Matinee Science Playlist, Part 2: ‘The Dark Crystal’

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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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,

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. 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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

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.

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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 of other topics. Is it how stuff works, dot com, batutory proper FA