There were no notes from him I believe about prequel series. He had left notes about a sequel which was folded into The Power of the Dark Crystal which was a script that then became a comic book series. Everything that was labeled or branded The Dark Crystal before was to talk to our show and not to be pushed aside, and that included a lot of the early development work.Īddis: There were notes but there were not notes left behind by Jim Henson about a prequel. Not to mention, we had Lisa Henson so this is something where we were told that everything that came before it vis a vis The Dark Crystal is canonical. We also had in the room a very nice man named Joe Lee who wrote the YA novels and had been immersed in this world for a very long time because he's written a quartet of novels for it. Grillo-Marxuach The sequels, we had access to all of that. There were in house sources that have cataloged all of the development of The Dark Crystal from the original up to the animated versions, all the comic books, all the YA books, all that stuff. So everything is documented to the nth degree. They have an archivist in house and of course Jim Henson is one of the most venerated creators in the history of pop culture. Grillo-Marxuach: The Jim Henson Company is very invested in archiving everything they do. Had Jim Henson left behind any notes about the further world of The Dark Crystal that he didn't get to explore in the movie? It was a good way to get everyone on board right from the beginning of this show is going to test the characters, push the characters. Matthews: It became a good catch phrase to crystalize this idea of complicated narrative, intertwining narrative with real stakes and emotional depth. Grilllo-Marxuach: No, I think I was the first person to say that actually because we were saying it in the writers room years ago. We approached this as a high fantasy with a great deal of human emotion to it so the comparison Game of Thrones with puppets is not an inapt one because our narrative goals were very close to what Game of Thrones has accomplished. That comes with a sh*t ton of assumptions. And I think that it's very easy to look at this show on the face of it and say this is a puppet show.

Grillo-Marxuach: Yes, and to expand on that, we call it that because one of the things that we get constantly with this is look, the Muppets were intended for an adult audience but also for a younger audience. We came up with something that we just loved. I remember our conversations came out of Bowie passing away and how you would do it now that Bowie passed away.

Would this have been before Bowie passed away?Īddiss: It was right around the time Bowie passed away. Every so often, I've leaned over to Lisa and be like, 'You know, we still got that Labyrinth pitch if you ever want to hear it.' But we have an idea for that.Īddiss: I don't know what Fede's is so I don't want to say, because I've definitely been hinting at them for a while that I would like to know more and they have not told me anything so I'm just going to hold it in. What was your idea for Labyrinth 2 since they're not doing it?Īddiss: I don't want to say because it's so good, I hope it rolls back around until I'm comfortable putting it back out in the news.

And we had a strong take and we just pitched our little hearts out. Louis was in that pitch and then a few weeks later we were in at Netflix because they had already knew they wanted to do the live-action after developing the animated. Then they said, 'We're very excited to meet with you about our prequel series.' We said, 'Okay, can we come back next week?' Came back the following week, pitched. We didn't know it was a prequel series, so we had a whole pitch for a sequel. So we went in and we pitched our little hearts out. It was pure luck and they were like, 'Would you be interested in The Dark Crystal ?' And I was like, 'Absolutely.' I grew up with that thing. 'We're not interested, but we are taking pitches on Dark Crystal. We were like, 'We've got an idea for Labyrinth ' and they're like, 'No.' Didn't even hear it. We had sold some things and had just enough name that we could start doing crazy things. Addiss: We called them and said we have a sequel idea for Labyrinth.

The dark crystal tv tropes