The filming of a children’s television special isn’t usually threatened by the approach of a full-grown American black bear.
In this case, the furry interloper ultimately veered far away from the TV crew, but the production, “Jim Henson’s Wowsabout!,” still features lots of living nature, including a California quail, bighorn sheep, an American crow and other black bears, not to mention the majestic trees of the show’s location, Sequoia National Park in California.
“Wowsabout!,” a half-hour preschool special premiering on Friday on PBS Kids, also introduces an irrepressible hedgehog and a punctilious pig. But those two are among several puppets, the first that the show’s producer, the Jim Henson Company, has built for PBS Kids since the last time it made them for “Sesame Street.” The stand-alone special, possibly the first for small children to focus on awe, shows how this emotion inspires curiosity, fosters learning, forges fellowship and encourages people of all ages to conserve natural and cultural resources.
This premise is “not woo-woo,” said the puppeteer Dorien Davies, who joined the independent producer Halle Stanford to create and write “Wowsabout!” “It’s peer-reviewed science.”
Much of that research is in the book “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a science consultant for this show and both of Pixar’s “Inside Out” movies. A co-executive producer of “Wowsabout!,” Keltner identifies eight sources of awe, including moral beauty (acts of altruism), nature, music and collective effervescence.
“You have to bring it to the preschool level,” Stanford said of Keltner’s work, as she and Davies discussed the special in a recent video interview. As for the show, “climate hope is what it’s all about, and appreciation and love for the natural world, because if you care for it, then you’ll caretake it.”
In conceiving “Wowsabout!,” Stanford first imagined Roxy, an ebullient, guitar-toting country hedgehog who dresses in hot pink and drives a solar-powered van. She first intended the character to investigate just the world’s wonders, but fastened on exploring awe after reading Keltner’s book.
Roxy also needed a friend and foil, so Stanford envisioned Ronald, a neat, orderly city pig whose dream is to become a junior park ranger and see the giant sequoias. After these characters meet, it doesn’t take long for them to squabble: Roxy casually flings around gear and flamboyantly decorates the campsite by — horror of horrors — attaching scarves to the trees.
“We decided to make Ronald our little eco-warrior,” Stanford said. “He’s like, ‘Leave no hoof print behind’” and delivers “digestible, bite-size tips for kids.” Roxy, for her part, teaches Ronald to rely less on technology, like his smartwatch and multiple night lights, and to appreciate wonders like the gasp-inducing starry sky above the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Both puppets sing, and Mike Himelstein, the special’s music director, assembled a team of songwriters and musicians, including himself, to give “a bluegrass-y, kind of Americana vibe to the show,” Davies said.
She and Stanford felt it was critical to shoot the characters’ scenes in a real location rather than create them through animation or on a soundstage. The National Park Service became an important partner, suggesting the Sequoia site. Cinematography wasn’t easy — when the puppets appear to be on the ground, they’re on a raised platform — but the team loved the giant, forested set: more than 17 billion square feet.
By combining live action, puppets and a natural backdrop, “this show is going to really do something that we think nobody else is doing right now for this age group,” Stanford said.
“Wowsabout!” relies on computer-generated imagery for only one scene: a migration of California tortoiseshell butterflies, some of which alight on Roxy and Ronald — an awe-inspiring encounter that vanquishes their bickering. The production also uses digital technology to make the hand-and-rod puppets appear more lifelike by deleting the presence of the rods, said John Tartaglia, the special’s director and the puppeteer playing Ronald. (Davies portrays Roxy.)
Tartaglia sees “Wowsabout!” as a homage to Jim Henson, the pioneering puppeteer who died in 1990 and revered the outdoors. (Lisa Henson, Jim Henson’s daughter and chief executive of the Jim Henson Company, is an executive producer of the special, along with its creators.) “And even the road trip idea, right?” Tartaglia said, recalling two of Henson’s original Muppets. “You think of Kermit and Fozzie, right in the car, driving in ‘The Muppet Movie.’”
Roxy and Ronald call their adventure a “wowsabout,” a term Davies invented. Keltner “talks about the word ‘whoa’ or ‘wow’ as a universal word for the expression of awe across all languages,” she said. The title also refers to the Australian Aboriginal walkabout, a ritual journey.
On their wowsabout, Roxy and Ronald meet a Spanish-speaking armadillo (PBS Kids will have a version of the special with Spanish subtitles and descriptive audio) and Pekan, a puppet representing the endangered Southern Sierra Nevada fisher (also seen live in a clip). Pekan shows Roxy and Ronald the park’s pictographs, inscribed by Indigenous peoples centuries ago. To the tune of recorded music by Michael Tex, from the North Fork Mono Tribe, Pekan introduces the word “awe”: “that goose bump feeling,” she says, when “the world around you feels so much bigger than you are.”
Roxy and Ronald experience awe again when they discover the park’s giant sequoias, including the 275-foot-tall General Sherman, the most massive tree on earth. They investigate the species with children who are not actors.
“If you think back to the early days of ‘Sesame Street,’ those wonderful moments of the kid talking to a puppet — it’s such an honest thing,” Tartaglia said.
“Wowsabout!,” however, is not only a tribute to Jim Henson’s aesthetic but also a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States. Stanford and Davies conceived the show as a full-length series, but at a time when both PBS and the National Park Service were facing federal funding cuts, the creative team agreed to accelerate its schedule and film “Wowsabout” as a special that could lead “PBS Kids Across America,” a monthslong programming initiative exploring places and history nationwide.
The special’s creators still hope for a series in which Roxy and Ronald continue their journeys, inspiring families to go on wowsabouts of their own.
The network’s goal was “to introduce these characters and really kind of see what the response is,” said Sara DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of PBS Kids and Education. She noted that the organization was as committed as ever to creating original content, but without government funds, “we just can’t do as much of it.”
The special hints at a possible series with a concluding montage of future wowsabout locales — including ocean depths and outer space — along with images of the singing puppets traveling into the sunset in Roxy’s van. That twilight scene required closing a public road.
“And then I’m feeling bad,” Tartalia said, “because I’m like: Oh, my God, we shut down the road. Are people going to be upset? And then people are driving by afterwards, and they’re honking, giving us the thumbs up, and they’re waving.”
It was, after all, a moment of awe.
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