Series / Construction Site

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Construction Site, also known as Jim Henson’s Construction Site, is a puppet-based children’s television series created by The Jim Henson Company which ran for four seasons, from 1999 to 2002.

Set, of course, in a construction site, the show stars a hardworking crew of construction machines - Diggs, a backhoe with a bit of a mischievous streak; Scooch, a young mini-dumper; Carrie, an enthusiastic and determined forklift; Lug, a dump truck who can’t stop reliving the great jobs of his past; Maxine, a wise old mixer truck; Carl, an intelligent crane with a German accent and a bit of an absentmindedness problem; and Bozer, a bulldozer who serves as the kind and fair leader of the construction crew. Together, the crew works on building jobs, learns a few important lessons along the way, and has fun all the while.

Tropes in Construction Site include:

• Absurd Phobia: ”One Roll At A Time” reveals that Diggs used to be afraid of concrete, although he got over it before the events of the series.
• Aerith and Bob: While most of the construction site crew have names that are either obviously not normal names (Bozer, Diggs, Scooch, Lug) or “normal” names which just happen to also be puns (Carrie, Maxine), the crane is just named “Carl”.
• Alliterative Name:
  • Carl the Crane
  • Lug’s old stunt-jumper alias was Long-Leaping Lug
  • A lot of minor mentioned characters have these- there’s Dexter Dumper (from “Every Dumper’s Dream”), and Kevin The Crane (well, the sounds are the same), Denzel “Dumpen Trucken”, and “Percy the Pugnacious Piledriver” from “Silencers Are Golden”.
• Alliterative Title: “Carnival Capers”, “Feeling Flat”, “Bozer’s Boo Boo”, “Safe And Sound”, and “Building Bozer” all have these.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Scooch is the youngest member of the team, fitting foe the Kid-Appeal Character.
• Birthday Episode: “Carnival Capers” takes place on Maxine’s “mileage day” (presumably the anniversary of the day she was built), with the crew trying to throw a carnival-themed party for her- and keep the preparations secret, because she doesn’t like to be made a fuss of.
• Buffy Speak: Carl produces some in “There’s No Place Like Home”.
  Carl: I lost my grip, und a crane without a his grip is like a bulldozer without his big pushy thing, or a dumpen trucken without his little dumpity thing.
• Bungling Inventor: Carl is portrayed as this in “Carl Wash” and absolutely no other episode whatsoever.
• Butt-Monkey: Carl often serves as this, courtesy of his carelessness when on the job which has often landed him into trouble in some form.
• Catchphrase:
  • Diggs tends to say "Top Gear" as his way of describing things.
  • Bozer saying "Mind behind" when reversing.
• Cheer Up Episode: The machines spend most of “There’s No Place Like Home” trying to snap Carl out of his “site-sickness” (homesickness), which is affecting him so badly that he’s lost his grip (a very big deal for a crane).
• Cold Snap: There are three episodes that involve wintry conditions, while the series otherwise subscribes to It's Always Spring- “Safe And Sound”, “Parp Idle”, and “Frozen Bozer”.
• Color-Coded Characters:
  • Bozer - Red
  • Scooch - Orange
  • Lug - Yellow
  • Carl - Green
  • Diggs - Blue
  • Carrie - Purple
  • Maxine - Brown
• Companion Cube: Carl treating his “hooky” and other attachments like this is a bit of a Running Gag, although how much, exactly, he anthropomorphizes them depends on the episode and on what would be funny at the moment.
• Compressed Vice: Diggs is portrayed as a Competition Freak in “What I Do Best” and absolutely nowhere else; likewise happens with Carl being a Bungling Inventor in “Carl Wash”.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The “Life Is Not A Game” sequence from “Call Of The Forest” consists of flashbacks and references to earlier episodes- specifically, Carrie learning that everyone is different, Bozer telling Diggs he can wear the Turbo Treads, Diggs looking down on Scooch as the elevator he’s in malfunctions, the newer machines striking oil, Bozer sinking into Diggs’ poorly-made driveway, and Diggs pretending to be Carrie behind a tarp.
• Cool Old Lady: Maxine serves as this, especially to the younger machines who enjoy working with her. Often happily singing with them and also providing useful advice to the team.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Dumper the Jumper’s catchy theme tune (“He dumps, he jumps, he flies over bumps”) uses the same melody as the show’s own opening.
• Dub Name Change: Has its own page.
• Everything Is an Instrument: In “Canival Capers”, Carrie provides the music for Maxine’s carnival-themed birthday party by banging on some oil drums.
• Expository Theme Tune: “That’s What They Do” from Seasons 3 to 4 teeters on the brink between being this and a Thematic Theme Tune, as it lists a few construction-y tasks “they” do, and then just manages to squeeze in a description of “them” as “masters of construction / a heavy metal crew”.
• Face Your Fears: Bozer spends most of “One Roll At A Time” trying to overcome his fear of water; he finally conquers it when he has to save Diggs from a collapsing jetty.
• Fashion Hurts: A vehicular variant is done in “Tread Carefully”- Diggs’ “turbo tread” tires might look cool, but they’re painful to actually work in; because of this, Diggs has Scooch check out the inside of the water cooler tower that’s going to be demolished rather than doing it himself. Unfortunately, when Bozer sees Diggs outside of the water cooler, he assumes that his job must’ve done, and the thing almost gets knocked down with Scooch still inside.
• Flowers of Femininity: Gertie, Carl’s old friend, apparently wore flowers in her windscreen; the out-of-universe reason for this was so she could be visually differentiated from Lug (whom she used the same puppet as).
• Funny Foreigner: Carl has a goofy-sounding German accent and a tendency to add (what the writers think is) German phrasing to his sentences (such as calling Lug a “dumpen trucken”, which he does constantly).
• Got Me Doing It: From “Sunk”
  Bozer (to Carl): That’s very strange. First I can’t find the oil drums and now you can’t find your hooky- I mean, hook.
• Harsh Talent Show Judge: When Lug is selected as one of the judges for a parp song contest, he quickly turns into this.
  (Carl named his song “Mr. Poo-Poo Comes To Town” without thinking about what that sounds like in English)
  Lug: Put it this way: If Mr. “Poop Poop” came to my town, I’d move.
  (Diggs says he’s going to perform “Sad Little Scooper”)
  Lug: Next!
  Diggs: What?
  Bozer: Um… Lug?
  Lug: Oh, come on. If I had a rivet for every time I heard a parp song about a “sad little scooper”... Next, next, neeeeext!
  (Scooch performs; Lug’s reaction is offscreen)
  Scooch: Lug told me not to give up my day job!
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Many, many instances occur; a recurring one is the expression “easy as diesel”, a rhyming, machine-themed play on “easy as pie”.
• Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis: Lug has one in “Mid-Mileage Crisis”, wearing his old “speed stripes” (which Carl thinks looks ridiculous) and trying to have fun with Diggs, Scooch, and Carrie.
• Identical Stranger: Gertie, Carl’s “dumpen trucken” friend from Germany, looks exactly like Lug. This would just be a case of Reused Character Design except for the fact that the other machines actually leverage this to cure Carl’s homesickness (much to Lug’s dismay).
• Idiosyncratic Wipes: At the end of each episode, a crane hook will swing a girder across the bottom border of the screen, and then pull the girder up to reveal the credits roll.
• I Just Want to Be Special: The plot of “Carrie's Pallets” is she is tired of working like a normal fork lift and decides to do things in her own unique way. This only lands her into trouble in the episode.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: In “Building Bozer”, when Diggs goes to tell Maxine, Carl, and Lug that Bozer is leaving, he promises Carrie he won’t make a big thing about it.
  Diggs (over the PA system): Big site announcement! Now hear this! Now hear this! Bozer’s leaving!
  Carrie: Well, if that’s not a big thing, then I’m a fire engine.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: When invited to hang out with Carl and Lug in “Grown-Up For A Day”, Diggs discovers, much to his horror, that their idea of a “fun time” is sharing boring stories about old jobs they’ve completed, like when Lug hauled a bunch of boulders down a mountain or when Carl lifted 150 crossbeams.
• Instrumental Theme Tune: The first two seasons use one which formed the base of the initial scoring style.
• Introductory Opening Credits: The opening sequence for the show depicts and names, in order, Diggs, Carl, Scooch, Maxine, Carrie, Lug, and Bozer.
• I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: Done quite hilariously in “Tread Carefully”.
  Bozer: Diggs, a construction site is not the place for high fashion.
  Carl: I remember it being ze place for a certain bulldozer und his beads und flowers.
  (Flashback to Bozer with flower stickers stuck to his blade, beaded strings tied around his operator cab, and an oversized pair of colored glasses)
  Past!Bozer: Groovy…
• The Leader: Bozer is the machine in charge during every construction project.
• A Lizard Named "Liz":
  • The steamroller Lug once mentioned working with in “Frozen Bozer”, who forgot to put in his antifreeze one day? He’s named Rolly.
  • In “Bozer’s Boo Boo”, “Flatty the Flatbed [Truck]” is mentioned.
• Lyrical Shoehorn: “That’s What They Do” mostly consists of short verses of the form “They [X], They [Y], They can [phrase that rhymes with Y]”, with about 90% of the “[phrase that rhymes with Y]”s being one of these.
• Meaningful Name: Diggs is a backhoe digger, while Lug is a dump truck who lugs around loads of dirt.
• Metafictional Title: The episode “Big Rig” is named after a fictional in-universe superhero the newer machines are all enamored with.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: A Running Gag in “A Good Mixer”.
  • When Bozer tells Diggs that he’ll have to be careful with the bricks he’s delivering.
  Diggs: Don’t you worry about that, Bozer. Careful’s my middle name.
  Scooch: Oh, is it? My middle name’s Peewee.
  • This makes a return after the bricks are reduced to gravel:
  Bozer: So, Diggs, your middle name wasn’t really “careful” after all, was it?
  Scooch: No, I think he changed it to “Make Maxine go so fast she’ll start to mix”.
  Diggs: Scooch!
  • And then, when Bozer needs to do something with said gravel:
  Bozer: Diggs and Scooch, can you scoop all this up and get it over to the loading area?
  Diggs: No problemo! “Scoop” is my middle- (Bozer glares at him) Um. Never mind.
• Monochrome Past: The flashbacks to Carl and Lug’s past in “Out With The Old” and “Silencers Are Golden” are in black and white, while the depiction of Lug’s time as “Long-Leaping Lug” in “If Trucks Could Fly” goes for sepia tones instead.
• Musical Gag: “Sunk”, which has its plot revolving around missing oil drums, has a soundtrack that mostly consists of steel drums.
• Mystery Episode: “Whodunnit” has the building crew figuring out who managed to destroy a parking garage they’d been building overnight.
• Noodle Incident: “Don’t Panic” shows that, the last time Carl was the group’s leader, a bridge collapsed and a pipeline somehow ended up spewing fire.
• Not Now, We're Too Busy Crying Over You: When Scooch disappears in the darkened mine in “Mine All Mine”, Diggs and Carrie assume he’s been taken by “mine monsters”... and, when they hear him calling to them, comment on how it’s like they can “still hear his voice”.
• One-Word Title: A few episodes have these, namely “Sunk”, “Truckmake”, “Junkyard”, and “Fog”.
• Out-of-Context Eavesdropping: The whole plot of “Building Bozer” only happens because Diggs overhears Bozer talking about his plans for the road they’re building and misinterprets it as being about Bozer retiring. In Diggs’ defense, however, what Bozer said still sounds like he’s talking about retirement even if you know it’s supposed to be about a road.
  Bozer: Well, that’s the end of the road for me. No, there’s no turning back. It’s time I looked for pastures new, oh yes.
• Parental Bonus: There is absolutely no way that the show’s intended audience of young children will get what the title of “Big Bozer Is Watching” is referencing.
• Parody Commercial:
  • In “The Way Of The Bodger”, after Diggs is told that he has to dig another foundation, he says aloud that there has to be a quicker way to do it- and the episode switches to a sepia-toned advertisement for “the Bodge-It system” (“dig the hole quickly and carelessly, it doesn’t matter since it’s just going to get filled in with cement and gravel again”). Given that the “commercial” first appears on his windshield before spiraling out to fill up the whole screen, it’s probably supposed to be his Imagine Spot.
  • “Going Solo” has one for “Diggs, the one-machine construction site”. Just like the “bodge-it method”, the idea of trying to do a job entirely on his own doesn’t work out very well. The end of the episode gives the commercial a "reprise" of sorts- after Diggs has learned the value of teamwork, it now promotes Diggs, Carrie, and Scooch as "the three-machine construction site".
• Phrase Catcher: Scooch has a tendency to cause cries of "Oh, Scooch." (said with a very specific inflection) whenever he says something that indicates his overwhelming naivete.
• Poor Communication Kills: The main plot of “Out With The Old” only happens because Scooch tells Carl and Lug that Bozer said it’s “out with the old and in with the new” without giving the context of the quote (he was talking about prefabricated buildings); because of this, the older machines leave with the belief that they’re being replaced, and Diggs decides to destroy the prefabricated buildings due to belief that their ease of assembly is what cost Carl and Lug their jobs.
• Poorly Lit Pareidolia: In “Junkyard”, what Diggs, Carrie, and Scooch believe to be Truckzilla is actually just a pile of the parts the machines have replaced over the years, poorly lit and with the wind causing Maxine’s old horn to make eerie noises.
• Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: A good selection of episodes have these: "Who's The Boss" (on the sitcom of the same name) “Big Bozer Is Watching” (on a recurring line from Nineteen Eighty-Four), “There’s No Place Like Home” (from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), “Days Of Blunder” (Days of Thunder), “Star Truck” (Star Trek), and “Emission Impossible” (Mission: Impossible).
• Portmantitle: “Truckmate”, of “truck” and “teammate”.
• Pun-Based Title: Quite a few episodes have these:
  • “Tread Carefully” has Diggs trying on some “fashionable” new treads.
  • “A Riveting Story” has Carrie having trouble with a giant box of rivets.
  • “Carl Wash” has Carl testing out a car wash he engineered.
  • “Mine All Mine” has chaos ensue when the crew clears out an old mine.
  • “Silencers Are Golden”... has nothing really to do with the plot of the episode, and doesn’t even make sense in general.
• Punny Name: Carrie carries things, while Maxine does a lot of mixing. Diggs is a "digger" and Lug "lugs" goods.
• Questioning Title?: “Who’s The Boss” and “What’s The Plan” have one, although their question marks are mysteriously absent.
• Read the Freaking Manual: The main conflict of “Look What I’ve Got” comes from the fact that Diggs threw away the instructions for his new attachment before finding out what it actually does.
• Real After All: The ending of “Mine All Mine” has the newer machines commenting on how the “mine monster sounds” don’t actually sound so bad once you know it’s just Maxine grinding… before realizing that Maxine isn’t grinding anything at the moment.
  Diggs, Scooch, & Carrie: Mine monsters! AAAAH!
  (They drive away as the camera flies into the darkness of the mine.)
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Despite their color palettes, Diggs serves as the firey and energetic red oni while Carrie is the calm and serious blue onion.
• Rhyming Names: The stunt-leaping truck from “If Trucks Could Fly” is called Dumper the Jumper.
• Rhyming Title: “Cool Fuel”. “Frozen Bozer” also almost rhymes.
• Rule of Seven: There are seven members of the construction crew the show follows.
• Selective Magnetism: When Carrie gets magnetized in one episode, nearby metal objects start displaying a tendency to ignore her magnetism for a random amount of time before suddenly remembering they’re supposed to be attracted to her and thus going flying towards her.
• Sentient Vehicle: Every character seen in the series is some sort of construction vehicle.
• Shout-Out:
  • Diggs' Catchphrase is "Top gear!".
  • The obligatory Superman reference is made in “Big Rig”.
  Bozer: Is it a bus? Is it a plane? No, it’s Big Rig! Rig of steel! He toots his horn at danger! Flashes his headlights at fear! You will believe a truck can- (sees Lug has arrived)
  • In “Idle Time”, Carrie says “I am Carrie, hear me rev!”, a reference to "I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)" by Helen Reddy.
  • In the musical number in “Every Dumper’s Dream”, Carl comments that Lug is pretty fly for a yellow guy.
  • “Going Solo” has a fake commercial for “Diggs, the one-machine construction site” in which Diggs, for no particular reason, recites a familiar “I’ll be back”. At the end of the episode, after Diggs has learned the value of teamwork, we get a redone version of the commercial where “the three-machine construction site” (Diggs, Scooch, and Carrie) give a resounding “We’ll be back!”
• Show Within a Show: One episode reveals that most of the characters are fans of a superhero truck called “Big Rig”; apparently, he has a woodchipper sidekick named Chips, his arch-enemy is the Abominable Snowplow, and one of his adventures is called Big Rig And The Raging Bulldozer.
• Snap Back: The rattle Carrie develops in “Testing Behavior” inexplicably vanishes at the end of the episode and is never heard again.
• Space Episode: “Star Truck” has Diggs, Scooch, and Carrie adventuring on the planet Zar and dealing with everything from meteors to fuel-sucking moon buggies, with the Framing Device of it being a story they’re making up to keep entertained on a rainy day.
• Stealth Insult: Diggs delivers one at the end of “Who’s The Boss”, after Carrie’s attempt to be boss for a day didn’t exactly work out very well.
  Diggs: Well, don’t worry. Whatever happens, you’ll always be the bossiest of us three.
  Scooch: Yes, that’s true.
  Carrie: Aww, thanks guys. (beat) Oy! Wait a minute!
• Stealth Pun: At one point in “A Good Mixer”, Diggs mentions that, when he gets excited, he backfires. By the end of the episode, he’s also realized that, when excited, he stops thinking through things- so he produces plans that backfire on themselves.
• Stock Aesops: “Cool Fuel” trots out that old “don’t feel bad about being different; if everyone were the same, the world would be a very boring place” message.
• Superstition Episode: “Big Bozer Is Watching” has Scooch convinced that he’s been cursed with bad luck after spilling salt grit.
• Team Mom: Maxine serves this role for the team, providing useful advice to the machines when needed and often looking out for the younger machines.
• Tempting Fate: This happens twice in quick succession in “Who’s The Boss”- first Carrie asks rhetorically how hard being the leader could be (as the rest of the episode shows: very hard), and then Diggs snarks that yes, Bozer will definitely let her take over for him if she just asks (which he does, as he needs to go offsite for a bit).
• That Reminds Me of a Song: This exchange from “Canival Capers”:
  Maxine: Oh, I don’t know what to say!
  Diggs: You don’t have to say anything, Maxine.
  Maxine: In that case… I’m gonna sing!
• Those Two Guys: Card and Lug are rarely seen apart from each other.
• Trivial Title: The title of “Emission Impossible” appears to stem from one scene of Skatch sneaking into the warehouse while wearing Cool Shades, which was an Imagine Spot by Diggs with very little bearing on the actual plot of the episode.
• Two Girls to a Team: Carrie and Maxine are the only female members of the main cast.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Diggs and Carrie spend a lot of episodes bickering or disagreeing with each other, but will always be there for each other when the other is in need.
• Vocal Dissonance: “Hi-Pitched Bozer” has Bozer suffering from this, as an engine servicing causes his normal deep, authoritative voice to be replaced by something that sounds like a baby chipmunk on helium.
• A Way Out of a Cave-In: When the titular mine of “Mine All Mine” collapses, Scooch ends up discovering that the “spooky tunnel” everyone had been avoiding was actually a way out (by realizing that the breeze coming from it had to be from the surface), and that the “mine monster sounds” that were coming from it were actually just the sound of Maxine’s mixer.
• Who's on First?:
  • This fouls up some of Maxine’s advice in “One Little Word”.
  Maxine: Scooch, there is a little word that would've saved you all this zooming!
  Scooch: Oh, tell me what the word is Maxine!
  Maxine: “No.”
  Scooch: Oh, please tell me, Maxine!
  Maxine: I said “No”.
  Scooch: Oh, why won’t you tell me?
  Maxine: I am telling you; the word is “no”!
  • At the end of “Fog”, Scooch says he really liked Diggs’ song, and, apparently not having picked up the title from the endless amount of times it was said in the lyrics, asked what it was called.
  Diggs: “Follow Me”!
  Scooch: Uh, yes, I will, but please tell me the name of your song first.
  Carrie: “Follow Me”
  Scooch: Um, I’ve said I’d follow Diggs, Carrie. (beat) Oh, why won’t you tell me the name of the song?
  Diggs & Carrie: “Follow Me”!
  Scooch: I can’t follow both of you!
  Diggs: Oh, Scooch…