(upbeat music)
- I'm Elvis Mitchell,
and on this episode of "Deep Cuts"
the evolution of the Muppets,
from comedy material to something much more foreboding
and revolutionary.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Another world.
Another time in the age of wonder.
- The opening narration the 1982 fantasy film,
"The Dark Crystal" could be a description
of the kind of enchantment puppets draw upon.
In every culture,
from ancient Greece to the Edo society of Japan,
puppet theater allowed artists
to display the hunger of the id under a proscenium arch.
It's been a long road for puppets in America.
And they're chiefly recognized these days
as a brand name.
A brand name that straddled the line
between kids entertainment and sophistication
since their creation.
That name is The Muppets.
Jim Henson created a new type of creature choreography
when he brought his Muppets to TV,
combining the theatricality of vaudeville
and the intimacy of television
to make something wholly other.
Each iteration of the Muppets,
from appearances on old school variety shows,
to "Sesame Street," to "The Muppet Show,"
to "The Muppet Movie,"
was a step further in developing deeper,
richer scenarios.
Until finally, in 1982,
"The Dark Crystal" gave audiences a tableau
in which humans were supplanted by a world
made entirely of Jim Henson creations down to the plants.
His daughter, Lisa Henson, who now runs the Henson Company,
reflects on that.
- I remember my father was asked,
"Well what is the meaning of 'The Dark Crystal?'"
And he wouldn't even answer at all.
He would just be like,
"Oh, no, I don't wanna discuss what anything means.
"People should just watch it
"and feel the meaning for themselves."
I feel like we have to be wary of being pretentious,
particularly when we're doing puppet production.
People are, like, worried they're either gonna be
creepy and boorish or it's gonna be ridiculous and childish.
- Each iteration what they did with Muppets
was about sort of getting audiences to invest more,
and to sort of say, "Listen, this medium can offer
"as much of the human experience as live action can."
- Mm-hmm.
We have to be very careful about tone, you know?
We don't want to tell people this is an important show
because it's puppets.
They're gonna say things people can't say,
they can do things people can't do,
I mean, that's the whole point of "Punch and Judy."
Punch is doing incredibly awful things,
and people are just laughing watching it.
But if it was a person doing that whole routine,
you would be shocked by it.
(puppets squealing)
- Henson's ambition to innovate created worlds,
from appearances on "Sesame Street" to "The Muppet Show."
But the Muppets broke new ground with the little known
grim fantasy, "Land of Gorch" on "Saturday Night Live."
- There is a little bit of comedy,
but it's not, like, joke comedy.
That didn't work on "Saturday Night Live."
So it was sort of this brief thing that came and went.
But my father wanted to experiment
with other sorts of textures
and he started using sort of a much more realistic treatment
on the outside of the puppets,
they had glass eyes that were painted
to look more realistic.
You know, it wasn't just creating puppets
that were more believable
but also animating a whole environment.
Sculpting, casting, the plants, the rocks,
creating this idea that the whole environment
was alive.
- Still, seeing that world
and how much attention was paid to each aspect of it,
it's almost like his entire career
was building up a rehearsal for "The Dark Crystal"
in some way, wasn't it?
- He was tremendously curious about trying new things.
His desire to do something very different with puppetry
to create something more real, more authentic,
or maybe believable,
like you could look at it and say it's believable
in its own environment,
he kept that going after the failure
of "The Land of Gorch."
And after years and years of R and D,
and creative development
ultimately became "The Dark Crystal".
- That's always been the excitement,
that there's always been so much ambition in the Muppets,
in terms of just sort of pushing back boundaries
and making people think that you can offer
something more than what they were used to from puppets.
- Yeah, you know my father found "Dark Crystal" to be
both the most exciting thing that he did,
the most rewarding, but at the same time,
very challenging when he presented it to the public.
This is not what you except,
but you'll enjoy it.
Muppets and puppets don't have to be just one thing.
One important collaborator for my father was Brian Froud.
It was really when my father saw his artwork
that he thought that this is a kind of image
that I could bring to life in film.
That sort of fantasy landscape, the creature,
how it fits in the environment.
I think it was partially meeting Brian
and getting excited about that imagery
that ignited his creative juices
to start to put it all together like that.
And then we were lucky enough to have Brian Froud come back.
And that is our most important connection
to the past production on our new series.
So he and his wife, Wendy Froud,
who he met on the movie,
who designed the Gelfling characters,
they and their son, Toby Froud,
all worked on the show as our kinda main design team.
- [Elvis] For years there have been storied attempts
to revive "Dark Crystal,"
including a feature film followup
that would've been something a little different
from the original movie.
- I don't know if he knew, or if anybody knew,
that the movie would continue to have this cult status
that it had.
It's just like maintained its popularity for so many years,
and I think it's just because nobody ever tried
to do anything like it,
there were no copycat movies,
there's no faux "Dark Crystal."
Nobody even tried it. (Elvis laughs)
There's nothing.
- There was originally talk about this being
an animated series. - Mm-hmm.
- And then they came back and said,
"How about doing it in live action?"
- Actually we were pursuing parallel development
of a sequel film, which would be with puppets,
and then a prequel television series,
and that would've been animated.
So we were sort of thinking about that,
and presented that to Netflix.
And Ted Biaselli at Netflix was an advocate of that,
as well as everything "Dark Crystal."
He came back and said,
"Well I think I've got, I think, great news for you.
"We wanna do a series, 10 nearly hour long episodes,
"with puppets."
The idea of doing puppetry along the lines
of the feature film was gonna be a gigantic project
and a huge undertaking, and kind of expensive.
So we said, "Are you really aware what you're asking for?"
With "The Age of Resistance"
we've actually made it much bigger.
By going back to a prequel period of time,
we're showing a world where Thra is not all crumbling
and dark and decaying,
it's a much more vibrant, colorful world,
it's much more populous,
there's so many puppets.
- It was evident that all roads
would lead Henson back to "Dark Crystal,"
if only because it touched on material
that kind of a thematic legacy.
We go from each world being bigger and deeper
to the Muppet movies,
and actually having the characters ride bicycles,
and all that kind of stuff.
Kind of felt like what you guys were doing
was trying to train audiences to think of puppets
as more than just puppets.
- Yeah, the challenge with something like "Dark Crystal"
is for people to really suspend their disbelief,
more than when the Muppets interact with actors,
because, for instance,
if the Muppets are interacting with actors
you're well aware that they're not the same.
This is a person, this is a puppet.
But when you go into "The Dark Crystal" it's all puppets.
Our goal is for people to really suspend their disbelief
and kind of just go with it,
and maybe hopefully forget that they are puppets.
Now that we're blending the puppets with so much CG
in the backgrounds,
it's really, we hope, creating a very complex kind of image
where maybe your eye doesn't know exactly what it's seeing,
like, how much of that is puppetry,
how much of it is CG background,
how much is the real set?
And we don't want people to think about it.
But because it is a kind of a complex image
I think you will, hopefully, just get drawn into it,
and allowed to feel that it's real.
- Again, if we look at the beginning
of "The Dark Crystal" movie, it still sticks with me,
how subtly we're brought into the world.
It really takes its time.
- Part of it was also necessity.
The puppets had very little mobility.
The Mystics and the Skeksis characters
were hauling cables and people around,
and they had to be hidden under everything.
So one of the things we embraced right away
is that our characters can be more nimble.
Even the Skeksis can scuttle down a hall
whereas before the walked really, really slowly.
Just with some basic green screen removal
and puppeteer removal we were able to puppeteer
the puppets in all kinds of action chase scenes.
Fighting, flying, we've given them a kind of mobility
which was not possible at all back in the time
of the original films.
- With support, the idea of bringing "The Dark Crystal" back
was also the knowledge that so many people had grown up
with the film as a formative influence.
Percentage-wise, how much of the talent came to this project
having been huge fans of the original?
- 100% of everybody. (both laughing)
Everybody who worked on the show was a fan of the film.
Louis Leterrier, our director,
and Taron were sharing stories of how much
the movie terrified them when they were kids.
- I know that Taron Egerton is really invested in this.
- Well he came to us very, very early.
He loved "The Dark Crystal" so much,
and he loves puppets,
he really respected the art of the puppetry.
And he really understood also that performance
was ultimately going to be a collaboration
between the puppeteer and the voice artist.
The puppeteers are really actors.
All the subtlety that you see on screen
is from the puppeteer,
and then we had the voice cast people
who complimented that perfectly
and had the voiced character that we wanted.
Every voice is somebody amazing.
- Yes.
- And that actually is something we didn't entirely predict.
In fact, we originally planning just to have the,
maybe, lead five puppets be voiced by celebrities
and the rest would be voice artists.
But after we got Taron Egerton,
we started getting one more star, another star,
another star, and then suddenly we realized,
we gonna have a star play every role we think. (laughs)
It wasn't originally the intention.
Amongst the Gelfling we really went for British movie stars
and British performers
so that they feel they are of a culture together.
With the Skeksis we really just wanted to go big.
We have Awkwafina as a Skeksis,
we have Harvey Fierstein as a Skeksis.
Mark Hamill, his character of the Scientist,
is angry, is resentful, but he's also horrible,
and torturing.
We have the best of all "The Dark Crystal".
- Puppetry has met social turmoil with a response
tradition that Jim Henson follow,
perhaps even unconsciously,
and the newest edition of "Dark Crystal"
has allowed a chance to do that again.
Keeping the conversation alive
while constantly exploding the definition
of what puppetry is.
(dramatic music)