and our people in the shop, who would have to make, remake, repattern, and so on, to get them to something that was, to my eye, acceptable." To Frith, the plush toys and windups were just “cute," and not the cutting-edge learning tools he'd hoped to produce.
For political reasons, Henson Associates had to tread a very narrow line with their merchandise circa 1983. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan's new Federal Communications Commission chairman, MarkS. Fowler, had loosened the regulations preventing American TV programs aimed at kids from directly promoting toys. What followed was a wave of cartoons like My Litle Pony, G.I. Joe, and HeMan and the Masters of the Universe, in which each episode effectively functioned as a half-hour ad for action figures and playsets. This was soon followed by a backlash to blatant commercialism, with parents groups in the US and regulatory commissions abroad demanding that overly commercial shows be yanked from the air.
So when Duncan Kenworthy and the Henson Associates' Product Group undertook a presentation for UK retailers in November of 1983, they had to word their remarks carefully, to make it clear that their company should be recognized primarily as a producer of TV and film, and that "the licensing of products, publishing, software, music, etc., are all support mechanisms to enhance our principal endeavor, production." In other words: They weren't making shows to sell toys; they were making toys to sell shows.
Given the company's squeamishness over skewing too commercial, it's all the more ironic that Michael K. Frith's best experience with the Fraggle toy line came from an unexpected source: McDonald's. "I've never been in a McDonald's in my lite," Frith says with a laugh. And yet, in 1987, when the newly renamed Jim Henson Productions set out to promote Fraggle Rock: The Animated Series with a line of Happy Meal toys, Frith was amazed at how creative and conscientious the fastfood giant's product development team was.
The only snag? Frith wanted the Fraggle vehicles to be Sightly offcenter, so that they'd wobble a litle when kids pushed them. When next he met with the McDonald's toy engineers, they gave him a solemn look and told him they'd had to put the axles in straight. When Frith asked why, they replied, "We did a focus test, and the moms thought they were Whether or not the Happy Meal toys were as offbeat as Frith had hoped, they remain popular with Fraggle Rock fans, fetching impressive prices on the collectors' market. Like the other Fraggle merchandise released in the '80s, they became part of the experience of the show for a lot of kids-and part of the magic that keeps Fraggle Rock alive.
First time drawing human Rizzo (and @sweetysapphic 's Rozzi/MTF Rizzo design as a human <3) tysm again for the request @sweetysappic I hope you like these doodles X3 also these are like first attempt designs so I'm like not 100% on them but yeah Idk lol I hope they look okay :3
why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit
"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.
Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.
Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".
The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.
And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.
Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.
And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.
An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.
An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.
These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.
And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.
Some drawings I made for the last few weeks of art fight!!!
1. @data-dork
2. JoyfulRam
3. caninecomet
4. @violetpony11
5. KijiTheCat
6. RainyPromenade
7. beetlewings
8. @mehmista-blog aka mads my beloved
In total I made 16 attacks this year which is one more than my initial goal!!! Thank you soooo so much to everypony who gifted me art this year I will cherish it 4ever
Posting this here because I know someone on here will appreciate it. Anyways ive been fixated on fraggle rock (specifically the reboot) this month so ive been drawing the fraggles... lmk if yall want to see more fraggle art.
Was thinking about Wembley working a lot of different jobs, and then I remembered the ep Wembley's egg and got really emo bc like..yeah he'd def work with kids at some point and it'd change his life :')
theartofmadeline
gamechangershow
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
amandla
izzy806
