Gary Levin

USA TODAY

Jim Henson%27s cult hit %27Fraggle Rock%27 is spawning spinoff series

%27The Doozers%27 features industrious 3-inch creatures

Computer-animated series%2C aimed at preschoolers%2C will surface on Hulu April 25

The industrious Doozers of Fraggle Rock, the 1980s Jim Henson series, have finally won their own spinoff.

More than 30 years after the cult puppet hit began airing on HBO, The Doozers will surface on Hulu April 25, with the first batch of 11-minute episodes — there are 52 in all — aimed at preschoolers. The new series, Hulu's first original project for kids, is computer animated, and introduces a "Pod Squad" of four new 3-inch-tall kid Doozers: Spike, Molly Bolt, Flex and Daisy Wheel.

"Even when the Fraggle Rock series was made, the creator of the show was curious about the world of Doozers, and the possibility one day of giving Doozers their own show," says Lisa Henson, CEO of Jim Henson Productions and the daughter of the Muppets master. "They were very intriguing; they were not the stars of the show, but they had their own little world going on," as builders of things the Fraggles would eat.

Unlike Fraggles, they don't live in underground caves, though they're connected to them by a series of tubes. Instead, they can be found in a log or under rocks.

And this time their design skills are put to the test for more than just Fraggle appetites: "In each episode they tackle a design problem in the community and they have to engineer a solution," says Henson, also an executive producer of the series. Their tools are a very 21st-century tablet and holographic device called a "Doozigner," as they build things such as a "Doozer Derby" racing car, a jetpack and an all-purpose "Cleanamajigger."

But it's not all easy: "A lot of things they build don't work immediately," Henson says, so kids are taught lessons of perseverance and problem-solving.

The series, shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia, aired last fall on Cartoon Network in Europe (the network airs no preschool programming in the USA), but Hulu will be its exclusive American home, joining those old Fraggle episodes.