“These were the things that 37 years ago Jim
Henson was worried about and was talking
about. Now more than ever, it’s in the forefront
of the news,” said Leterrier. “I guess that’s also
why this movie stayed close to my heart — the
stakes felt real.”
Netflix bankrolled a test to see how the series
would look and that six-month process of
building sets and characters became a puppet
school for Leterrier. “I mean, it’s not like I’m
casting Brad Pitt. I have to create Brad Pitt,” he
said, laughing.
Leterrier also visited some original “Dark Crystal”
puppets at the Center for Puppetry Arts in
Atlanta to see how they moved — piano wire
over wooden skeletons. This time, the puppets
are lighter but the workload was bigger. To fill
10 hours, the series features 75 sets and 170
puppets, some of which took eight months to
build. There’s even a puppet show within the
puppet show.
The new and the old “Dark Crystal” projects
actually share DNA. Brian Froud, the conceptual
artist for the 1982 film and his puppet-builder
wife, Wendy, both worked on the new series.
Their son, Toby, is the design supervisor. (He
was the baby abducted by David Bowie in
Henson’s “Labyrinth.”)
Lisa Henson said the creators tried to keep two
different audiences happy: “Both the people
who loved ‘The Dark Crystal’ and for whom it is
a very special memory and those who’ve never
heard of ‘The Dark Crystal’ and couldn’t imagine
that they would watch 10 hours of puppets on
television,” she said, adding: “We went back and
forth between those two mind-sets to think
about those audiences while we were making
the show.”
nora
(Nora)
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