Re-live old childhood traumas with the new Dark Crystal.
The Netflix revival of Jim Henson’s muppety movie is going to be more adult than you think
NOW THAT Game Of Thrones has finished, there’s a big hole in the TV landscape. where to go now for a hit of sprawling, sword-andsorcery fantasy? we’ve got at least two years to wait for Amazon’s megabucks Lord Of The Rings series, which means your next obsession could come from a very unlikely place: a prequel to a 37-year-old movie with a cast of puppets.
when it was released in 1982, Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s The Dark Crystal was groundbreaking. A landmark in the art of puppetry, it told the story of the land of Thra, where a group of evil bird-like creatures called Skeksis had used a magic gem to help seize tyrannical control, obliterating the peaceful elf-like Gelfling race. Anyone unfamiliar with it might dismiss this as a children’s movie, because of the puppets, but that would be like dismissing Toy Story or Inside Out because they’re animated.
Netflix’ new prequel series, Age Of Resistance,
will show just how rich the
Dark Crystal world is and just how appealing it can be for adult viewers in a post-got world. All being well, the initial 10 episodes should be just the beginning. The Dark Crystal
world — there are various expanded-universe comics and novels — is so massive it could carry on indefinitely.
“The beauty of what
[The Dark Crystal movie directors] Jim Henson and Frank Oz created was this huge world and a sense that it has history,” says series director Louis Leterrier. “You’re told [the Gelflings] existed for millennia and the two in the movie are the last two of their kind. what happened to their civilisation? I had so many questions after I saw it for the first time as a kid.” Attempting to answer those questions, the show will take place around 1,000 years before the movie, following the rise of the Skeksis and the journey of three Gelflings trying to save their peaceful world from ruin.
Indicative of the extent to which this series is going to mine a deeper, more complex level of Dark Crystal mythology, one of
the writers shaping the show is Javier Grillomarxuach, who was a writer/producer on Lost in its early seasons. In addition, Leterrier is also well aware that he can’t bank on us all being familiar with the original, so will need to win us over. His plan is to do that with the most spectacular puppet project ever seen, with giant battles, an enormous world and a cast of hundreds, all using barely a lick of CGI.
“Even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s still really exciting,” says Leterrier. “We are throwing everything at this. Nobody’s fooled by CG any more. We know when something is CG. Puppets, we know someone had to [work them]… And we’re pushing puppeteering beyond anything anyone has done before.” If he achieves his aim, we should all be so caught up in the lavish spectacle and the complexities of the storytelling that we forget we’re watching characters that have all got someone’s hand up their butt.