"I got everything in me": Fraggle Rock's Trash Heap, Spirit, Earth, and Connection

What the show is really about is people getting along with other people, and understanding the delicate balances of the natural world. These are topics that can be dealt with in a symbolic way, which is what puppets basically do all of the time. These are two of the areas that children in the next generation or so will have to deal with in very real terms.

Jim Henson, Notepad

In the seventh episode of Jim Henson's popular Muppet-based series Fraggle Rock, the Trash Heap composes a poem about compost, garbage, and her rat-like sidekicks, Philo and Gunge. Touched by her comparison of them to "rotten rinds," they comment that they "never knew you had it in ya" (1.7). ¹ As she laughs and sinks back down into her restive state, the Trash Heap—known as Marjory to her companions and Madame Trash Heap to the Fraggles who consider her their oracle—comments, "Boys, I got everything in me!" And she does. As the moral center of her world, the Trash Heap is the medium of Henson's intention, quoted in the epigraph above, that his show will teach children about taking care of each other and the natural world. There is something in her for every group in Henson's wacky universe: the Trash Heap offers wisdom to the Fraggles (small furry Muppet-creatures), compost to the Gorgs (huge humanoid Muppets), nurturing to Philo and Gunge, and wonderful combinations of insight and hilarity to the audience. She sees the intrinsic value in every part of creation. Her humor and wisdom, a blend of mystic and earth-centered knowledge, are offered in speech and song: the former with a voice most often accented with heavy Yiddish tones that often take on British inflections and occasionally borrow from a variety of cultures and nations, the latter with music ranging in style from American blues to Caribbean calypso to multicultural ballads. In one of the few critical studies of Henson's work, Sidney I. Dobrin argues that "the Muppets are a deeply ecologically conscious group," that Henson's "projects deliberately promote ecological thinking and ecological literacy," and that with Fraggle Rock "Henson also intended his young viewers to learn how to live in harmony with all of the world, not only people" (235, 243). The Trash Heap is the matrix of the ecological literacy Henson promotes. Literally rooted in the earth, the Trash Heap absorbs all the garbage and pain brought to her; as the spiritual center of this universe, she takes in everything from the Gorgs' table scraps to the Fraggles' fears and gives back to them a vision of healed relationships and a healthy world. Marjory does indeed have everything in her, and this essay will draw from writings on social and environmental justice to examine how, through her unique combination of transformative prophecy, environmental sustainability, and inter-species connections, Fraggle Rock works to fulfill Henson's goals to help children envision a better world.

"I'm orange peels; I'm coffee grounds; I'm wisdom":Prophecy, Spirituality, and Marjory

Filmed primarily in England and broadcast from 1983 to 1987 on HBO in the United States, CBC in Canada, ITV in the United Kingdom, and TV ² in Australia/New Zealand among other networks, Fraggle Rock was a primetime half-hour show produced for children and highly popular with audiences of all ages. Now syndicated and sold in DVD boxed sets, the series continues to be replayed around the world and has spun-off an animated series and a feature film currently in production. Set in a world connected to—and somewhat dependent upon—ours, the series features a complex system of symbiotic relationships between different races and species of creatures that function as allegories of our world. At the beginning of the series, the Fraggles, Gorgs, and Doozers (tiny Muppet builders who also live in Fraggle Rock) seem largely unaware of just how interconnected and essential they are to each other, and they are even more oblivious to the connections between them and the "lower...