The Monstrefact Omnibus: Jim Henson Roundup

In this special omnibus episode of The Monstrefact, Robert discusses several creatures from the imagined worlds of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and "The Dark Crystal."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The
Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your
Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
This is going to be an omnibus episode of The
Monster Fact. This is where we take past entries and
we cobble them all together, collect them because they're related works.
All of these episodes are going to relate to the

(00:31):
works of Jim Henson. They're going to deal with creatures
from Labyrinth, and they're going to deal with creatures from
The Dark Crystal. So let's actually begin with Labyrinth. Let's
start with an episode on The Four Guards of Labyrinth.
One of my favorite films of all time is easily

(00:52):
the 1986 fantasy musical Labyrinth. a movie that summons the
combined creative talents of Jim Henson, Brian Froud, Terry Jones,
David Bowie, and composer Trevor Jones, just to name a few.
While its predecessor, the 1982 film The Dark Crystal, took
its fantasy world creation incredibly seriously, Labyrinth leans more into

(01:16):
pure musical fun and Python-esque absurdity. There's a lot of
this flavor to discuss in Labyrinth, but I wanted to
talk specifically about the four guards that Sarah encounters as
she makes her way across the Goblin King's Labyrinth. They
are dog-like humanoid creatures that guard a pair of doors.

(01:37):
They are either conjoined beings, and therefore two guards, or
they are affixed behind their signature shields in a way
that allow for two beings per shield. They're Absurd appearance
is of course linked to their visual resemblance to double-headed
European playing cards in which a king, queen, jack, or
joker is double-bodied and double-headed in such a way that

(01:59):
the card can be discernible from either side of the table.
According to S.T. Binday and the excellent Labyrinth Bestiary, the
heads of the left door guardian are Alf and Jim,
while the heads of the right door are Ralph and Tim.
When Sarah encounters the guardians, she quickly learns the rules
concerning their doors. One door leads to the castle at

(02:24):
the center of the labyrinth, where, of course, Sarah is
trying to go in order to rescue her stepbrother Toby,
while the other door leads to certain death. The lower
heads have no idea which door is which, but the
upper heads do. But Sarah is only permitted to ask

(02:45):
one of them. Furthermore, one of the two guards always
tells the truth, while the other one always lies. So
Sarah faces a conundrum. How can she find out which
door is which? How can she risk asking the wrong
guard and being lied to? The scenario instantly invokes what
is known as the liar's paradox. If a liar tells

(03:06):
you they are lying, well, then they are telling the truth.
Consider the statement, quote, This sentence is a lie, unquote.
If that statement is true, then it's false. If it's false,
then it's true. Oh my. Sarah, of course, is a
bright young woman and makes short work of the guardians
and their attempts to confuse her. As John Turi points

(03:27):
out in the paper, objective falsity is essential to lying,
an argument from Convergent Evidence published in Philosophy Studies in 2021.
She engages in what is called answer laundering. If Sarah
simply asked one of the guards which door was which,
then it might be a true or untrue statement that
she gets in return, and her chances, therefore, are no

(03:49):
better than simply picking a door at random. Instead, she
launders one answer through another. Turi explains, by asking one
guard whether the other guard would say that this door
leads to success, Sarah deduced the correct one. Either she
gets the truth about a lie or a lie about
the truth. Whenever she is told yes, the correct answer

(04:12):
is no. And whenever she is told no, the correct
answer is yes. The truth and the lie dependably cancel
each other out in this scenario, provided, Turi stresses, that
lies cannot be true. Turi points out that the Riddle
of the Four Guards is a variant of the Knights
and Knaves logic puzzle from Raymond Smolian's 1978 publication, What

(04:36):
is the Name of This Book?, The scenario in the
book that closely resembles the scene from Labyrinth involves a
knight and a knave, otherwise indistinguishable, who guard a fork
in the road. Which road do you take? Dare you
ask these two men, given that one is secretly a
noble knight and the other secretly a vile knave? Only
one of them is going to give you a good answer.

(04:57):
The other one is going to lie to you. The solution, again,
comes via answer laundering. Ask which path the other individual
would say is the correct one. So this is how
the four guards of Labyrinth work. Unless I am lying,
which I am not. All right, let's keep the Labyrinth

(05:19):
fires burning with the fireys of Labyrinth. I know you
remember these guys. Once more, we return to the rich
magical world of Jim Henson's 1986 classic Labyrinth. having previously
covered two other of its creatures here on The Monster
Fact and the film itself on Weird House Cinema. Today,

(05:42):
I want to talk about the most terrifying denizens of
the Goblin King's Labyrinth, creatures that have unsettled children for
almost four decades now, the Fieries of the Fire Gang.
You remember them. Do not tell me that you don't,
because I know even now you're picturing their lanky, vulture-like

(06:02):
bodies their huge ears, their bright red and orange fur,
and those piercing mad eyes. The Labyrinth Bestiary by S.T. Bende,
with illustrations by Iris Complete, devotes no fewer than eight
pages to illustrations of the Fieries, along with notations that
describe them as chaotic, unhinged, good-natured troublemakers. And that is

(06:26):
essentially correct, but Bende also points out that, quote, Anyone
adverse to combustion, disorder, and the possibility of dismemberment is
advised to steer clear of their revelry. Yes, because for starters,
the Fieries are so named not only for their brilliant
flame-like colorization, but also for their innate pyrokinetic abilities. And

(06:49):
even more terrifying, they possess the ability to detach and
reattach their own limbs and heads at will. They can
also remove their own eyeballs, roll them as dice, and
then swallow them in order to return their eyeballs to
their sockets. But all of this reaches a fever pitch
when these inhuman hedonists engage in what I can only
describe as a dismemberment party. Fireys will dance around a

(07:13):
great fire and pull themselves apart with gleeful enthusiasm. They'll
employ their disembodied legs and heads as clubs and balls
in morbid games of croquet. They will even swap body parts,
with each other and reconstitute themselves into multi-limbed forms that
cavort through the forest. The only rule they keep is

(07:34):
thou shalt only throw thine own head. And all that
is well and good for the Fieries, except as we
see in Labyrinth, they can scarcely comprehend beings that don't
have these strange powers of bloodless living dismemberment and instant regrafting.
We're to understand that many an outsider guest to their
festivities winds up as a pile of body parts that

(07:56):
puzzlingly refuse to graft back together. Way to kill the vibe, and, well,
also the guest. But it's a detail I always appreciated.
The fireys are indeed good-time party creatures, but their inability
to understand other beings makes them a very dangerous encounter
in the world of Labyrinth. Naturally, we don't have anything

(08:16):
quite like the fireys in the natural world. Certainly, we
have some amazing examples of regeneration, from sea stars and
sea cucumbers to the axolotl, but they regrow, they don't reattach.
Humans alone have developed the medical knowledge of limb reattachment,
and even this has its limits and, in the best
of cases, is far from instantaneous. And as for the

(08:38):
grafting of another's individual limbs onto your body, and even
the xenotissue of other organisms such as pigs, humans face
severe limitations due to the body's autoimmune response to transplanted limbs, tissues,
and organs. This generally requires the use of immunosuppressive medication
to prevent rejection of the donor limb tissue or organ,

(09:01):
but the lowering of the body's immune response in general
can then open the door for other infections. Donor recipient
matching can also help, and a host of more advanced techniques,
including stem cell therapy, genetic engineering, biomaterials, and more, may
provide additional possibilities in the future. Now, with the fireys,
we might imagine, well, it's possible that their own immune

(09:23):
systems would reject another firey's head or limbs if it
remained attached for too long. Human rejection can play out
over days, months, or even years. The fireys might simply
not remain attached to other limbs long enough for it
to be a problem, something maybe they only do during
these games and festivities. On the other hand, knowing nothing

(09:44):
about their deeper biology, it's also possible that they're all
genetically identical and therefore perfect donors for each other. It's
also possible that the Fierys boast an overall reduced autoimmune
response to allow this sort of fusing and evolve some
other form of complementary autoimmune strategy to make up for it,
which may well be the case with the natural world anglerfish,

(10:07):
in which the bodies of genetically disparate male and female
counterparts are able to fuse together without invoking a strong
anti-graft immune rejection response rejection response that we see in
pretty much all other vertebrates. The fireys don't seem particularly
concerned with predators, or anything really, which raises the question
of why they might have evolved to be like this,

(10:29):
if such logic even applies to the labyrinth. One can
imagine there could be a survivable advantage in simply being
able to graft on the limbs, tissues, and organs of
other members of your group, perhaps even in a role-based way,
sharing particularly healthy or strong body parts for particular tasks.
One can also see where this could easily get out

(10:49):
of hand, but then again, perhaps it also benefits the
fireys as far as group cohesion goes. Not only can
they share information and resources, they can share body parts
and adapt their forms to different tasks. Hey, after all,
there's no reason to domesticate a horse when you can
just make a horse-like body out of your own assembled limbs.

(11:11):
If this is all the case, however, clearly they overcame
their natural obstacles long ago, and now devote their natural
talents exclusively to self-enjoyment and celebration. Oh, ought to do
one more Labyrinth entry. Why not? This is a deeper cut,
but one of my favorite things in the whole movie.

(11:32):
These are the nipper sticks of Labyrinth. I'd like to
turn our attention once more to the world of Jim
Henson's 1986 fantasy film, Labyrinth. where a vast, shifting maze
surrounds the goblin king's castle, full of various hazards, traps,

(11:53):
and riddles. It is not uncommon to encounter the goblin
army in these parts, as they tend to such important
work as tormenting good-natured beasts like Ludo. In the film,
Sarah encounters several heavily armored goblins, engaging in just such
work with nipper sticks. These are long sticks or cudgels

(12:14):
with a strange, bitey creature perched toward the end of
the stick. These creatures are hairless and pink, their eyes
remain closed, and they seem unwilling or incapable of leaving
the end of the stick that they cling to with
clawed hands and feet. While the goblins don't bother to

(12:35):
explain the origin of the Nibir sticks, and the bestiaries
and novelizations I turn to were equally silent on the matter,
One is struck by a sense of newborn or larval
morphology in the nipper beast. It has not yet opened
its eyes. It does not move on its own. It
has not grown hair. Its only defining behavior is to

(12:56):
bite at any and everything it can with its pronounced
sharp teeth. Larval aggression is very much a reality in
the animal world. It is common among nursery mates, generally
due to resource limitations. Some salamanders and frogs even develop
cannibal morphs, larvae with larger teeth and mouths, to gobble

(13:17):
up nursery mates when resources are tight. While horrific sounding
to us, this is just the survival economics of the wild.
It's also one way of interpreting the large mouths and
teeth of the nippers. Larvae have many enemies, however, so
it also bodes well for larvae to fend off predators,

(13:37):
as well as cannibal adults of the same species. It
has been theorized that the dorsal spines on metallic blue
lady beetle larvae serve to protect them against attacks by
the larvae of other species, species that often boast the speed, maneuverability,
and mandibles to take out susceptible larvae. This, according to

(13:59):
Intra-Guild Predation Among Lady Beetles and a Green Lace Wing
by McCodd and Grant, from the Bulletin of Entomological Research
in 2007. In short, larvae and babies generally have a
great deal of development left to do, sometimes in quite
a hurry. But in some cases it makes sense to

(14:20):
front-load that development with an outsized ability to defend yourself
or to consume your competitors. One can easily imagine the
goblins of the Goblin City in Labyrinth capitalizing on these
adaptations for their own nasty weaponry. All right, up next,

(14:43):
let's get a little bit into some Dark Crystal. These
are from the Dark Crystal Age of Resistance, which I
greatly enjoyed. I think there's a lot of wonderful world
building in that show. So first, let's enjoy the Locksnakes
of Thra. The Skeksis of Thra saw nature as a
thing to be broken, reconstructed, and used as they saw fit.

(15:08):
Their perverse outlook famously resulted in the creation of such
horrors as the Rambaging Gartham and Spying Crystal Bats. But
a less obvious example can be found in the humble
Lock Snake. As witnessed in the Dark Crystal Age of Resistance,
and related by Adam Caesar in The Dark Crystal Bestiary,
the Lock Snakes were a variety of serpents noted for

(15:30):
their mineral-hardened scales an inclination to wrap around an object
and tightly bind themselves onto that object by latching onto
their own tail. Presumably, this tactic would protect the creature
in the wild from predators that would otherwise snatch them away,
much in the same manner that an eagle may take
off with a terrestrial snake. The presumably arboreal lock snake

(15:53):
would simply hunker down and bind itself around a branch
and trust its unbreakable, rock-like exterior to protect it. The Skeksis,
of course, saw only potential purpose in these creatures, and
adapted them for use as an actual locking mechanism on
cabinets and books to keep out unwanted individuals, and should
that individual manage to break the bond, well, then they

(16:15):
have to deal with the snake's bite. The particulars of
how authorized users of the lock snakes unlocked the serpent
remain something of a mystery, but it seems as if
they might be trained to respond to a particular master. Likewise,
their use would seem to be time-limited, useful only for
temporary absences from the vicinity of these prized chest, tome,

(16:38):
or other possession. The concept of the lock snake is
of course linked to the terrestrial tradition of the Ouroboros,
the symbol of a serpent biting onto or swallowing its
own tail, forming a loop as well as a potent
paradox of self-consumption. Nothing quite like this exists in the
natural world, but the image, the symbolism, as we've discussed before,

(17:00):
is potent. Now, as for the detail that Caesar shares
regarding the diet of the lock snakes, that they consume
minerals to strengthen their scales, this does have some parallels
in our natural world. Beavers, for instance, consume an iron-rich diet,
which helps fuel the iron-rich enamel of their powerful teeth.
Various animals may consume minerals from time to time to

(17:21):
offset dietary deficiencies. and the use of swallowed stones or
gastroliths to aid in digestion has been documented in various reptile, bird,
and mammal species. Given the avian characteristics of the Skeksis themselves,
it's not unthinkable that the masters of the Dark Crystal
might have consumed stones to aid them in the digestion

(17:43):
of their many strange meals in their grotesque banquets. And finally,
one more creature, a very memorable creature from Dark Crystal,
the Age of Resistance. This is going to be the
Grunak of Thra. The crimes of the Skeksis are many

(18:07):
on the planet Thra, from the cracking of the Crystal
of Truth to their war of extermination against the Gelfla.
While the plight of the Gelflings is of particular note,
other species suffered and died under Skeksis rule, including the
gentle Grunach. As related by Adam Chessery in the Dark
Crystal Bestiary, these gray-skinned, flat-faced bipeds were a prominent, technologically

(18:34):
advanced sentient species on Thra during the Age of Harmony.
But as the Skeksis rose to power during the Age
of Division, The twisted lords of the crystal decimated the Grunach.
They spared only two individuals to serve as slaves in
the castle of the crystal. Here they aided the scientist
Skektek in his vile research and spoke not a word

(18:57):
of their species' lost culture or the cruelty of the Skeksis,
for their mouths were sewn shut in a permanent mournful frown. Now,
you might wonder how the last Grunach carried on without mouths.
But the biology of Thra is exotic and diverse. And
so is our own here on Earth. So we can

(19:18):
turn to our own natural world for possible answers. For starters,
are we sure that the Grunach need to eat at all?
The Lunamoth is an example of a moth that does
not eat as an adult. It possesses vestigial mouth parts,
but they're functionless. As the adult flying forms don't live
long enough to require sustenance, they do all of their

(19:40):
eating during their larval caterpillar stage. While the Grunach are
clearly vertebrates and not insects, perhaps they go through some
sort of metamorphosis and, via a slow metabolism, live off
of fat stores from their previous life stage. They are,
after all, sloth-like in movement and appearance. Of course, it's

(20:02):
also possible that they just don't need mouths to feed.
From a technological standpoint, it's possible that they're fed through
a nasal feeding tube, but they also might absorb nutrients
through their skin. The hagfish, for example, can absorb dissolved
organic matter across the skin and gill. Other primitive scavenger
fish boast this ability as well, so perhaps the grunach

(20:25):
boasts some similar evolutionary legacy. Even in human beings, our
skin has absorption characteristics. It's also possible that the grunach
are an entirely different sort of organism, feeding off, say,
soil nutrients, or the multi-solar energy of Thra, or even
energy absorbed from the Great Crystal itself. We will of

(20:48):
course never know. The last Grunach could not speak, though
they at least succeeded in helping to bring about the
downfall of the General Skekvar, who played the central role
in the downfall of their species. All right, there you
have it. I hope you enjoyed this dive into the

(21:09):
world of Jim Henson. Obviously, there's a lot more there.
So if there are specific creatures you would like for
me to explore in future installments of The Monster Fact,
or if it's something you think deserves more focused discussion
on a core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
or even a Weird House Cinema episode, write in and

(21:30):
let us know. That's exactly the kind of guidance that
we will benefit from. In the meantime, tune in for
additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalia
Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at
contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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