Fans of Henson’s popular Fraggle Rock noticed that Mokey, one of the show’s popular characters, looked very different (and more glamorous) when the reboot version of the series (Back to the Rock) premiered on Apple TV + in 2022. The new version of the bright and optimist character now wears a lovely green dress, sports a blue beehive ponytail, and has less prominent eyelids. We were fortunate enough to find out more about Mokey’s fantastic new makeover when we chatted with Henson Creature Shop’s talented New York-based creative supervisor Jason Weber, who’s been making magic with the company since 1996.
Animag: It’s not every day that we’re invited to go behind the scenes of a glamorous superstar’s makeover! So, thank you for this special exclusive! Can you tell us a bit about why it was decided that Mokey was the puppet that was going to get a makeover for the show’s return on Apple TV+ two years ago?
Jason Weber: The original designs for the characters ended up being so joyous, fun and playful, However, for some reason, Mokey’s character (as delightful as she is) did not appear to be a peer of the characters. She seemed more of a mentor or parental figure as opposed to someone who was the same age as the others. So, for this new reboot, we wanted her to look younger, like a friend or sister. We talked about colors and whether her costume and hair needed to change. We wanted to brighten everything, even her fur color and reimagine her costume which was a sticking point for the longest time. I did many revisions of her, and the designs went through many different groups of people within our company and then within the Apple group and some other producers. This all happened during the pandemic, so I was working on it a lot from home, but it was a lot of fun. We did want to keep her shape relatively similar to what we had in the original show, which meant she was taller than all the rest of them.
You also gave her a fabulous new hairstyle!
That’s right! She had less hair than the others. I hate to say it but when you look at it, she almost looked a bit bald up there. I looked at it and said, nope we can’t do that! I did versions where it was up, then it was down, it was pulled back, with pom poms. I tried every kind of hair, even a nice Afro. They would say, “No, No, Maybe, Next …”
Do you remember how many versions you had to come up with before it got the final approval?
Oh my gosh. I know I did five rounds, but within each round there were usually five to seven versions, and then within that, they would say, OK I like this costume but I don’t like that hair. There was a point where I was just doing revisions on the hair by itself, so I didn’t count them individually. But, I want to say I probably did about 125 drawings during the course of six or seven months. I know at the end they were getting a little impatient with me, because I kept getting a little slower, so it was definitely a challenge, but I really enjoyed doing it.
Can you tells us about the change in eyelids and what they were able to do?
Well, in the original series, Mokey did have the capacity to open and close her eyes: That was part of the original design, so we wanted to make sure that she was able to do that. We did change the design of the eyelashes on the eyelids. It was made a little bit more feminine. There’s a technique that we use for a lot of our characters, where a male has a simple dark line defining the eyelash, and a female character might have a jagged line with eyelashes put on or it’s fur or something like that. But the original design just had a straight line, which sort of made her look like an old man character. We wanted to make her more like a female character. We brightened the color of the eyelid and made a defined eyelash shape and changed the mechanism itself trying to make sure it closed completely, because I think it only closed partially in the original design.
We all know that Kermit evolved a lot from the original puppet Jim Henson had designed early on his career. Can you think of other Henson Muppets who changed and evolved through the years?
The ones I’m more familiar with are definitely the Sesame Street characters. When you look at Big Bird, for example, when he started he was always a big yellow walk-around bird. He began as a character with a tiny head and all of the feathers were a lot shaggier. The way we make them now everything falls on itself so it has a nice smooth look, and he looks very clean and has a very full head. But originally he had a little pinhead with big huge eyes and the long beak, and didn’t have this big fan of feathers. Of course, Oscar started as an orange Grouch and ended up as a green one! Grover also had a little bit of a makeover as he was originally a kind of green-gray character with black tips on it his fur, which changed into this character that had this beautiful, deep rich blue color.
Can you talk about Mokey’s costumes?
One of the common qualities of about the designs of the original’s costumes was that everything was made out of a knitted fabric, so there was this easy casual stretch quality and playfulness about them. They all had these rich colors, and all of the hems around the sleeves and the waists had tubing in them which gave them a rounded quality. It was all very illustrative and indicative of this unique world they were creating for the Fraggles.
So, I knew we wanted to keep that idea for Mokey’s new redesign as well. We’ll still have this knit-fabric, graphic representation of the color and this rounded edge on all of the ends of her costume. As we got further along, other people started sharing their thoughts. I remember one of the executives sent a link to a catalog of clothing (I think it was Free People!) and thought we should use it as reference. I thought, well that’s very real world, and we’re in the Fraggle world!
I wanted to be respectful of these shapes and this aesthetic style. We actually tried a few things and got the approval on one design, but then, when we started the build, it didn’t work. Sometimes, when you draw something on paper, it doesn’t do the same thing in three dimensions. So, they axed it. One of the links to the catalog actually worked out well. We emulated the knit of the fabric. We hand-painted it to get the scale right, because the puppet’s much smaller than a human. We made it out of silk instead of cotton just so it would drape well on the puppet. Every part of the costume is a challenge because of the color, the shape, the draping, the pattern-making, how it hangs and moves. You have to bear in mind all those details when you’re designing costumes for puppets.
What are Mokey’s dimensions in real life?
Mokey is one of the taller ones and I’m kind of guessing because I don’t have her in front of me, I would say she was somewhere in the vicinity of 28/30/32 inches , where as the other ones like Wembley (which is one of the smallest ones) are more around 16/18/20 inches tall. She’s kind of towering over the others, but when you’re shooting half body, you can raise and lower the puppet a little bit too So, a lot of the times, just for framing purposes, they might bring her down just a little bit so everybody is within the same frame.
Looking back, what was the your favorite part of this assignment?
The whole build for the show was really quite wonderful, because we all love these characters. Even though they were originally from the early 1980s, they have such love in our company, so to be able to bring them and back to life was a great experience. Some of them weren’t in great condition because of the years that had passed. We had to spruce them up, clean and brighten them to give them new life. We loved that we got to keep the look of four of the five main characters. We did end up with a few minor things like brightening up the color of the shirt on Wembley. Then, to be able to add this new sort of dimension to Mokey was a really rewarding experience for all of us.
And the toughest part?
I think mostly it was during the first season, because that’s when we were really bringing everything out.. The Burbank Creature Shop was working with our Creature Shop in New York, the producers were based in L.A., and the show was going to be shot in Calgary. Part of the team from Burbank was also going to go up to Canada, as well as local puppeteers from the area. We even had one of our New York puppeteers go there so it really was a multi-city production. Just keeping all of that on track and getting it done in time was a bit of a challenge.
Do you remember the initial feedback you got after the Mokey makeover?
We had a lot of ups and down. I had to go through so many rounds before we started building: But when we landed on the final look for her, everybody seemed pleased. It was a bit late in the game. We were still playing with some of the details as we were shipping things. Even once she got up there, there was something about the shape of the puppet’s body under the dress that needed to be changed. So, they ended up doing a few nips and tucks to the puppet itself: Then, everybody was happy with the final version and of course, we had Donna Kimball in there who’s just an incredible puppeteer.
Any final thoughts?
Well, we’re all hoping that there will be a third season of the show, because we all had so much fun creating this world and these wonderful characters.
The second season of Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock premiered on Apple TV+ in March. We’re all waiting to hear if a third season has been greenlit or not!
All images courtesy of The Jim Henson Company, Apple TV+.
