Jul 14, 2018

Crystal shard

If you've got some time to kill and you're looking for something wacky to watch, check out the original edit of The Dark Crystal. It's the workprint, so it's in black and white and missing the special effects.

What makes it worthwhile is that it shows Jim Henson's original intentions for the film. In this version, each species in the movie speaks it's own made-up language. The only English spoken is when the main characters, the Gelflings, are speaking or when multilingual characters are talking to Gelflings.

It's like watching a nature documentary from another planet. It's refreshing to see popular science fiction that doesn't include some sort of translation device to explain away why everyone in the universe speaks English.

Henson was sure that audiences would understand what was going on despite the language barrier, but the audience he showed it to felt excluded. So new dialogue was written to match the mouth movements and characters were re-dubbed to speak English in the theatrical version.

There are some additional scenes that make this version a little darker. In any edit, my trouble with The Dark Crystal is that the main character looks like a doll. Of course it is a doll, but I think as a puppet representing a living creature, Jen is the least convincing in the movie. Maybe they'll fix that in the new series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.