Do Gooder Press

In case you haven’t seen it, there’s a trailer for a new Netflix series called The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and here it is:

It looks pretty good, and a lot more polished than the original film. I got a little Gerry Anderson vibe when the muppet touching the flower vibrated around when having her mind filled with “the darkening,” but that’s part of the package when using practical effects.

However, we’re probably in for some prequel-itis. While scientists haven’t completely mapped out this condition, prequel-itis has a few commonly noted symptoms:

• Everything looks far better than what’s supposed to come “after” the events of the “earlier” story. From ships predating the USS Enterprise having far more advanced equipment to lightsaber duels going (chronologically) from physics-defying ballet to two guys kind of standing around trying to hit each other with glowing sticks, most prequel media has this issue.

• We know what’s going to happen, eventually. Age of Resistance may have some interesting stories, but in the end it has to come down to two surviving Gelflings, Yoda Aughra, and ten Skeksis/Masters. This could be somewhat overcome if this prequel series lays the groundwork for something to come after the events of the movie, but that might be too much to expect. To use Star Wars as another example, the prequels had to end with all the Jedi gone, the Empire in place, and everyone who would appear in Episode IV ready to “resume” their roles that we’d already seen.

• And leading on from the previous two, one often has to ask “where is all this stuff I saw in the ‘earlier’ story?” Locations, macguffins, characters, and other signature parts of a prequel either need to predictably be setups for things in the media we’ve seen already, or their absence “later” has to make sense. This is often hand-waved if it means that characters we’ve come to like have to be killed off for the original movie to make sense, so they’re often said to be traveling, stuck somewhere off-camera, etc.

• Prequels can highlight (and create) flaws in the original movie. I’m going to pick on Star Wars again. Episode IV established how the Jedi Order had been around for a thousand generations, keeping the peace, being space wizards, etc. However, that legacy was apparently completely forgotten and relegated to fantasy by the galaxy at large in about 20 years or so. Many, many attempts to explain this have been made, but it’s still something that required that effort in the first place. True, The Dark Crystal doesn’t have such deep lore to keep in the forefront of its production, but the more complicated and rich a world a prequel makes only highlights its absence in the story that’s supposed to follow it.

All that said, I dug The Dark Crystal back in the day; If I can ever find it, I’ve got a box of trading cards somewhere that has a decent stack from the movie. I think the giant hermit-crab beasties are one of the greatest monsters of my childhood, and they had the perfect name: Garthim. The scene in the film where the Emperor dies still gives me chills. I really liked it and rented it several times on VHS (ask your parents what that was). I hope the series does the film justice.

That said, I’ve come to find a few nitpicks over the years: A review I heard many years ago that concluded The Dark Crystal would’ve been more engaging without the first five minutes where they basically gave away the plot. Now, we’ll have a series where we not only where it has to wind up, but we’ll likely have a lot of time spent telling us how it’ll turn out, which is something we already know. As it’s a prophecy, at least some time will have to be devoted to this in the Netflix show. I think that’s more to do with the problem one has when involving prophecies in the first place, and it might have had something to do with another bit of Dark Crystal trivia, making such blatant explanation of what you were about to see necessary:

A lot of the film was going to be in an alien language.

Henson wanted the Skesis to have their own tongue, so he commissioned a language for them to be created for the film. It didn’t do well with test audiences (hey, they can’t all be Klingon), so it was scrapped. The Podlings spoke Croatian, so it’ll be interesting to see if that sticks around. Anyway, with a lot of dialog requiring audiences to guess at what was being said, I figure the prophecy structure was probably a way to set up the plot so that if any details got lost in the lack-of-translation, it wouldn’t matter in the long run.

Anyway, I think I’d prefer it if this series included the story from The Dark Crystal as one of its seasons. Allow some of these new characters to play a role or even live through those events somehow, giving the fight to heal the crystal some more complexity and depth. Heck, if they wanted to really try for something ambitious, giving the crystal some kind of time-warping powers where events can be changed would work, provided the writers established the rules for it and stuck to them. Perhaps they’re considering something of this nature as Aughra says she sees “many endings,” so maybe there’s more going on under the hood than just “Skesis drain all but two Gelflings, journey of the hero(es) to follow.”

If you want to see some other trivia bits behind The Dark Crystal, Screenrant has twenty interesting facts regarding the film, what went into it, and its legacy. As for the show, all I want out of it right now is a toy of that Skeksis Batmobile we see at about 1:21 in the trailer. I’m also curious to find out if the makers of the Skydancers toys are going to be involved, seeing those creatures flying through the air at the twelve second mark.

I’d also take a plushie Garthim. Because reasons. 🙂