Throwing a puppet off a cliff is a lot harder than
you might expect. For the best part of 40 minutes,
a very focused puppeteer on the Langley Studios
set ofThe Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistancehas
been trying to lob a Gelfling, a small elf-like
creature, to his death, but the stupid doll refuses to
die properly. He hits a camera. He plops to earth
before making it to the edge of the cliff. He frisbees
off in completely the wrong direction. After
repeated resurrection, persistence pays off and the
Gelfling whizzes past the camera in just the right
way, plummeting to his end as intended, his
successful murder receiving a round of applause.
OnThe Dark Crystal, you keep going until things
work out. It took almost 40 years to get here and
nobody’s about to let an uncooperative Gelfling
keep it from crossing the line.
Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s 1982 movie
The Dark Crystalwas a mad idea. Henson was,
of course, the godfather of puppetry, but he was
known for funny puppetry, likeThe Muppetsand
Sesame Street.The Dark Crystal, a fantasy epic,
treated puppets as seriously as you would live
actors. Set in a magical land called Thra, it followed
the last two members of a once thriving race of
peaceful Gelfling as they tried to bring an end to
the evil reign of the Skeksis — monsters that
looked like the result of a horrific union between a
buzzard and an old crocodile, who derived their
power from a magic crystal. It was not a huge
box-office success, but was revered as a landmark
of puppetry and built a cult following over decades.
Rumours of a follow-up have materialised
and dematerialised for decades, but it’s only now,
37 years on, thatThe Dark Crystallives again, as
a 10-part Netflix prequel series. There were huge
obstacles to overcome on the way, but like a flung
Gelfling, the project simply refused to die.
ESCAPING DEVELOPMENT HELL
Age Of Resistanceisn’t the first attempt to make
aDark Crystalfollow-up. Not even close. Jim
Henson mulled a sequel for a while, making
notes about where the story might go, though he
never seriously pursued it. It’s his daughter Lisa
who’s been trying to get something off the
ground for well over a decade. Standing in the
middle of one of the show’s enormous sets,
Henson cannot quite believe she’s finally here.
“Every project that’s been around this long
has war stories,” she says, “It’s honestly hard for
me to say how many years we’ve been [working
toward this].” Jim Henson, who died in 1990,
left some notes about a continuation of the
story, which his daughter found in the company
archives, and used as the basis for a sequel script.
In early 2006, it looked like a sequel was actually
happening. Genndy Tartakovsky was announced
as the director for ‘Power Of The Dark Crystal’,
a sequel set hundreds of years after the events of
the first film. It was to be a mixture of puppetry
and CGI (one of the lead characters was a girl
made of fire). It got stuck in development hell,
shedding Tartakovsky and then hiring and losing
a succession of directors. About eight years ago,
Henson started working on that idea with Louis
Leterrier (Clash Of The Titans,The Incredible
Hulk). “We worked with Louis on the sequel film
for a few years, but we never had exactly the right
script and we didn’t have funding,” says Henson.
At the same time as the film was being
developed, there was also work happening on
a CG prequel series, modelled on the mythic
television seriesThe Last Airbender(it’s much
better than the terrible movie). Neither was
going anywhere fast until the advent of Netflix,
which had the resources to take risks on projects
that were too much of a gamble for moviestudios or traditionally funded TV channels.
“When Netflix came along, we combined
our feature development and our series
development and shelved the movie,” says
Henson (the script for ‘Power Of The Dark
Crystal’ was turned into a comic-book series).
Getting the TV show greenlit was not the
long-awaited happy ending, just the beginning
of the second act. Now they had to get the
damn thing made.EMBRACING THE DARKNESS
“We have a mantra in the writers’ room,” says
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, one ofAge Of
Resistance’s core writing team. “‘This ain’t The
Happy Crystal.’” For a PG movie,The Dark
Crystalwas, well, very very dark. Anyone who
saw it as a child probably still can’t shift the
nightmarish image of a Podling rapidly
desiccating as he was drained of his ‘essence’ to
create a youth potion for the Skeksis. Grillo-
Marxuach and the writing team of Jeffrey Addiss
and Will Matthews were given the difficult taskClockwise from
here:Director
Louis Leterrier
with Skeksis
The General;
Toby Froud at
work — he is the
son of original
Dark Crystal
puppet creators
Brian and Wendy;
Lead puppeteer
Beccy Henderson
brings life to
Deet; Froud
finessing his
creations.