


In advance of the film’s release, Henson and Oz used interviews and TV appearances to prepare audiences for a film featuring no human characters, one darker and stranger than previous projects bearing the Henson name. Going a little bit further meant attempting feats never before realized with puppets, while staying true to the vision of the original film, a now-beloved classic that divided critics and met with tepid box office in December of 1982 - though not for a lack of effort on the part of its creators. “I actually knew what puppets could do,” he says. Leterrier, however, tells the story a little differently.
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“And then we figured out how to make it happen.” So he just said, ‘This is what the puppets will do.’ And we said, quietly to ourselves, ‘Puppets can’t do that.’” She pauses, then continues.
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“Louis had never shot puppets,” veteran puppeteer Alice Dinnean says, referring to series director Louis Leterrier, a veteran of action and fantasy films like The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk, and the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans. And filling a world with puppets takes a lot of work, as anyone involved with the project will tell you.

The Gelfling, however, is a CG effect, and while it wouldn’t look out of place in a different sort of fantasy film, it looks all wrong for Thra, the setting of both the Dark Crystal and its prequel. The Skeksi is a puppet, and its terrifying appearance will look familiar to fans of The Dark Crystal, a 1982 fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz to which the ten-episode Netflix series serves as a prequel. In a featured scene from a 2016 demo reel, a Skeksi, one of the series’ vulture-like ruling-class villains, menaces a Gelfing, one of its elfin good guys. Watch the informative documentary The Crystal Calls - Making The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which premiered on Netflix alongside the new series, and you’ll receive a striking glimpse of a road not traveled. To understand what Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is, it helps to first understand what it might have been. Artist Toby Froud, son of fantasy illustrator and original Dark Crystal collaborator Brian Froud, worked alongside his father to help expand Age of Resistance’s world of Thra.
