So I guess Grimm fairy tales were the HBO of the day! Bruno Bettelheim wrote in The Uses of Enchantment and reminded everybody that those stories were not really for children. That’s why when people looked at the Grimm's fairy tales, they were shocked that it was violent and scary. When people had folklore as their only kind of storytelling, it was for adults and kids alike. So the premium is on originality, rather than treading the folkloric familiar.īut I guess everything that I do is relevant to those folkloric studies. And it’s hard to figure out which characters are good or bad because they don’t look like what is conventionally heroic or unheroic. There’s a mushy line between animate and inanimate objects. This should feel like you’re transported to a different place with different rules. We’re aware that when people watch Dark Crystal, it’s not our world set in an alternate fantasy, like how Game of Thrones, for instance, is more like human reality. We actually steer away from story developments that might feel like archetypal tropes and try to do it a more unpredictable way. I don’t want to diminish my studies, but the goal is really to be as weird as possible. Do you ever contribute to the lore of Thra? But they’ve always been the most fun characters. We just added to their numbers and created some new Skeksis with some new aspects to their villainy. They were great villains in the '80s, and bringing them back, we hardly had to dial them up at all. They’ve always been the most amazing villains. The carelessness for life, that sort of self-interest business of the Skeksis. We have the Darkness creeping in, and it feels like Darkness has arrived in the human world now. We have a very tenuous environmental situation in our world, as well as a lot of inequity, and we really did want to reflect that in our fantasy world. It’s a very alien-looking and alien-feeling world, but we wanted it to feel emotionally relevant.

It’s not exactly draining their essence, but it’s the same attitude. Given the state of the world, do you look back at The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and see new relevance? Especially when you have certain people making statements like they think it’s OK if older, at-risk people are sacrificed so others can live. Now, Lisa Henson, CEO of the Jim Henson Company and guardian of all things Thra, chats with SYFY WIRE about getting back to work, and the challenges of creating this world - among them, working with puppets in confined spaces. Last month, Age of Resistance nabbed a 2020 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Children's Program.

New Thra stories have continued to appear over the years in book and graphic novel form, but the fate of the Age of Resistance series remains uncertain. The Jim Henson Company, the producer of the series, received a federal Payroll Protection Program (PPP) bailout (approximately $2 million) in order to retain its 75-person staff after live-action productions and the Jim Henson Creature Shop were shut down. But now the future of this live-action return to the world of Thra has been put in jeopardy - after just one season - by the coronavirus pandemic. The journey from the cult classic film The Dark Crystal to its prequel series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, has taken nearly 35 years. Today we speak with Lisa Henson, the Emmy-nominated executive producer of Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. This month, SYFY WIRE is speaking to some of the actors and artisans whose work earned them Emmy nominations this year.

The dark crystal age of resistance cast