Never quite as famous as their cousins on Sesame Street or The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock was basically the pinnacle of what Jim Henson was always trying to accomplish: it taught lessons to kids without feeling like it was teaching, it entertained with music and comedy, and it stressed the ideals of friendship, honesty, and kindness. Audiences loved it, critics loved it, but because it was on HBO and not an over-the-air channel, it never got to be as big as it should have. But hey, at least we're finally getting action figures!
Gobo is a guitar-playing, musical Fraggle - a born leader and an explorer, following in the footsteps of his Uncle Travelling Matt.
His adventures take him through the caves and tunnels of Fraggle Rock, even into "Outer Space" to retrieve mail from his uncle. While Matt usually travels alone, Gobo likes to take his friends along, especially his best buddy Wembley!
A "gobo," in lighting terms, is a device that casts shadows - it's slang for "go between," and in fact goes between the actual light source and the subject. Like, imagine a film noir detective's office, with the light coming through the slatted blinds; real blinds may not produce exactly the kind of gaps you want, so you make a gobo and shine the light through it for the desired effect. Or the Bat Signal! The bat part of the the Bat Signal would be a gobo, casting the shadow into the sky. It was probably chosen as a name just because it sounds funny, but there's a certain poetry in Gobo Fraggle being the one who most often goes between the different strata of Fraggle Rock societies.
The first season of Fraggle Rock was shot in two 12-episode chunks
in 1982 and 1983. During the break in the middle, Gobo got redesigned: originally he had a rather narrow snout that performer Jerry Nelson felt made him look like a Skeksis, and his hair covered the tops of his eyes, making him feel less expressive. This figure uses the later, more familiar head-shape (though the opening and closing credits were never redone, so the original version did live on in some ways).
Technically these figures are based on the 2022 Apple TV+ series Back to the Rock, but for 80% of the characters that difference
means nothing. Gobo still wears a striped shirt under a vest, his pockets stuffed with things he might need as the Fraggle's intrepid explorer. We can see a bit of his furry body, and his bare legs. Just like NECA, Boss Fight Studio is following Palisades' lead in both general scale and level of detail: Gobo has a bit of a texture on his "skin," and the hair both on his head and the tuft on his tail are sculpted, rather than trying to make them rooted doll hair. We'd have liked the aforementioned texture to be more pronounced, but it's a start.
Modern articulation is a different bag than it was in 2002, but Boss Fight has never been afraid to make their toys move. Gobo gets a barbell neck, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel/hinge elbows, swivel/hinge wrists,
a balljoint waist, balljoint tail, balljoint hips, swivel/hinge knees, and swivel/hinge ankles. Everything moved fine right out of the box except the knees: they were the stiffest, stuckest hinges I've seen in years - and I buy Mythic Legions figures! Even trying to gently rock them back and forth didn't get them moving. The issue was solved by the application of very hot water: took off all the pieces I could that didn't ned to get wet (the head, scarf, vest, and tail), dunked him in the water for a couple minutes, and was finally able to get the knees bending. Wish they were as smooth as the rest of the joints are, but it was easy to free them up.
In the original Fraggle Rock, Gobo had a thing for wearing different hats, though it was never really remarked upon; it was just a background trait. Back to the Rock really played that up, made
it his "thing," so naturally this figure includes a second head that's sculpted wearing a hat. This one has his mouth closed, and he's looking up instead of straight ahead, so it's a shame you can't swap the hair bits bewteen the heads for a variety of looks. The hat is a purple winter cap with pom-poms on it, which is kind of like the one he wore in Season 2's "A Friend in Need" (and a couple other episodes), but it would need more paint for that.
His other accessories include an alternate hand holding a postcard. The promo shots showed another with the fingers splayed, but that seems not to have fit in the final budget. There's his Fraggle-style guitar, which the regular hands are shaped to hold/strum
(assuming he plays it lefty), and a lantern hanging from a gnarled stick. Finally, there's a radish, which is the main food source for Fraggles, and should give you an idea of what scale these toys are meant to be in.
Like we saw with the Doozers, the Fraggles are held in place in their packaging by paper-pulp trays, which is both environmentally friendly and - since it looks like a cave wall - perfectly suited to the characters. Plus, unlike too many companies these days, Boss Fight didn't hesitate to put biographical information on the back of the box, instead of making us go digging for it in marketing copy. Imagine!
Our only complaint with Diamond Select Toys' Muppets Select line was that they weren't in-scale with Palisades, so there was no reason to start buying in. And while the Fraggles aren't technically scaled to Palisades Muppets as characters, they are pretty close as puppets, if that makes sense. It's great to finally have a real follow-up to one of the best toylines of the 2000s, even if it's taken 20 years for anyone else to get to where Palisades was back then.
-- 07/02/25
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