#The dark crystal age of resistance cast series

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is set on Thra many years before the events of The Dark Crystal.

#The dark crystal age of resistance cast series

How does the new Netflix series relate to the film? (CGI was used to enhance some scenes or erase puppeteers from the shots.) The sprawling and intricate craftwork added up to “the biggest puppet production ever mounted,” according to Lisa Henson, who is the chief executive of the Jim Henson Company. They aimed not to use new computer technology, but instead build and paint all the puppets and sets by hand. “Everyone was scared of it,” the director, Louis Leterrier, told The New York Times this year.īut in 2017, Leterrier and the Jim Henson Company joined forces with Netflix for a prequel based on the extensive notes that Henson and Odell had left behind for the original film. But that film became stuck in development hell and was ultimately scrapped. In the mid-2000s, more than a decade after Henson’s death, the film’s screenwriter, David Odell, began work on a script for a sequel. And while it received mixed reviews, it had an outsize impact on many artists, including Guillermo del Toro and David Bowie.Īt the time of its release, Henson was open to expanding the world of The Dark Crystal: “I think we could set another story in the same world, but we probably wouldn’t necessarily use the same characters,” he said in the same 1982 interview. The film was billed as the first live-action film to feature just puppets and no humans. and Yoda, wherein you’re trying to create something that people will actually believe,” Henson said in a 1982 interview. Some puppets were radio-controlled, while the hulking Skeksis were controlled by six puppeteers each. Henson and his team took five years to make the movie, employing cutting-edge puppetry design and technology. While the Muppets are cartoonish and stylized, the world of Thra is incredibly lifelike. Those would become The Muppets Take Manhattan and The Great Muppet Caper. According to Henson’s daughter Lisa, he was told that he could only make The Dark Crystal if he also made two bankable Muppet films. While Henson threw himself into the project, producers and financiers were skeptical about its marketability. But one young Gelfling, Jen, escapes the Skeksis’ grasp, and embarks on a hero’s journey to end their reign. On the planet Thra, the conniving birdlike Skeksis seek to maintain control over the rest of the kingdom due to a foreboding prophecy, they massacre the altruistic, elf-like Gelflings one by one. After meeting, the pair began work on a story that would resemble Lord of the Rings in scale and tone.

In 1976, Henson had come across the work of illustrator Brian Froud, who was known for his vivid and sinister creations of fantastical creatures. “He thought it was fine to scare children.” “What Jim wanted to do, and it was totally his vision, was to get back to the darkness of the original Grimms’ fairy tales,” Frank Oz, the film’s co-director, told SFGate in 2007. But in the late ’70s he dreamed of creating a world much different from their amiable slapstick chaos. At that time, Henson was at the height of his career and churning out hugely popular television shows and films centered on Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppet gang. The Dark Crystal is a 1982 film conceived by Jim Henson, the inexhaustible creator of The Muppets. Before you dive into Dark Crystal, here’s what to know about its history and fictional universe.