The Dark Crystal

It’s time for another movie-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and this time Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick are bound for the world of Thra in Jim Henson’s 1982 masterpiece “The Dark Crystal.” What are we to make of these complex creatures, mythological themes and cosmological alignment? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Travel to another world, another time in the age of
London The Crystal. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind

(00:22):
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with another movie
episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I'm so excited
about this. When Robert, what are we talking about today?
We're gonna be talking about The Dark Crystal. Last month

(00:43):
it was Highlander two. Uh, you know, I think a
pretty objectively terrible film. But this time we're talking about
a film that that, in my personal opinion, is is
a indeed a great film, if not a perfect film.
In the words of a good friend of mine who's
it is his favorite movie of all time, he posits
it is the most magical movie ever made. And I

(01:03):
think I agree. There is no more magical film. There's
also no film I can think of that is a
more pure fantasy than The Dark Crystal. There are a
lot of fantasy movies, but The Dark Crystal is is
the most fully committed to a fantasy vision. It's a
movie with no human beings in it. Yeah, it is
a It's just a wonderful alien experience. But yet one

(01:27):
that you know is it shadows the natural world that
we we know. It's shadows human mythologies and storytelling traditions. Uh.
And it really leads to just an overall eloquent work.
Um to remind anyone who hasn't seen it or did
just sort of introduce you to it, because I've spoken
to people who have not seen The Dark Crystal, uh,

(01:48):
and I have to tell them about it. I have
to serve as an ambassador for this film. Uh. It
came out in two directed by Jim Hinson and Frank
Oz written Kermit and Yoda yea Kermit Yoda written by
David O'Dell and Jim Hinson, and the world and creature
designs were created by the artist Brian Froud and then
and then brought to life through a Hinston's Creature Shop

(02:11):
and just the vast effort of just an entire industry
of people. Uh. There's a wonderful making of documentary that
is generally included on most Stevs and blue rays uh
that you'll find of of the Dark Crystal. Highly recommend
everyone watched that. In short, though, The Dark Crystal is
a story of prophecy and reunification in a divided fantasy world,

(02:35):
in a world that, like you said, is almost entirely
rendered via puppets. I mean you'll see rocks and maybe
a few you know, you know, see some grass, etcetera,
that sort of thing. But sometimes the grass is a puppet.
That's right. Sometimes the you know, the faun of the flora. Uh,
all of it is is realized with puppetry, at least
at some point in the film. The various creatures were

(02:58):
designed through a superb fusion of that imaginative design from
Brian Fraud, inventive puppeteering and puppet design from Jim Hinson's
creature shop, and also the various professional physical performers such
as dancers and still walkers. And you really can't over
emphasize the importance of these three things coming together, because

(03:18):
it's it's not enough. That's like, the creature looks real,
but does it move in a way that feels real?
And then does it move in a way that doesn't
feel like a human in a suit? Yeah? So it is.
It is a beautifully designed film, and it's the kind
of design that I love. You know. It's back before
everything with c g I, it's puppets, it's models, it

(03:39):
sets its painted backgrounds. God, I love painted backgrounds and these.
I would love to go back to that more often. Yeah,
it's a film that that that really could have only
occurred in two It came in at the perfect time
because on one hand, like you said, I would come
out a little later, you would have had the early
c G I coming coming into play. You imagine that

(04:02):
like Mortal Kombat Level c G I, the Dark Crystal,
or or likewise, if it had been earlier, you might
not have had the degree of a technical know how.
Certainly the puppetry technology might not have been quite where
it needed to be. I would also say a thing
that's remarkable about The Dark Crystal is the way that
it seems to be a product of true collaborative evolution,

(04:26):
because it seems like it's something that was originally kind
of a rough concept and mythology dreamt up by Jim Henson,
who joined forces with Brian Froud and Brian Froud's type
of creature designs. Brian Froud illustrated like giants and fairies
and things like that, and so his designs for creatures
sort of fed back into Henson's ideas about the story

(04:49):
and the mythology, and then all this came together and
got more definition when the performers came on board. It
seems like a real ensemble, creative project that was formed
by gradual accretion of mutations over many generations. Yeah, And
a big part of that was that, like, there was
money for this to happen, and I you know, it's
not a given that that would have been the case.

(05:11):
It's Muppet money, and Muppet it is Muppet money. Like
I believe part of the deal was, like, you know,
when it was financed, it was like, all right, you
can make The Dark Crystal. You gotta make some Muppet
movies as well. We need them, you know that we
need to have the definite cash cows as well as
this this sort of long gamble at trying to cash
in on the sort of you know, franchise um uh

(05:33):
dominance that you saw just a few years earlier with
Star Wars. Yes, and also I think it was pretty
clear through the Empire Strikes Back that people were looking
at The Dark Crystal and saying, hey, you know, Yoda
the puppet, he's very popular in the Empire strikes Back.
We can we can make some puppet money with this
Dark Crystal thing. Now, arguably it may not have reached

(05:55):
the degree of financial achievement that they were that everyone
was hoping for at the time, I'm but it has
certainly become a beloved film, certainly one with a very
strong occult following. Um and uh and and today generally,
if you find if you ask somebody about The Dark Crystal,
sometimes you may get some people are like, oh, I
remember seeing that as a kid. It was a little dark, etcetera.

(06:17):
And it does have some darker serious themes. Um. But
I don't think I've ever met anybody who who disliked
The Dark Crystal. Nor do I want to meet something
to dislike The Dark Crystal, because that's it's probably gonna
be a pretty big red flag for me that maybe
we don't have a lot in common. Yeah, if you
don't like it, don't even bother right and end to
tell us no, no, you can you can tell us.

(06:40):
I'd be interested to hear your reasons. Okay, but why
are we talking about The Dark Crystal today? For well,
for starters, we do like to chat about films on
the show here and there, and they often give us
a means to discuss various scientific, philosophical, or psychological concepts
that in some cases we might not otherwise cover. And
with The Dark Crystal, I think I think there's there's
a lot to be said about how it reflects aspects

(07:02):
of our world and what we can see of Planet
Earth and human culture in the world of Thraw Thraw.
So that's the planet they're on in The Dark Crystal
or I don't know if they say, yeah, I guess
it's a planet, it's their world. Yeah, it gets kind
of tricky when you start trying to apply that, like
the scientific lens to a world that is, uh to

(07:22):
a to a pretty large degree realize through mythology, you know,
like it's we will get into some astronomical concepts, but
for the most part, the world of The Dark Crystal
is a world of of myth and magic. Yeah. And
also I will say, though I love The Dark Crystal
and I'm a partisan of science, I will say it

(07:43):
is not I don't know if it is a strongly
pro science narrative, because you notice in the film basically
science and technology seems to only exist among the bad
guys and the well, no, that's not quite true. There's Augura. Yeah,
I'm overstepping and in the say, the Skexy have a scientist,
but the good mystics are more mystical in nature. Yes,

(08:05):
but then we have to consider where they came from.
And well we'll get back to that in a bit.
But but those are those are aliens, those are that
come to the world of Thraw. We should talk for
a little bit about the the native inhabitants of this world. Okay,
So first and foremost, The Dark Crystal is the story
of gelf links. Yeah, it's it's a sort of hero's

(08:27):
journey type narrative, basic classic adventure narrative with a with
a young Gelfling at the core of it. Yeah, to
two of them, actually we have. We start off with
the male gelfling Jin and then we meet a female
Gelfling later on named Kira, and they are the last
two are seemingly the last two members of their species.

(08:48):
And we we come to learn that that they were
that their people were hunted to extinction by the ske
Skexias in in ages past. And I guess we'll have
to explain the we'll explain this ex he's in a bit.
But basically, their species is all but extinct. If we're
to apply you know, scientific understanding, I think we can
safely say that they're extinct in the wild, like the

(09:09):
gene pool would be too shallow for them to repopulate
the world. Though in a mythological sense, like the sort
of Adam and Eve logic applies, and they could conceivably
bring everything back. But but then also more to the point,
their culture is uh is extinct, like the only thing
we see of original Gelfling culture we see in ruins,

(09:30):
because Gin and Kira have each been raised by a
different people. Jin has been raised by the mystics, the Uru,
and then Kira is raised by the podlings. These sort
of uh potato people. Yeah, that they live in huts
and uh and the dance about and have a good time.
They do quite literally appear to have potatoes for heads. Yes,

(09:52):
they and we're modeled on potatoes. Yeah, so they live
sort of underground. It makes sense. They're they're potato potato humans,
basically little potato people. Now. Biologically, one thing that is
interesting about the gelflings uh is that the males are
wingless and the females have wings. Otherwise they're sort of
basic they're they're the most human characters in the film.

(10:12):
They're kind of elf like, thus the word gelfling, uh,
sort of you know, elf like humanoids. But the wings
are interesting because ultimately this would be an example of
sexual dimorphism, and we see this kind of sexual dimorphism
a lot. Say in the insect world. You'll find examples
of winged females and wingless males. Uh, you know, bees, wasps, ants,

(10:36):
soft flies, different types of beetles, all boasting morphological gender differences,
and the reasoning generally comes down to pure sexual economics.
You know, for all intents and purposes, Females are these
species itself in most cases, in all cases, and males
exist as a biological variant necessary for sexual reproduction. They basically,

(10:58):
in a lot of these insects species, the male are
just kind of there to mate and then don't do
much else. I mean, for an extreme example, just consider
there's a particular type of fairy fly um called uh
dico Pomorpha egg mc tergis. And not only are they
wingless compared to the winged females, but they're also blind
and non feeding. Oh, they don't even have a working

(11:19):
digestive system. Yeah, now we don't see that in the
guelf links. But but any rate, it's an interesting case
where you can you can look at this fantasy example
and see how it matches up with the real world biology.
But in in these insect examples, the males exist only
to breed, and that breeding takes place close to where
they hatched, often with nest mates, so there's no need

(11:39):
for them to disperse um. However, if we were, you know,
apply this to the gelf wings, we might assume that
male gelf links exist primarily to breed close to home.
One of the females would have migrated to find new mates,
produced new young, find new communities of gelf links, that
sort of thing. I don't know if we get much
sense of that in the movie, because it seems like
they're both long lived at least that the jin Jin,

(12:04):
the boy gelf Lin ventures out. Yeah, that's right, we
do see that. It's a reversal that jin is the
one who ventures and and Kira is the one that
is still remaining close to home. So so you know,
maybe that doesn't match up all that. Well, Oh, I
didn't mean to say it doesn't match it all. I
mean I just that I would say that the gelf
wings perhaps are not insects showing insects. Well, another possibility

(12:25):
would be that perhaps Kira still has wings but there,
and we see her sort of glide with them, but
not really fly with them. Perhaps they have more of
a pure like mating display purpose, you know, like they're
a show of fitness, reproductive fitness. Well, in that case,
I would think you'd be more likely to see them
on the males. That's true. This would be an inversion
of the sexual dimorphism we typically see where the mail

(12:47):
is the one with the with the fancy peacock feathers
as opposed to the pea hen. Another bit of sexual
dimorphism with the gelflings is that the jin is a
little bit taller. So I mean that could be maybe
Gen's a little older than Kira. But also it could
just be like the sexual dimorphism of more of a
sort of a warrior cast within the species. So we

(13:08):
can consider that as well. But basically the big difference
is the wings. Uh and and uh. And that kind
of spoils a key moment in the film for people
who haven't seen it, uh, because it comes as a
surprise to gin as well. I mean, I would say
the experience of The Dark Crystal is not really about
learning what's going to happen. You can probably kind of

(13:29):
predict to the plot. It's more about the experience of
the world, the texture of it. But we are going
to continue to talk about the plot of the film today.
So if you can't stand to have this, uh, this
rather straightforward hero's journey kind of story spoiled, I guess
you should stop here and then come back after you've
seen it. Alright. Well, another native species that plays a

(13:51):
pretty important role in the film are the land striders.
And this is this is my this is my son's
favorite creature from the movie, and he's always drawing these things.
These are long legged, striding herbivores that are sometimes used
by gelf Links as mounts, and they're ferocious fighters when
they have to be. They're kind of sweet looking, but
they can really put up a fight. They've got like

(14:13):
pussycat whiskers, funny looking eyes. They're great. Like most of
the creatures in The Dark Crystal designed by fraud. Here,
it is kind of difficult to put a real firm
line on the on the hybridity that's going that's taking place.
You know, it's not just a case where oh, it's
a tiger with a rabbit's head. No, it's more like
there's a sense of a rabbit to it, but also

(14:34):
the sense of an insect or a moth, and also
a giraffe. And it's all swirled around in a way
that feels familiar but also just distinctly alien. But we
do see some some some key real world animals reflected
in it, most notably probably the giraffe. So the giraffe

(14:55):
are real world land striders. They can actually reach top
speeds of thirty seven miles per hour, but they can't
really maintain it for long. But their kicks are are
no joke, just as the kicks of the land strider
are seen to be pretty devastating against their their enemies.
Um an adult giraffe can kill a human or a
lion if threatened, and they've also been pretty effective slinging

(15:19):
their necks, certainly in fights against other giraffes. Well, yeah,
long limb gives you a lot of leverage. You can
you can really whack with that thing. There's also again
a hint of the rabbit and the land strider. Anatomy
and I've also read that fraud considered jumping spiders and
designing them, so that kind of makes sense. They've got
a kind of so they've got very long legs below,
but then they've got this hunched upper body that looks

(15:40):
almost kind of like the the bunched up tiny body
of Assualta said spider. Yeah, Now I was thinking about
like animals like this. When you consider really long legged
animal body forms, you can think of quite a few
reasons for animals to have long legs compared to the
rest of their body. Might be a defensive thing, you know,
maybe they want like big legs for you know, a
lot of average and kicking. Maybe they want to be

(16:01):
able to move faster across short distances, longer stride, longer legs.
Of course, the long legs also come with downsides to
fast movement. But another thing would be to reach farther
or taller. This fairly simple one, but one really interesting
example I came across of animals with long legged body
ratios is for a totally different reason. Uh, the I

(16:23):
want to look at the black winged stilt or heman
optus human optus. This is a type of bird that's
a very land strider. To my eye, it's got these long,
narrow legs with these kind of knobby joints. Uh, and
it walks around in the water. Heman optus is found
all over the world and they walk around in the
water pecking around for food. According to the British zoologist

(16:46):
Mark Carwardine, the black wing stilt has the longest legged
to body ratio of any bird on Earth, with an
average body length of thirty five to forty centimeters and
an average leg length of seventeen to twenty four cinameter. Uh.
The legs are usually about six or more of total
body length. I'm looking at a picture of one right now,

(17:07):
and these are some long legs. Yeah, it's it's a
bit ridiculous looking. But the question would be why, like
do they need to reach up in the trees, And
the answer here is interesting. Instead, they're reaching down. The
human optics bird is a waiting forager like wades around
in water or mud, pecking down below to catch its prey.

(17:27):
And the long legs allowed the bird to walk around
in water pecking at prey, keeping their body up above
the water and dry. And I guess if you want
to do that longer legs allow you do wag deeper.
Interesting and you know, in the Dark Crystal, the land
Strider does seem to be more of a like a
purely terrestrial animal, and it kind of there are some
swamps in there are a lot of swamps, so, you know,

(17:49):
I don't know if anybody's ever really drawn a fine
line on why they have long legs. I always kind
of imagine that it was more like a draft they
needed to reach like high um fruit or flowers or
something to chew on. But you can easily imagine one
trooping through the swamp as well. All right, let's take
a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk
about the wise woman of thraw Agra. Thank alright, we're back.

(18:15):
Uh So, everybody's gotta have a favorite character in the
Dark Crystal. It's kind of hard for your favorite character
not to be agraa Ogre is pretty great. Like she's
she's commanding, she's powerful, she's wise, she grunts a lot,
She like every They are great scenes where she like
sits down and releases this powerful groan of discomfort as
she does. So. Yeah, I have seen interviews, old interviews

(18:35):
where Frank Oz describes her as being you know, she's
she's so ugly, she's beautiful that she's there's this there's
this grotesque, gorgeous quality to her. She she can detach
her eye and hold it in her hand to see
around with it. Yeah, she has uh belly, she has
like sort of goat curl curled goat horns um coming

(18:58):
out of her head. And she has what looks like
parietal eye where a third eye would be um. You know,
kind of like you see and say lizards and in
various species. So she too, is this kind of thing
that seems like a hybrid of all these different forms,
though she's largely humanoid. Uh. We we only learned so
much about her in the actual film. But there's a
wonderful book that came out um by Brian Fraud, titled

(19:23):
The World of the Dark Crystal. It's magical. This is
one of the best illustrated books ever and it's so
it's um. It is presented as if it is a
like an academic translation and gloss on an ancient text
that's been discovered, and that ancient text is the Book

(19:43):
of Augura. So it takes as like a fact, as
if you know, the stuff that happened in the Dark
Crystal is like a mythology from a long ago existing culture,
and Augura is the author of this mythology. And then
it's been translated by a by a fictional sky all
learned I think named lue Ellen. Right with the various
academic asides of uh dismantling what's happening there, But but

(20:08):
we learned it's it's really a wonderful book, not only
because it's filled with Froud's production art and designs, but
it is it's just so weird too, because it could
have just been that, right, it could have just been Hey,
my name is Brian Froud, and I worked on this
movie called The Dark Crystal. Here, here's some of the pictures. No,
it's this this this utterly weird and magical and one

(20:28):
of a kind of book. But but in it, yeah,
we hear a lot more about Augura, where she came from.
We get more of a sense of the backstory on
the world of Thraw. But we learned that she's something
like an earth elemental, that she's like a being that
rises up out of the stones and the roots of
the world so that the world can have voice, in

(20:50):
that the world can witness what's happening, and uh, and
then she loses one of her eyes when the great
conjunction occurs, but we'll get more into that later on. Yeah. Now,
one of the cool things about all gress that she's
sort of an astronomer astrologer type, right. She has in
her laboratory. She has like a big observatory on the

(21:10):
top of a mountain, and within it there is an
oor y, and I love a good oorory. So an
oory is basically a mechanical model of the movement of
celestial objects, usually of the planets in the Solar System,
and these have been constructed based on various astronomical models
throughout history. They became very popular in the early modern

(21:31):
period to represent the heliocentric model of the Solar System.
A standard or y would operate by orbiting physical objects
around based on a clockwork mechanism timed to simulate a
ratio of the actual orbital periods. And of course, because
the mechanisms that generate the movements were approximate, the known

(21:51):
oories are basically all to some degree inaccurate. You might
have heard though, of like classic examples of these things
that are very head of their time, like the ancient
Greek astronomical computer from the second century BC, known as
the anti Kithera mechanism. This was discovered in a shipwreck
around the turn of the twentieth century, but it was

(22:12):
a couple of thousand years old, and it's essentially an
analog computer that computed the future positions of celestial objects
by way of differently sized gears that would spin at
different rates and show you where the objects would be
at different points in the future. And this kind of
thing showed up again in the early modern period, where

(22:32):
you'd have these oories that were generally clockwork. You'd you know,
have like a somebody would work out all the details
of how to put it together, and you'd have a
clockwork solar system spinning around. Now we have highly accurate
digital or oories based on software, so I guess that's
actually a little bit less fun, even if it's more accurate.
But one interesting thing when constructing an accurate or ory

(22:55):
is that Augura faces a problem. We don't we have
a solar system that is by comparison, very easy to
predict the future positions of all gross solar system has
three sons and will return to this later. That's right,
it's key to the plot because when these three sons
aligne it creates the Great Conjunction, which has tremendous, uh

(23:19):
mystical properties in this film. You know, I've never wondered
this before, but is Pitch Black sort of a takeoff
on the Dark Crystal? Is there a great conjunction? So
long as I've seen it, it's on this hot planet
where the suns are always shining, but there's there's like
a predicted a prophet side conjunction when like all the

(23:40):
suns will suddenly be hidden. This almost never happens because
there are multiple sons, and then the planet will go
dark and then all the monsters can come out because
they can't they can't tolerate the sunlight. That's right, that's right.
I thought you were up on your Rittick movies. I'm
more of a Chronicles of Riddeck guy. I've seen that
one like a couple of times. I've only seen the original.
I only watched Pitch Black because you've told me to.

(24:02):
Did you move on to Chronicles a riddic to? I haven't. Oh,
that's the only reason to watch Chronicle. The only reason
to watch a Pitch Black is so you can watch
Chronicles of Reddit. Pitch Black was kind of trash, but
I sort of liked it. No, it's it has cool
monsters in it, and uh, it has some some I
don't want to trash it because it does have again,
really cool monsters, and I think it it did some

(24:23):
stuff really well. But then Chronicles are Riddic came along
and it's just even more over the top. It's like
more of like a flash Gordon. Okay, well i'll see it.
I'll see it this time. Okay, alright, But back to
the Dark Crystals. So one of the things that we're
just talking about the mystical nature of the of the
Great conjunction in this world. So this is how we

(24:45):
end up getting the Earth Sky. Now the Earth Skx
are being that we don't encounter in the film to
the very end. But then and there's a lot more
information about what they were and where they came from.
In the world of the Dark Crystal the book, it
looked kind of a bit like creepy pagan ghosts with
like like wicker crowns, or they look kind of like

(25:06):
when you see the images of the Nine Kings in
the Lord of the Rings movies, like as ghosts in
the shadow realm that you can only see when you
put the ring on there there like that. Yeah, like
all the things and all the other things in the film,
there's this wonderful synthesis right of all these these things
coming together so that it feels familiar and yet alien

(25:26):
at the same time. So it does feel like an
extra resturant, or like an angel or or some sort
of pagan spirit being, but it is also unique. And
so we learned that these are the Earth SKX, or
more specifically the Fallen Earth SKX, who came to the
planet to Thraw to exploit the properties of the Great
Crystal there and um in the World of the Dark

(25:48):
Crystal was written that they arrived during a past great conjunction,
and the great conjunctions occur every one thousand trine, which
we assume is something like a year, so about thousand
trines a thousand years roughly. But when the great conjunction occurred,
it allowed for them to open a door through the crystal,
some sort of a stargate, kind of like in two
thousand one Space Odyssey. I assume their home world had

(26:11):
a crystal as well, but it was unsuitable for the
work that they wished to pursue, and so, against the
advice of their fellow or Skets, they traveled to the
world of Thraw and they set up their operations there
where the crystal serves as kind of a meta crystal.
And so you had eighteen ear skets and they constructed
this great castle around the crystal and Thraw and they
began manipulating its power. So there are users of high

(26:34):
technology and UH, and they're you know, seemingly um at
least benign, if not benevolent species. They seem to get
along well with the existing species. They form a relationship
with the gelf links, they form a relationship with Agra Uh.
In fact, they teach agraa a bit about technology and
the and their use of crystals. But despite being the

(26:57):
splendid angelic beings full of in some possibility, they also
recognize that that inside themselves there was this duality, There
was this disharmony in their souls of darkness and light.
And so what they decided to do, what they set
out to do with the crystal was to purify themselves,
to expunge their darker natures. And as they tried this

(27:18):
during a great conjunction UH, they managed to sever themselves.
They divided themselves into two beings, and then subsequently the
crystal was cracked. So that's where you are in the movie,
or actually the movie is like a thousand trying or
a thousand years after this, right when you these two
beings are now completely separate, and you have the the

(27:40):
Uru also known as the mystics in the movie. Who
are these very very sweet, gentle you know, gentle dinosaur,
gentle friendly brontosaurus uh type creatures. I don't want to
knock them. I mean, the mystics are great, but oh yeah,
they're wonderful. They're there's certainly a dinosaur sense too of them.
There's kind of a Galapagos turtle sense to them, a
slow calmness. They also have a sense I think of

(28:02):
there's like an equine quality to their heads, so you
get this this herbivore vibe to them as well. But
they're yeah, they're very zen like. They're they're they're they're
they're drawn to prophecies and spirals and uh and they're
connected with the natural world. And these are the ones
that raise the hero of the film, the young gelf
link gen. Now, but then you've also got the villains

(28:25):
of the movie, the bad halves of of what there Skex,
and these are the skex eas a s. Yeah, so
these are vile, ruthless, greedy, also six limbed creatures. We
often uh, it's easy to not pick up on this,
but we see later that they do have an extra
pair of arms that have atrophied. But anyway, they are.

(28:46):
They're completely awful. They squander and pervert the science of
the Earth Skex for their own personal gain their technologists,
but they're also exploiters, so uh, you know, they end
up working with the Gelflings for a while, but then
eventually they're uh, they're they're capturing the gelflings, they're enslaving
the gelf wings, they enslaved the pod people. So they're
just nasty to the core. They all they hate everything,

(29:09):
they hate each other, they hate themselves and uh, I
guess in appearance, they mostly resemble humanoid birds, especially raptors,
and also crocodilians. One of the things we read preparing
for this was in a book You Let Me Robert
called uh well not the book was called, but the
essay in it was by Katriona Makara called a Natural

(29:31):
History of the Dark Crystal the conceptual design of Brian Froud,
And in this essay it's mentioned that the Skexies, in
addition to being inspired by reptilian features and predatory bird
features and classic attributes of the dragon, they may also
be based in part on angler fish. Interesting but clearly
the predatory bird like the vulture aspect and the crocodile

(29:53):
aspect are there. And Hinson was reportedly inspired in dreaming
up the world of Dark Crystal. When he was first
thinking about the idea of the Skexies, he was inspired
by an illustration he saw in the nineteen seventies. Think
it was in nineteen seventy five of crocodiles like being
posh in a fancy Victorian washroom. And this illustration was

(30:15):
by a an artist named Leonard Lubin, and it was
accompanying a some printings of Lewis Carroll poem. But in
this illustration I found a copy of it, and it's
like one crocodile is in a fancy bathtub with its
tail sticking out with a rubber ducky, and another one
is like being being toweled off in a graceful way. Yeah,

(30:37):
it's a you know, again, it probably doesn't. It's not,
you know, super helpful exercise to apply too much of
the natural world to the skexies, especially since they're not
even presented as a naturally evolved species. They're born out
of a mystical division. And yet if you try to
if when you try to imagine, like, what would a
culture be like if it was if it consist of

(31:01):
more solitary creatures, they're more you know, and they are
they are more competitive and less cooperative. What might that
be like? Uh? You know, it's interesting to wonder to
what extent the skexies are a realization of that. Yeah,
I mean you can see some kind of social ish
looking behaviors in in some birds and reptiles. But if

(31:22):
I was thinking about a more selfish kind of creature,
a less social kind of creature, yeah, I wouldn't think
like mammalian features. But again with with the mystics and
the skexies, they both represent one side of the same being,
and ultimately they're supposed to represent, uh, you know, two
sides of human nature. The idea of being that the

(31:43):
earth skex represent balance. Uh the uru are you know,
it's it's the noble human, the human that is, you know,
at one with the natural environment and peaceful, whereas the
Skexies are awful and exploitive and petty. The disgustingness of
the Skexies absolutely comes through in the design of the puppets,
and it actually even came through for the people working

(32:05):
with them, because Makara points out in in her essay
that the costumes and the puppets of the Skexies became
more and more genuinely disgusting as work for the film
went on, like as production went over time. She quotes
one person who worked on the production who said that
the Uh the Skexies puppets came more and more to

(32:26):
consist of quote, rotten rubber permeated with cold k y
jelly and putrefying noodles. Yeah, it's it's something that's easy
to to to uh to to overlook in when you
consider the costumes like this and puppets like this, is
that they were never they weren't built to last. And
that's why when you go somewhere like Atlanta's own Center

(32:48):
for Puppetry Arts and you see the the examples of
Skexies and UH and Ruru and various other creatures from
the film that are in it there and and on display.
Like everything had to be restored before it was suitable
for a public display. Again. And by the way, uh,

(33:10):
if you haven't been to the Center for Pupetory Arts
in Atlanta, I have the recommended to anyone visiting our city.
Here you can find out more about it at puppet
dot org. And through September one, two thousand and nineteen. Uh,
Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal World of Myth and Magic
is going on. It is a fabulous presentation of the

(33:30):
various props and designs that you see in the film. Yeah,
they have like some full puppets from the movie. They've
got an Augura. When I was there, at least they
had Augura. They had one of the Skexias, they had
one of the Mystics, they have a bunch of other
stuff land Strider puppets, and it was wonderful. Yeah, And
even if you don't make it by September one, they
have a lot of Dark Crystal stuff in the permanent

(33:51):
Hinson exhibit as well. Oh. In fact, one of the
things they have I believe in the permanent exhibit is Robert,
do you hear a scuttling What is that scuttling sound?
It's the garth Yes, so the Gartham are podcasters killed
by Gartham. I hadn't thought about that. We're kind of

(34:11):
we're kind of pod people, aren't we? Um in some sense? So, yes,
the Gartham are those fabulous scuttling, giant crab like monstrosities.
And uh. And they're essentially an engineered weapons species of
the Skexies. The Skexies are, you know, decrepit, cowardly, nasty creatures.
They don't fight their own battles. They're not going to

(34:32):
fight their own battles there. They need to make something
to go out there and wage their wars against the
gelflings and the pod people and too and and so forth,
and so they make these things. Um. Yeah, they're they're
massive guardians and soldiers and there they look like a
mixture of beetle and crab anatomies, though closer inspection reveals

(34:52):
than to be kind of like bipeds with supporting tentacle
like appendages. Uh. And part of that is kind of
like the illusion of the puppetry. But the thing about
the between the dark Crystal is like, even when you
see how something works, like the facade is still so perfect. Um.
One arm at the garthen terminates in a vicious crab pincher,
and the other has like a fingered claw for snatching

(35:14):
up prisoners. Yeah. So, in his introduction to the world
of The Dark Crystal, I thought this was so funny
and so interesting. Brian Froud was talking about the process
of coming up with the concepts and the designs for
the movie, and Froud mentions that he often drew inspiration
before the movie from walking in nature. When he designed creatures.
You know, he would do illustrations and he'd go out

(35:35):
and walk in nature and look at trees and rocks
and animals. But he was working on The Dark Crystal
in New York City and didn't have much access to
unspoiled countryside to go look at trees and rocks and animals.
So he said, you know, maybe you could sort of
go to Central Park, but it wasn't quite the same.
So instead, he said he would end up taking inspiration
from wherever he could find it, including by the natural

(35:58):
forms he found in his food. So he said he
he and others went out to a dinner where they
ate lobster, and then Froud was inspired to take all
the lobster shells home with them and this became partial
inspiration for the shells and the exoskeleton of the Gartham
and also for the carapace of the Skexies. Oh yeah,

(36:18):
they have these elaborate costumes that make them look grander
than they actually are. Yeah, but you can kind of
see it there, like in the in the carapace of
the Skexies, you can kind of see like a a
plated overlapping, plated lobster tail kind of thing, except it's
really craggy and nasty, and you can definitely see the
lobster shells as they came through in the Gartham. Yeah. Um,

(36:40):
so you know, a couple of things to sort of
take apart with the Gartham here. I believe it's mentioned
in the World of the Dark Crystal that they're they're
sort of a symbol out of the memory of ancient
sea creatures, which is something we'll get get back to
in a minute. And then um mccara, who again wrote
a natural Tree of the Dark Crystal conceptual design of

(37:01):
Brian Froud. Uh. She speculated the Gartha may actually exist
as the thought projection of the Skexies because like, yeah,
because when they're when when the Skexies power is broken,
the Gartham kind of vanished, or at least they their
internal um biology vanishes in the shell plating just falls
like empty armor. But you know, I was looking looking

(37:26):
reading a little bit about just like shells and claws
and weaponry, and I came back to an excellent book
by Douglas j Imlind titled Animal Weapons, The Evolution of Battle.
And one of the key things in this is that he's,
you know, he's comparing the evolution of various biological weapons
to actual you know, man made weapons and and and

(37:51):
tools of war and humans create. And he points out that,
you know, muscles are expensive to maintain even when they're resting,
and males with big claws require the most muscle. And
of course he's just talking about natural world fiddler crabs here.
But when we look at something like the Garthen, like
that's an enormous creature. You know, it would have to
if we're depending on a on an actual diet, and

(38:13):
it wasn't just sustained through like vile Skexies thoughts or
some sort of mystical crystal powers. It would have to
eat a lot. It would be expensive to maintain. Now,
you do see the Skexies feasting in the movie quite disgustingly.
There's a great feasting scene where they've got stuff hanging
out of their mouths. Yeah. I don't recall ever seeing
the Garthen eat. Yeah, but and the and and maybe

(38:33):
they don't. You know, it's it's hard to be hard
to be sure. But one thing you can think of,
it's like, okay, if they are expensive to maintain, uh,
just you know, through crystal power or feeding them a
bunch of meat, garbage or whatever the Skexies are doing,
you could easily compare that to the sort of weapons
programs that humans have. So and this is you know,

(38:54):
one of the key things that that he gets the
author gets into an animal weapons that Emelyand discusses. For instance,
you could compare the Gartham to UH the U. S
Air Force B two stealth bomber, built at a reported
cost of two point one billion per plane and requiring
fifty to sixty hours of ground maintenance for every one
hour in the air and uh, and that's not even

(39:15):
taking into account upgrade efforts. So contractors Northrop Grumman current
UH at least previously held a nine point nine billion
dollar contract to complete maintenance and modernization of the twenty
plane feet fleet. That was from a few years back.
But it just gives you an idea of just like
the colossal cost of not only creating some sort of

(39:36):
a weapon but also maintaining it, and that would be
part of having an army of Gartham as well. But
clearly it's a price that the Skexis were willing to pay,
and uh, you know, it almost works for them. They're
able to use the Gartham to uh, you know, wage
this war of extinction against the guelf Links and rid
the world of at all but at least two of them.

(39:57):
Now is the reason they do that, because is there
is a prophecy that the Skexies will be undone by
Guelfling hand or else by none. Exactly. That's their whole reason.
This is a great you know, mythic storytelling trope. Right,
there's this prophecy, and therefore they're going to act on
this prophecy and try and rid the world of those
that will undo them. But then perhaps it's a self

(40:20):
fulfilling prophecy like they have, they have set things in
motion for their own downfall. Well, it's also a great
example of the destructive power of an unquestioned religious dogma. Exactly.
All right, let's take one more break, and when we
come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about
Gartham and crystal organisms. Before we were, we return to

(40:40):
the problem of a world with three sons. Thank alright,
we're back. So the Dark Crystal, as we mentioned a
minute ago, has a couple of organisms that seem to
have at least partially crystalloid biology, at least they have
crystals for eyes, or use crystals to see. It's mentioned
in a couple of sources that the Gartham have crystals

(41:02):
for eyes, and you can see this in some up
close representations of them. It seems that their eyes have
sort of uh uh, you know, polygon type surfaces on
them that they might be actual, I don't know, pieces
of dark crystal or something like that in there. Oh yeah,
Like we're it's explained, especially in the world of the
Dark Crystal, that the Skexies, you know, they're not only
continuing to experiment with the dark crystal itself, uh, the

(41:25):
the the imperfect great crystal. But they're also creating like
their own knockoff crystals and doing other things with crystals,
and so seemingly also incorporating them into their weapons species.
They're doing all kinds of nasty crystal technology, and some
of this is nasty crystal biotechnology. So the Gartham have
crystals fries, and they're also these spy beasts in the

(41:46):
movie called the crystal bats who fly around doing aerial
surveillance and looking with their crystals that appears to be
their video recorder lens or their eyes. Now, obviously this
seems far fetched. She wouldn't expect, well, maybe there are
actually organisms that have crystals for eyes. But as we
discover pretty much every time, reality is weirder than fiction.

(42:09):
There are creatures on this very world with minerals and
crystals for eyes. And I had to talk about this
for a few minutes. Yeah, this floored me that you
were able to get so much out of the crystal bats.
I figured, the crystal bats are like the least biological
creatures in the whole movie. And yet here we go.
Let's have a look at a creature called A kitan
now a keiton, is a form of a marine mollusk.

(42:32):
They're generally small. They're flat. They're oval shaped, kind of
like a flat slug or snail, with a protruding foot
on the underside for attaching to surfaces on the sea
floor and moving along those surfaces while they scrape up
food in the form of algae or other clinging biomatter.
But on its back, the kiton wears a suit of armor.

(42:53):
It has a shell made out of tough plates which
face up towards the sea as it crawls along a
raw clapping up delicious slime with its ragula. Now, you
might suspect that a small algae scraping, rock crawling sea
dweller like the kitan is maybe simply blind, right, What
does it need eyes for to look down at the

(43:14):
rocks below it as it scrapes up stuff to eat.
But they do appear to have eyes on their backs.
On those protective shells. The armor part, they've got hundreds
of little beady, light sensitive organs spaced about on their
dorsal armor, called ocelly. Now, scientists have known about these
ocellly for years. They've known about these organs for sensing light,

(43:36):
but they didn't know much about them, what they were
made of, how they worked. Essentially, what we knew for
a long time was that the kitans had these organs
with underlying light sensitive cells like a retina, in some
form of lens material. Now, a few years back, a
marine biologist named Dan Spicer conducted research on a kitan
known as the West Indian Fuzzy Kitan, which is the

(43:59):
cuddliest to all kitan's. It sounds kind of like an
off brand Muppet, I have to say, it sounds kind
of like a fizz gig. So Spicer was studying the
lenses on the ocelli of these animals that the little
light sensing organs on their backs, and in an attempt
to clean these ocelli these lenses off for observation in
an acidic solution. The lenses suddenly dissolved and this was

(44:23):
a tip tip off that the lenses were not protein
based like you would find in pretty much all other organisms. Instead,
these lenses were made of a mineral called aragonite. The
Kitans had mineral crystals for eyes. Aragonite is a form
of calcium carbonate. It's the material that forms the shells

(44:44):
of most molluscs, so it had lenses for its eyes
that were made out of the same stuff that it's
armor is made out of the shell is made out of,
and Spicer, along with Earness and Johnson, published uh paper
about kitan and aragonite lenses in Current Biology in two
thousand eleven. So the kitan uses these eyes to detect

(45:08):
when shadows pass overhead. That would be a signal that
there's like a predator near And when this happens, the
kitans flatten out their bodies and clamp their armored shells
down over their soft parts. The crystallized don't appear to
see in great detail, but they can apparently distinguish dark
moving shapes from a mirror dimming of raw light levels. Now,

(45:29):
when you've got rocks for eyes, of course, they can
be eroded by water over the time. But I was
over time, but I was reading about how apparently one
benefit of having rocks for eyes is that they are
less vulnerable to the you know, the the violent washing
of the tide or intertidal areas. It's like they their
eyes have armor. Yeah, but what do you do when

(45:51):
your eyes erode? Yeah? Well you so as if you
have rocks for eyes, what you do is you gradually
replace them with more crystals. So the kitans would grow
new crystal lenses to replace the old ones that would
get eroded over time. And it seems that organisms with
crystals for eyes are pretty rare in today's biosphere, but
there are other example. There are other examples. So crystals

(46:14):
appear in various forms suspended within otherwise protein based eyes
of other creatures. Right, so there are other creatures that
might not quite have crystals four eyes like rocks as
the lenses of their eyes, but might have some kind
of crystal somewhere in there. One example I was reading
about in a book called Animal Eyes from Oxford University

(46:35):
Press by Michael f. Land and Dan Eric Nielson is
about spiders. Specifically, these would be like acids or wolf spiders.
Wolf spiders have some crystal structures inside their eyes. These
are specialized eyes, usually the lateral eyes, used for locating
prey in low light and to since in low light

(46:55):
they have a wide aperture so they let a lot
of light in. But they also have reflecting tap at um,
kind of like you see in a cat when its
eyes shine back at you in the dark. The wolf
spider has something similar. Now, what does the TapIt um
actually do. Apparently it serves to increase the sensitivity of
the retina in low light conditions by sitting behind the

(47:18):
retina and reflecting light back in the direction of the
source through the retina, again maintaining the visual features of
the image while increasing the amount of light available to
the light sensitive cells. Some makes sense, like, so there's
low light, so you put a mirror behind the area
that's sensing the light, and by reflecting it back through

(47:39):
that area, you sort of get You get a couple
of tries, you get extra ways of sensing the low
amounts of light. But in like I said's these tapita
that behind the eyes consist of quote, many layers of
very thin crystals, probably guanine crystals, which form a long
ribbon beneath the receptors. So that's pretty interesting on its own,

(47:59):
But it's not even the only organism that uses guanine
crystals in order to see with To look at another mollusk,
reflective guantine crystals are also important in the light sensitive
organs of scallops. Scalops like the kind you eat. Research
shows that scalops use a reflective mirror made of guantine
crystals instead of a transparent lens to focus light onto

(48:23):
their retinas. And I've attached a little picture of what
these crystals look like. They formed these layers of plates.
Almost yeah, it looks like like plate mail, kind of
like dinosaur scales. Yeah yeah, yeah, I guess more actuli
scale mail. If I was going to use the morefeitting
um the term there, but to get even weirder and
to connect to the dark crystal in a weirder way,

(48:44):
I want to go into the deep past, because if
you go into the deep past, you can find even
more crazy examples of crystallize. The TRIALO bytes, the trial
A bytes of the Cambrian period, which you know began
roughly five million years ago. The TRIALO byte of this
period had lenses on their eyes that were literally made
of calcite crystals. The triobites had rocks for eyes and

(49:08):
this uh, of course, the calcite crystals that form these
lenses were this is another form of calcium carbonate stone eyes.
And the lenses that were amazingly powerful by the protein
based standards were familiar with today. They were they were
seeing the world through crystal prisms. As described in a
feature by the American Museum of Natural History. Quote, this

(49:29):
provided these ancient creatures with virtually unparalleled vision that we
can assume thanks to recent experiments conducted with calcite crystals,
was filled with streams of light and bursts of color.
Oh wow, So like the Cambrian seas were just a uh,
you know, a psychedelic fire show for these these creatures

(49:49):
on some level. Yeah, if only we could see the
world like these ancient bugs that had crystals for eyes. Yeah,
and again this is this is fitting because it is
mentioned the world of the Dark Crystal that the sketch
the Skexies kind of summon the form of the Gartham
out of the memories of long dead sea life. Yes,
I love that. That's exactly what I was thinking about.

(50:10):
So the trial bytes. The inhabitants of this ancient unseen
world are are known to us only through fossils from
about five million to about two fifty million years ago,
And like the lost prehistoric world quality of the Dark
Crystal mythology. Yeah, in fact, I wanted to take this
connection even further. Tell you tell me if I'm getting
too wild here. But you can't get too wild, not crystal.

(50:33):
So one idea is thing I was thinking about is
that the trial bytes mineral eyes are the first complex
eyes we really find in the fossil record. They were
part of the Cambrian explosion, which is when animal bodies
suddenly showed this massive diversity and uh at least fascinating
and complex and fast moving forms. These eyes are a

(50:55):
wonder of evolution, but they might also be a signal
of something important changing in the himal world. Why did
animals suddenly need powerful calcite eyes crystal eyes? Well, one
theory about this is that it's because of the explosion
of predation. We live in a world in which predation evolved,
in which animals kill and eat each other, which plenty

(51:17):
of mythological traditions see as a key indicator of some
kind of fallen or corrupted state of the world, kind
of like the shattering of the crystal and the dark
crystal and the sundering of the earth skex, which which
in the mythology gives rise to the Gartham and the
crystal bats. Interesting. Yeah, so crystal vision on both counts
emerging out of an age of conflict. How about it

(51:40):
look up those those trial. Bye eyes, it's amazing. All right. Well,
let's let's return to the bigger picture here. Let's let's
talk about the three suns system, the three star system
that we see with the world of Thraw. Okay, so Thraw,
the planet depicted in the Crystal in the Dark Crystal
uh is a three star system. It's it's it's key
to the whole narrative about the great conjunction occurring. And

(52:03):
the three sons are described as the Great Son, of
the Dying Son and the Rose Sun, and we see
these images of these suns moving through the sky. Um
it's difficult, you know, and perhaps kind of a fool's air,
and to try and work out exactly what stage each
of these sons happens to be in. I've seen it
speculated that the Great Sun is a giant son, and

(52:25):
the Dying Sun is a gas giant or a protostar,
and then the Rose Sun is a red dwarf. But
really you could you could kind of go a number
of different directions and interpreting like what stage each star
is in that might make sense in the light of
something I'll get back to in just a minute here. Now. Likewise,
it might ultimately be a bit silly to to really

(52:46):
get two worked over up over the exact celestial mechanics
of all of this. I mean, for instance, given the
mythological nature of many themes in the movie, we might
be dealing with more of a uh potlemaic universe here
with the three sons orbiting thraw. You know, there's no
reason that wouldn't be the case. It's a mythological world. Um. However,

(53:06):
when we look to the world of the dark Crystal
that the Book of Brian frauds, uh, there is this, uh,
this fabulous a little bit of commentary that is supposedly
from the the anthropologists or the academic that is commenting
on everything, and this is what they say of the
three stars of Thraw. Quote. In a system with three sons,
astronomical calculations would be intolerably complex. Newtonian or Einsteinian physics

(53:32):
can deal exactly with two bodies Earth and Sun or
Earth and Moon, but more complex cases can be solved
only by successive approximations. With three sons. Even the elementary
calculations needed to begin our studies of the skies are
beyond our scope. Augura's astronomy, therefore, is devised chiefly through
intuition and empirical models. So this is a reference to

(53:56):
a very real problem in the study of celestial mechanics
that I think we've discussed and stuff to blow your
mind before, at least in passing the three body problem right.
If so, if you're dealing with uh, say, velocity, your momentum,
and gravity, you can easily predict the future states of
two objects orbiting each other. Once you throw another object

(54:17):
into the mix there, especially if it's you know, of
a similar mass, the interactions become increasingly chaotic and sensitive
to tiny to like tiny variations, and it becomes harder
and harder to predict a future state from the current state. Now.
I was looking into this because I was like, well,
are there really triple star systems? Like does that exist

(54:39):
in reality? What would that look like? And triple star
systems do exist, though they can in some cases become
dynamically unstable, meaning that they might eject one of the
stars from the system through their interactions. But a common
form of a more stable triple star system is that
there is essentially a core binary star system, which means

(55:01):
two stars more closely orbiting a shared center of gravity
and then you'd have a third star much farther away
orbiting that center of gravity. And this even almost sort
of goes with the Great Sun Dying Sun Rose Sun thing, Like,
I wonder if maybe your great son and your dying
stunt son, the bigger, closer ones are orbiting each other.

(55:22):
That's a binary star system, and then you've got a
little little red dwarf for Rose Sun that's way farther out,
that's orbiting the whole system. Yeah, I think that would
make sense. Now would be another question entirely whether in
reality a planet like Thraw could exist, I mean, not
necessarily like Thraw, but a planet of any kind could
exist in a triple star system. Or would it just

(55:42):
be automatically, you know, pretty quickly ejected or destroyed due
to the chaotic influences of gravity from a three star system.
Would there be enough stability there at all, certainly for
life to emerge. I just assumed the answer was no.
That I was like, that's probably not going to happen.
But I was actually surprised what I found here. I
was reading an article about this on astronomy dot com

(56:03):
by Amber Jorgensen, which was about the work of a
few scholars of Franco Bissetti of the School of Computer
Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Wits in
South Africa. Also Cherice Harley of Wits and uh are
a Boost at University of Grenoble Alps in France. So
Bussetti and colleagues here conducted simulations which found that planets

(56:25):
could survive in appreciable numbers in systems like this. So
Bussetti says, quote because of the complex dynamics between these
stars and planets, it was previously thought improbable that many
planets would have stable orbits in these regions, but they
found evidence to the contrary quote. We ran the simulations
for periods ranging from one million to ten million years

(56:47):
in order to see if the systems are stable over
very long periods. If a planet is ejected from that
system during that time, it is not stable. The analysis
showed that most configurations had large enough stable regions for
planets to exist. Many of these areas are actually very
habitable for planets, and they even mapped out areas of
the galaxy where double and triple star exoplanets are likely

(57:11):
to be found in stable orbits, so it is actually
possible there might be really bad places to be within
the orbit of a of a three star system, but
there could be types of triple star systems that could
have stable planetary orbits within them, where at least presumably
life could thrive. So there might be a thraw out.

(57:32):
There's what you're saying. There could be a world. Scientists
have discovered thraw. It really exists, and we're sending a
mission there right now. Um, in terms of things that
really exists, it is worth noting that there is a
real great conjunction, so the the the the the conjunction
of Jupiter and Saturn is sometimes referred to as the

(57:52):
Great Conjunction, and it takes place every eighteen to twenty years,
and there's a there's a fair amount of astrological uh
speculation about them, shall we say, especially concerning political assassinations
and how they seem to line up selectively. Of course,
with great conjunctions throughout history. The last one took place

(58:13):
in May thirty one, two thousand, while the next one
will take place in late December. Now, as usual, we
don't put a lot of stock, we don't put any
stock in astrological predictions like this. Ultimately, whatever the astrological
pattern is if you if you cherry pick enough, you
can find some sequence of events on Earth that match

(58:34):
up with it. The planets don't influence your dating life, folks,
I'm sorry, all right, So there you have it. This
has been fun, Robert. Yeah, the Dark Crystal. There's a
lot to discuss there, and I was legitimately surprised by
some of the places that it took us. Um But
but hopefully we have you know, maybe even enhanced everyone's
enjoyment of the Dark Crystal a little bit, or if

(58:55):
nothing else, giving you a good reason to go out
and watch a great film one more time and to
wish you had crystal eyes. That's right. Anytime when you
hear one of those rock songs or pop songs about
touching eyes, think think like spiky crystals for eyes clinking
against each other. Um, well cool. Obviously, I know we

(59:15):
have a lot of listeners out there who have thoughts
about the Dark Crystal and are Dark Crystal fans. Some
of you may be very steeped in the Dark Crystal
and have read like the novelizations and the comic books
and the sort of the extended universe of the thing,
and perhaps you have additional insight you'd like to share.
Perhaps some of the questions we have presented have been
answered in other bits of literature or other Brian Froud interviews, etcetera.

(59:39):
We would love to hear from you about that. Oh no, Well,
as we're closing out here, I do want to give
a quick shout out as well to The bizarre Cast.
That's b A Z A A R. The Bizarre Cast
with Richard and Robert. Uh They're like a horror pop
culture podcast. They recently had me on the show to
talk about podcast staying about Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

(01:00:01):
invention and the upcoming Transgenesis. Uh So, just to shout
out to those guys. If you want to check out
their show, it's The bizarre Cast dot pod bean dot com,
or you can find them on Twitter, the bizarre Cast
at the bizarre Cast, Huge Things. As always to our
wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. If you
would like to get in touch with us directly if

(01:00:22):
you give us feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com for more on this and thousands

(01:00:43):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works, dot com,
batutory proper FA