This is a great example of fanaticism done right. Jim Henson tried to be really weird and dark with his puppetry in the 1980s. In ’82, he released The Dark Crystal, a disturbing but beautiful fairy tale involving Gelfings and Skekses in a mythical land of waterfalls and such. However, Henson’s initial cut of the movie was even darker and weirder than what ended up getting released. One fan, Christopher Orgeron, has taken it upon himself to piece together, using what material he could, a cut of the movie as close to Henson’s original as possible.
As you can read about on Mental Floss’s website via writer Chris Higgins, who interviewed Orgeron as well, the changes the studio made Henson make included voiceover and extra English dialogue, as well as cutting some of the scarier bits. Using what materials were available, including a portion of a black-and-white VHS dub of the original cut, Orgeron spent the past two years piecing together the “definitive” Director’s Cut of The Dark Crystal, which you can watch the entirety of below. We applaud your hard work, Mr. Orgeron.
For more on The Dark Crystal, check out the Author Quest panel from this year’s SDCC as well as our interview with Lisa Henson and a retrospective of Jim’s life and work.
Enjoy this while it lasts. This video will be taken down soon.
That audio sounds awful, yes i realize its unfinished but holy crap and no monologue at the beginning? no thanks i’ll stick to the original
Makes me want to see an even darker “Labyrinth” now.
LET’S ALL JUST CORRECT EACH OTHER LIKE A BUNCH OF DICKFACES, HOW ABOUT THAT GUYS?!!
JESUS people.
Are you sure you meant “fanatacism,” and not “fantasism?”
maybe you don’t remember the movie perfectly from when you saw it in the theater
I… don’t get it? Apart from the unfinished audio, this was the movie I remember seeing in the theaters. Was there some kind of major edits that this guy had to restore? Because I really don’t see the poor audio and “original” (obviously temporary) vocals adding a whole lot.
So Henson’s 80s were particularly weird and dark . . . like the Fraggles?
The weird and dark was always an element in Henson’s work, from the very earliest days. As a kid, I had nightmares about Sweetums saying “Eat. Frog. Now!” in 1971’s “The Frog Prince.” One of the proto-pilots for The Muppet Show involved a talking crumpet and the line, “I had a crumpet once . . . but it died.” And if you really want to see weird and dark, go back and watch the Henson pieces from the first season of Saturday Night Live. You can totally see the first traces of the Skekses and their world in Scred and the rest of the inhabitants of The Land of Gorch.
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/The_Land_of_Gorch
This Was Awsom