Hacker Cinema
The Dark Crystal
1982 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Frank Oz, Jim Henson
On another planet in the distant past, a Gelfling embarks on a quest to find the missing shard of a magical crystal and restore order to his world, before the grotesque race of Skeksis find and use the crystal for evil.
8 positive2 mixed11 neutralfrom 21 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
22 comments on Hacker News
I don't know much about the movie industry, but I think the biggest commercial successes for early CGI was possibly Jurassic Park? I don't think it would have been nearly as good if it had all just been done with puppets.
Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.
Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).
I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?
There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.
If you want to watch it:
https://archive.org/details/the-dark-crystal-a.-o.-r.-episode-01/the+dark+crystal+A.O.R.+episode+01.mp4
I think plans for a Dark Crystal sequel were stuck in development hell for decades and then Jim Henson died. It was actually announced in 2005 but never got made into a film. Think there was a comic series though.
Also, can't help pointing to this Robot Chicken gem: The Dark Cristal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RudzOqb-fRc
I do not agree w/ this in relation to the Dark Crystal series. But I see parallels in the Star Wars series Andor. Many will skip it because 'it's star wars', but it's a great series in star wars costume. The three people I've pressed into watching it came away with very favorable reviews.
There are some kinda deep cut star wars references that non-fans will miss. Mon Mothma the political head of the rebellion is seen only sparingly in the original trilogy and in rogue one (scenes were shot for her in the prequels setting her up as politically aligned with Padme and Bail, but they were cut) is a main character here. Other characters like Saw Gererra only appear in the clone wars series and Rogue One (a film for which this series is a prequel). However this didn't seem to effect my friends much only one of whom had even seen rogue one and the prequels, the other two only having seen the original series.
I'm so glad that it got a second season and am very excited to see it play out.
I love the film. The film is a real masterpiece.
I'm struggling to get through the series. That ultra clunky opening narration is not a great sign and the world building and underlying plot feels shallow in the series.
I'd LOVE for more Dark Crystal content but I would like them to start over...
Perhaps they learnt the word "shard", like I did, from the movie The Dark Crystal (1982), which is also in the Fantasy genre.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083791/
Apropos the first examples given in TFA, I have a friend who worked at Oxford Scientific Films, back in the '70s and' 80s. When Jim Henson wanted to make a Serious Movie, with puppets, he hired OSF (or artists from - I don't know the exact business arrangement) to build the sets. They had experience with natural materials, which Henson wanted precisely because of their fractal detail. My friend has a credit somewhere towards the end of the reel on Dark Crystal, which I thought was cooler than he did when he told me.
>I am genuinely curious to hear where in the day to day of the tech industry you'd draw parallels to puppetry.
The line you're replying to is more general purpose (puppetry as a vehicle for storytelling in television, movies, theater, parties, festivals, concerts, one-on-one conversation, etc.) however to address your curiosity, a few thoughts since I'm between meetings:
Puppetry involves problem solving and story telling. Maybe we start off with the idea of bringing the novel War Horse to stage - you can't teach a horse to act, so you've got to do puppetry.
You choose a framework: is it shadow puppetry? Rod puppets? Marionettes? Bunraku? Hand puppets don't scale, you're not going to do that. The technology you choose will shape the end result, and it's tempting to go with something flashy and huge, but a seasoned puppeteer can make you cry just by using a sock on their hand.
(see also: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/news/war-horse)
Some styles of puppetry are going to need more skill in manipulation or crafting than others, which is going to affect what hiring looks like, and what training looks like. Some of the easier styles of puppetry are more popular, and certainly work on smaller projects like a puppet slam - but won't be as effective at getting results on a large scale production.
Putting on a puppet show involves project management and collaboration. Depending on the size of the production, it could be a one-person show, although even those often have one or two people helping to run, for example, light and sound cues. A larger scale production could have a director, a writer, multiple crafters, multiple manipulators, a project manager... These are almost direct analogies to PMs, engineers, developers, department directors.
Projects can be small scale - a more personal puppet slam piece performed in front of an audience of 50, and a talking monstrosity of a cake as part of a Saturday Night Live set piece might involve similar amounts of work, but one's going to pay better than the other. On the far end of the spectrum, you have projects like The Dark Crystal series on Netflix - which is analogous to an enterprise project. Multiple systems operating together, up against tight deadlines while simultaneously taking years to complete, compromises are made that few who see the end result will ever see or recognize...
And in both tech and puppetry, a lot of the people who put in the hard work never get recognized :D
By the year 1998 I was using the term "shard" in slides for MySQL, and I believe mSQL as well. The term might be found in Slashdot's source code. I am pretty sure I gave a talk on sharding at the open database summit in 2001.
I had previously used the term shard for an app I wrote and distributed for VMS around '92, but that app only ever had a handful of users. It was available via FTP.
FWIW I took the term from the movie "The Dark Crystal".
>Art and entertainment hinges on novelty and message.
Does it? Show me something truly novel either in terms of art or message created by Hollywood in the last decade. Art and entertainment are risk averse industries - novelty is risk, genre is safe, and within genre you have well defined aesthetics, themes and material from which to derive new iterations on a theme.
The mashups in the blog posted upthread (particularly the Giger/Henson posts[0]) look far more visually striking to me than most modern sci-fi. I want to see that movie based on the look alone, and the look is literally just "what if Dark Crystal, but xenomorphs?"
For these particular services I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
is more like it. That is, a Raspberry Pi is a much more powerful computer than the IBM 360/75 that planned the moon mission and costs orders of magnitude less but there has been no productivity improvement for baseball players.
Movies are an entirely business than they were back in the day. I remember Ghostbusters being in the theater for more than a year, and back then there were not just the first-run theaters that charged full price but many second-run theaters that had cut-rate double features (I remember seeing one of Gremlins and The Dark Crystal)
Today home video "competes" with theaters in some sense, a month of Netflix costs less than one movie ticket but the consequence isn't downward price pressures on theaters but exactly the opposite because home video demolished the second-run theaters leaving the first-run theaters to go on their own trajectory.
(And as for TV sets and things to plug into TV sets... Today's TV offers better quality than was imaginable in the 1960s and is cheap in comparison. It's astonishing what people spent for old game consoles like the Atari 2600, what a VCR and tapes cost in 1980, ...)
(Not the OP)
I can’t say it was ground breaking, as I was a kid at the time, but it was one of the great movies of my childhood. I remember watching it many times over. I do remember the characters seeming less real, and I still knew they were puppets. But this was also the era of Sesame Street, so a movie by Jim Henson that had puppets was kinda normal. I think the fact that my parents talked about it so highly probably answers your question more — it was something adults appreciated. Ultimately, to me, the Dark Crystal wasn’t a great movie because I feel the story was there to service the technique, even if the technique was masterfully used. Maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it.
Tron was much the same. At the time, you knew it wasn’t great, but it was still new. Like the targeting computer CGI for the Star Wars trench run, the effects weren’t great. Even at the time, it was a little spartan. But the effects moved the story, and worked well enough to not be a distraction (and you had never seen anything like it before). Tron was just as much about what it foretold as much as the CGI that was available at the time. But in contrast to the Dark Crystal, I liked the story behind Tron more.
I would say that both were groundbreaking for how they pushed techniques of movie making forward. The world creation in both were amazing and they both set a new bar for future movies to meet.
Watership Down and the Secret of Nimh were my two favorite movies as a young child in the early 80s, followed closely by the Dark Crystal and maybe Aristocats and the Black Hole.
Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
Was born in 1973 and grew up in the Redwoods of Northern California, near what would eventually become Silicon Valley.
In that place and time, the 80's were mostly a very fun and exciting bunch of years to be a child, with the crazy hippie 60's/70's mentality of the adults crossing over into a new "cleaner" era of exploding fresh technology and intelligent comic vision.
Records became cassettes. Being able to record our own sounds and listen to music on mobile devices for the very first time was totally amazing. The first personal computers arrived, which were equally incredible, although quite mysterious and complex.
Atari 2600 and the video game revolution hit, with all of us hooking up our new joystick machines to parents big Zenith televisions, while dumping quarters into arcades.
The arrival of the VCR was a breakthrough in being able to watch movies at home, GOOD movies such as Star Wars, Breakfast Club, Blade Runner, Dark Crystal and countless other great films from the time, many of which we saw in theater.
Really cool new music was coming out regularly, from bands like Depeche Mode and Oingo Boingo. MTV arrived and was extremely bizarre and brilliant, at first.
The environment was less toxic and people were far less paranoid in general. We spent endless sunny days riding bikes, swimming in rivers, climbing trees, building forts, go-carts, and causing silly mischief, without any threat of watching cameras. We could make prank phone calls in the middle of the night without any worry about "Caller ID." ;)
We were afraid of the "nuclear war" propaganda constantly pouring out of the 3 mainstream TV channels (PBS was relaxing) and some young friends committed suicide. Yet, the Space Shuttle launches were inspiring and we felt that America was genuinely dedicated to freedom, democracy, and justice. This illusion was eventually crushed, for me.
The 80's officially died in a wave of hip-hop, rap, awful "butt rock," bad films, and a sudden appreciation for general stupidity. The inspiring momentum of what felt like a positive movement seemed to fall apart suddenly with corporate consolidation of media, commercialization of everything, and a darker, harsher, lifeless cultural attitude.
Been missing that bright 80's era, ever since.
The Dark Crystal is also a trope-laden, cheesy (though critically acclaimed) puppet-action fantasy movie from 1982, whose making involved Jim Henson (of The Muppet Show fame).
One horcrux-like trope central to the plot is that a missing shard from a crystal (the Crystal of Truth) must be found and reunited with the crystal to put the broken world back in order again.
The name is an allusion to a children's movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Crystal
There's also a cult classic movie called Dark Crystal: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083791/
I actually wouldn't be surprised if this project was named after that movie as their project logo looks similar to the crystal in that movie (but that could just be coincidental).
I watch tv shows more than pretty much anyone I know and lately I don't even bother watching a show unless it already has several seasons. So this is a terrible business decision. I mean there's a reason "binging" because a phenomenon. I'm not going to binge a show with one season.
Worst news I got from this article was that The Dark Crystal got cancelled. I was looking forward to more shows so I could check it out, guess I never will now.
RIP season 2 of The Dark Crystal. Netflix axed it.
I thought it was a brilliant revamp and collaboration in between Netflix and the Henson group. It even won an Emmy.
I also loved that show (as well as the movie which I've watched a few times since I saw it as a kid).
The thing with Dark Crystal--aside from the impressive nature of all the puppetry and design--is that there's still a lot of story to tell in that world.
The movie was more like The Hobbit in a sense. Great world building without spelling everything out, simple quest, interesting characters, etc.
But there is apparently a lot of other material which has only been explored in stories and comics so far and it leaves room to build on what the movie started.
Even knowing the "ending" due to seeing the movie, I enjoyed the show and am eager to see if Netflix shells out for a continuation. The end may be the beginning, but it's really not all the same ;)
I feel you, it is often annoying. Not saying I really want to see an Alf movie, but every now and then the nostalgic remakes really knock one out of the park.
The recent example that makes me say this is the new 'Dark Crystal' series on Netflix (coincidentally also puppets haha). The original movie was berried so deep in my brain I had all but forgotten it. Then I saw the previews and it all came rushing back.
I think they did a wonderful job capturing the essence of the original. I found it very entertaining & we binged through all 10 episodes. I highly recommend!
Watership Down, Secret of Nimh, and The Dark Crystal were probably the most influential films of my childhood. It would be a terrible loss for any of them to be recategorized away from children.