The 80's was a really great time for films and I say this primarily because of the fact that every blockbuster wasn't just a CGI-fest that is kind of all we ever see in big-budget films these days. I feel as though a lot of the artistic aspects of films are kind of gone now as the studios seem to be almost entirely focused on films that have 80% of the budget dedicated towards special effects and about 2% of it goes into actually have a story.
CGI wasn't really a thing in the early 80's and film makers had to be a lot more creative in order to make fantasy films seem realistic. This was especially daunting in films where literally no one in the film was human.
The Dark Crystal was one of those films and on a side note, it scared the crap out of me as a kid too!
Jim Henson and Frank Oz were well-known puppeteers and had created a very large world of unforgettable characters in the Muppets and also Sesame Street. They were not, however, terribly well-known for having a dark or even scary side to their characters and were more focused on children's entertainment.
This was a risky project for them but they were still able to secure $25 million for it which seems like peanuts in today's film budgets that routinely exceed hundreds of millions but trust me, for the time this was a lot of money with not much guarantee of return since they were not sure if the final product would be appropriate for children nor were they sure that adults were going to be open to the idea of an "adult" Muppet show production.
I don' t think I am in the minority when I say that I feel as though they definitely pulled it off even though after all expenses and advertising budgets are accounted for, it wasn't exactly a massive success at the box office. However, the merchandising and VHS and later DVD sales probably more than easily made a pretty hefty profit for Henson's production company and the film company that backed this project.
Now I don't want to spoil the film for anyone out there that hasn't seen it (and I strongly recommend that you do so) but there are some baddies in the film called the Skeksis that were borderline nightmare inducing for less-than-10-years-old me. I was already quite nightmare prone at that time in my life anyway and this almost certainly didn't help matters. The most terrifying one of these bad-boys was Chamberlain SkekSil who constantly would emit a "hmmmmm" sound that haunted my dreams. If I were to hear this sound in a dark hallway today, 40 years later, I would probably still be very afraid.
I didn't realize it at the time (nor did I care) but the filming of some of these scenes, particularly the action sequences, involved a tremendous amount of people and planning and the slightest mistake would result in needing to start back from the beginning. This must have been an extremely frustrating experience for all those that were involved.
The end result though was what I consider to be a masterpiece and something that at that point in time couldn't have been pulled off by any means other than puppets. Computers were a relatively new thing and they certainly weren't capable of pulling off this level of realism in any sort of CGI sense. That is exactly what makes it so special.
back in the 80's it was required to have a deep-voiced male narrate all movie trailers
I am actually quite stunned that this film managed to pull off a PG rating and there were a lot of parents that feel as though this film should have been rated at least PG-13. I know my parents regretted letting their kids see this as I relatively sure that all 4 of us probably kept them up at night with our night terrors that were brought on because of it.
Should I watch it?
This is a piece of history folks, not just an amazing fantasy film the likes of which the world had never seen before back in 1982. The undertaking was an amazing one and to this day it remains one of the most profitable puppet films of all time, ahead of even most of the Muppet's feature films.
It has some 80's charm to it that can't (or wont) be replicated in today's times and while it did inspire Netflix to make a 10 episode series using the same tactics, this was the first time anyone had ever seen anything like this. You might get bored at parts because it is a bit dated, but this was one of those films that really blew everyone's minds when it was released.