For this Pride Month at ToughPigs, we’re raising money for charity and giving away some super cool prizes in the process. But while we’re enjoying Pride Month, we’re reminding you again that gay, transgender and nonbinary people are just people in your neighborhood like everyone else. We’re not evil or weird, or even new, despite what a lot of people want you to think. We’ve always been here, living our lives, hanging out with our friends, and sometimes, making the art you love.
Case in point: The Jim Henson Company and Disney have worked with a number of trans and nonbinary puppeteers, performers, and creatives over the years. They’re a part of shows you enjoy, like Muppets Mayhem and Back to the Rock. Every Pride Month, I reach out to some of them and have amazing conversations with some of the most genuine, passionate artists I’ve ever spoken to. Below, I’m going to profile one of them and share some stories.
Charley Feldman (they/them)
Henson Projects: Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, Harriet the Spy
Introduction:
Last year, when Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock premiered its second season, I was obsessed with the show’s best (and queerest!) episode, “I’m Pogey.” For those who don’t know, this episode is about Wembley Fraggle learning that he can express himself in many different ways, with help from the nonbinary Fraggle Pogey and a magical drag queen-esque monster named The Great Glitterini. As soon as I watched it, I knew I had to talk to that episode’s writer, Charley Feldman. It took a while for our schedules to line up, as you can see, but I’m so glad I finally did get to talk to Charley Feldman.
Charley is a nonbinary, pansexual TV writer. In addition to working on both seasons of Back to the Rock and The Jim Henson Company’s animated Harriet the Spy show, they wrote for The Owl House and both wrote for and were a supervising producer on X-Men ’97.
Obviously, I mostly talked to Charley about their identity and “I’m Pogey,” but they had a lot of stories to tell.
Getting to the Rock:
Charley has been writing for different projects for over a decade. They worked on various YouTube shows, including Machinima and Screen Junkies, then developed their own production company called CREATURE. CREATURE’s name later became Chickbait, a pun that Charley admits made more sense before they transitioned. After nine years in the digital sphere, Charley realized their real dream was to write for TV and movies. They wrote an animated pilot that did not get picked up, but did get enough attention to land Charley a writing gig on Season One of The Owl House. Since then, they’ve been “booked and busy ever since.” While they didn’t list every project they worked on in this era, they noted Adventure Time: Distant Lands as another favorite.
As a child, Charley was a huge fan of Labyrinth. They said it was “the only thing I wanted to rent from Blockbuster. It’s an escape. It’s that feeling of possibility and imagination that Henson really wanted to tap into.” So it comes as no surprise to learn that Charley was excited to join the Jim Henson Company in 2019, when they began writing for the animated Harriet the Spy. There, they met and worked with Halle Stanford, the President of Television with the Jim Henson Company. When Henson was planning the reboot of Fraggle Rock, Halle told showrunners Matt Fusfeld and Alex Cuthbertson that they had to reach out to Charley. Charley has been working with the Fraggles since then.
Fitting in on Back to the Rock:
I can’t stress enough how happy Charley was whenever they talked about Back to the Rock. They said it felt like a homecoming, a weird alchemy of silly weirdos from all different genres of writing. “I hate to be so arrogant about it,” they said, “but we had the best team for the work. We had sensitive, truly sincere people. They were supportive, bolstering each other’s ideas. It reminded us of Fraggle Rock itself; we laughed until our face hurt.” Jocelyn Stevenson, a writer from both the original Fraggle Rock and Back to the Rock said it was “stupid,” but Charley added that “from her, that’s a good thing.”
Charley noted that every episode was written extremely collaboratively. In Season One, this was a little more difficult, seeing as most of the work took place over Zoom. However, Season Two began with a writers’ retreat, where the team discussed ideas that interested them. Many of the writers were queer, and so there was a lot of interest in exploring LGBTQ+ themes. Because of the positive reception of Season One’s “The Glow,” an episode where Boober’s glowing baloobius serves as a metaphor for queerness, the team decided to move forward with another episode that dealt with these themes.
Creating “I’m Pogey”
Charley told me that before Season One even began filming, the writers thought of Pogey as a nonbinary character, and wanted to use they/them pronouns for the character. So when brainstorming began for the second season, people began asking Charley if they wanted to talk about this an episode.
Charley’s first goal was to make this important topic feel “Fraggley.” Their goal was to write something where, if kids knew this feeling, they would understand it completely, but their writing needed to be so much broader than just talking about nonbinary identities.
“People think we come with an agenda of making more people queer, but we all can say we just want kids who are already queer to know they are loved and seen and a part of a community like Fraggle Rock,” Charley explained.
This was all very important to them, and so for this episode, Charley was around for the entire process to make sure it was executed correctly. Charley summarizes the episode’s message simply: “It’s the good part of saying you’re not special. We can all hear your truth.”
Charley and Wembley
Early on, the writers discussed whether the episode should entirely be about Pogey. But the team felt that, since Pogey was a less-established character, it felt less impactful to center the episode entirely around them. The episode needed to explore one of the core cast. Given that, the writers felt Wembley was the obvious choice. Charley stresses that like Wembley, a lot of trans people get accused of being indecisive about who they are. But Charley feels that gender isn’t as simple of that. “I am a proponent of seeing all of gender as something that serves you or it doesn’t,” they explained. “Some people need a more concrete thing, and some people are just passing through. And isn’t that a wonderful thing? And to Glitterini, if that sparkles for you, then it fits you. But if it doesn’t, then at least you tried.”
Charley likened Wembley’s moments of self-doubt and self-hatred to the “crucible” that all queer people have to go through before they find themselves. Charley admitted that they still feel Wembley’s doubts a lot of the time, because they present femininely despite being nonbinary. That mentality went into the design of Glitterini, who first appears as a smaller, drabber monster before he reveals his glittering form. “It doesn’t matter if people see you as nonbinary,” they explained. “It’s what’s inside that counts.” All in all, writing “I’m Pogey” was extremely cathartic for them.
Pogey’s performer, Kanja Chen, was very anxious about portraying a nonbinary character, as they are cisgender. Kanja was not aware Pogey was nonbinary when he started performing the character in the first season, even if the writers considered them to be. Despite Kanja’s worries, Charley felt he was able to bring a lot of pathos to the performance. Likewise, Charley was pleased with the character of Glitterini, even if they originally insisted glitter was too generic of a theme for him. (“Johnny [Tartaglia] fought for it,” they said, of the show’s executive producer.) Charley’s one insistence was that, if they had to use glitter, Lanford the plant should barf it up at some point. That remains in the finished episode.
To wrap up our conversation about “I’m Pogey,” I had to ask Charley about the Junior Gorg B-plot, where Junior cannot choose which Gorg box to go into on Gorg Boxing Day. The ToughPigs team had mixed feelings about this subplot, so I wanted to know how they felt about it.
Charley explained that story was written for Season One’s “Flight of the Flutterflies,” another episode they wrote. That episode mattered a lot to Charley, who has a generalized anxiety disorder and related to Boober’s plight. Because that episode was about holidays, Charley wanted to include a Gorg holiday, and decided to make it Boxing Day in reference to the show’s Canadian filming location. The team liked this plot, but it didn’t fit well into the episode, especially because the idea of Junior defying binaries was confusing when it didn’t have a clear parallel with the Fraggle A-plot. However, Charley realized it would fit perfectly with “I’m Pogey,” so the team used it there. Charley liked that the boxes were a nice, simple way to explain the gender binary to young people.
Queerness and Fraggles
I asked Charley how their queer identity affects all the work they do. “It’s just so much a part of me that I’m sure it comes out in ways I don’t even recognize,” they said. “Even before it gets to writing, people need me to join a staff, and I try to present myself as authentically as I can. You are hiring someone who is nonbinary, who is proud of their queerness. It’s not something I overtly champion if it doesn’t make sense for the story, because story is my top concern. But if there’s a place for it, I genuinely want to include it, because I think inclusivity matters.”
Charley notes that puppetry and cartoons tend to resonate with queer people because of ideas that stem from those media’s inherent sense of play. “Once you understand that the world is absurd–and I mean that very specifically and not in a nihilistic way–then you can take it as it is and realize that you can be anything. There’s a freedom to understanding that the rules don’t matter, and these systems and labels and ways in which we’re trying to confine ourselves to fit a mold is absurd. We’ve all agreed to it, and why?” They explained that this mindset lets people find their community, the show they want to be a part of, likening being queer to being a part of The Muppet Theater.
And lastly, I asked Charley if they had a final message for our readers. They said, “To my beloved queer community: Let’s set aside the fear for a moment (legitimate as it is) to put the ‘silly’ in ‘Silly Creatures’ this Pride. Dance won’t take our cares away forever, but it has always been a damn good place to start!
“To our much needed allies: if anyone trusts you enough to share with you who they are or what they’re discovering about themselves, repeat after Gobo: EVERY NEW THING I LEARN ABOUT YOU MAKES ME LOVE YOU EVEN MORE!”
Click here to put the “silly” in Silly Creatures on the ToughPigs Discord!
by Becca Petunia
