Boober Fraggle Puppet

Boober Fraggle is a hand-rod puppet performed by Dave Goelz on the television show Fraggle Rock. In a hand-rod puppet, like Boober, the performer’s dominant hand goes into the puppet’s head and operates the mouth and sometimes other facial features. The less dominant hand controls the arm rods, which are thin rods connected to the puppet’s hands. Boober is pessimistic and superstitious, but he enjoys cooking and doing laundry. The name Boober comes from an angry cow that one of Jim Henson’s daughters encountered when visiting a farm in England. He is one of the five main Fraggles on the children’s program Fraggle Rock created by Jim Henson that aired for five seasons on HBO from 1983 to 1987. Henson created the Fraggle world as one where different types of creatures lived together in a world where they were interconnected and important to one another. From the beginning, the show was designed to be easily adaptable to different cultures, which generally led to each country having its own human character, such as Doc in the American version, with the same Fraggle scenes dubbed in local languages.

This particular Boober puppet was the original Boober puppet created for Fraggle Rock in 1982. It was designed by Michael Frith and used as a model for all of the later versions of the character Boober.