The Dark Crystal prequel takes us back to planet Thra
SLOUGH, ENGLAND — “We’re sure we’re doing something that no one else is doing,” Lisa Henson said last August.
She was in a conference room in the newly opened studio complex, just outside London, that served as the home of Netflix’s ambitious prequel series “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.” The walls were papered with maps, photographs and sketches, and the table was laden with a plastic diorama of a mythical city. Just down the corridor, 48 puppeteers were gathering: a core team of 12 and an extra 36 brought in for the day’s shooting. “It’s the biggest puppet production ever mounted,” Henson said.
That’s a difficult claim to factcheck, but if anyone would know, she would. As the daughter of Muppet impresario Jim Henson and as the chief executive of the entertainment company he founded, she has been around more puppet extravaganzas than most people, including “Sesame Street,” “The Muppet Show,” “Fraggle Rock,” “Labyrinth” and more.
The most ambitious of these was the gloomy New-Age fantasy saga “The Dark Crystal,” from 1982. Directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the film was — in more ways than one — a world away from “Sesame Street.” One of the few live-action films to have no flesh-and-blood beings onscreen, it played like a cross between “Star Wars” and “The Hobbit” as it ranged across the planet of Thra, with its forests of sentient flora and its cackling, vulturelike Skeksis rulers. The darker facets of “The Dark Crystal” may have given nightmares to young viewers expecting something closer to Bert and Ernie, but the film’s scope and elaborate visuals remain impressive more than three decades later. Henson, who died in 1990, called it his proudest achievement.
“The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” now streaming on Netflix, is built on an even grander scale. A 10-part series, it includes 180 puppet characters, 90 sets and 10,000 lines of dialogue voiced by an all-star cast that includes Mark Hamill, Helena Bonham Carter, Andy Samberg, Simon Pegg and Keegan-Michael Key. The grotesque Skeksis, the gentle Gelflings and the potato-faced Podlings will be familiar to anyone who has seen the film, but the series is new territory for everyone involved, including the viewer.
“What’s it like to watch 10 hours of something and it’s liveaction and there are no humans in it?” asked Jeff Addiss, an executive producer and one of two head writers (with Will Matthews), on set in August 2018. “We’re going to find out.”
All 10 episodes were directed by French director Louis Leterrier, a longtime Henson fan whose films include Marvel’s “The Incredible Hulk” and the 2010 remake of “Clash of the Titans.” When Leterrier first came to Hollywood, his agent asked him whom he would like to meet in the American film industry.
“I told him there’s just one company,” Leterrier said. “It’s the Hensons. I was in awe of them.”
Lisa Henson, in turn, invited Leterrier to help with various “Dark Crystal” film and series concepts she had been trying to develop.
Her father, she noted, had worked on developing the film for “an exceptionally long time, so the world had a reality and a mythology to it that were comparable to places like Middle-earth and Westeros.”
They ended up with a twopronged project: Leterrier, desperate to work with puppets, was to direct a live-action sequel for the big screen while an animated television series was to tell the tale of how Thra’s peaceful, matriarchal civilization had crumbled in the first place, leaving behind the wasteland depicted in the film.
Unsurprisingly, Hollywood studios didn’t fall over themselves to bankroll a cartoon about genocide and ecological catastrophe. “Everyone was scared of it,” Leterrier said.
But Netflix was interested, Henson said, because it was looking for something children and parents could watch together. So the two projects were combined into one live-action prequel TV series, to be made by Leterrier in “the most complicated way possible,” he said.
In short: forget animation, bring back the puppets.
Henson’s next call was to Brian Froud, a British artist who had been the conceptual designer on the original film. Back in the 1970s, Jim Henson had admired Froud’s richly textured illustrations of woodland trolls and goblins (perhaps the soft, rounded faces struck a chord with the creator of the Muppets). They went on to collaborate on “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth” (1986). Froud also met his wife, American puppet builder Wendy Froud (then Wendy Midener), in Henson’s studios. Their son, Toby, played the baby who was abducted by David Bowie’s goblin king in “Labyrinth.”
All three Frouds worked on “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” with Toby serving as the design supervisor in the production’s “Creature Shop.” As he guided visitors around the menagerie of phenomenally detailed and spookily lifelike latex creations last August, his parents sat on opposite sides of a table, Wendy gluing feathers onto a puppet’s head and Brian drawing runes in a notepad.
“We thought we were done 30 years ago, or whenever it was,” Brian Froud said, “and now here we are again.”