Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we are going to be talking about a childhood classic, I think for many people roughly our age or between our ages, the nineteen eighty six musical fantasy film Labyrinth, starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie, directed by Jim Henson. I was thinking, this is actually our second David Bowie film, since we did previously cover
Nicholas Rogues. The Man Who Fell to Earth, a very interesting, very good, but mood withering film about an alien who comes to our planet on a mission to save his own from catastrophic drought, but gets derailed by our culture's infinite and infinitely absorbing distractions like television, alcohol, and table tennis. You remember all the ping pong and The Man Who Fell to Earth.
I had kind of forgotten about the ping pong until you mentioned it, but that's a solid point.
Yeah. So, while it also stars David Bowie, Labyrinth I think is about as different a movie from the Man Who Fell to Earth as one could possibly imagine. Bowie's film career did have a lot of range. But thinking about this actually raised a kind of humorous question for me. Are there any similarities between the two movies? And the more I thought about it, I thought, actually, there kind of are, especially in the overall plot structure and the
journey of the hero. Both are stories in which the hero or heroine is transported to an alien world on an originally selfless quest to save their family or a family member from a terrible fate, but faces obstacles along the way, primarily in the form of temptations to go
off the path into narcissistic, self indulgent pursuits. So in the case of Labyrinth, the heroine is played by a young Jennifer Connolly, whose quest is to rescue her baby brother from a goblin related predicament of her own making.
And Connolly's character is I like the character because she is smart and brave, but begins the story as a very believable teenager, so self pitying and self absorbed, infuriated by the inconvenience of having to look after her screeching baby brother for an evening and wanting simultaneously to be free of her family and to achieve adult independence, but also at the same time to regress into childhood and avoid all responsibilities, like you know, hiding in her bedroom
with her dolls and costumes. And thus her challenges in the movie reflect these very common and relatable teenage character issues, like she's tempted along the way to give into defeatism and selfishness in the forms of both self pity and
self indulgence. In the end, she emerges much more successfully than Bowie's character and the Man Who Fell to Earth, though, as we were discussing off Mike before recording, the exact mechanics of her victory over the goblin King Jarith are somewhat difficult to schematize.
That's right. This is a movie that I've seen so many times over the years as a child, as an adult, you know, as a parent, and so forth, And no matter what phase of my life I am in, I never completely get the details on how she defeats Jarreth, but I never doubt the victory, like it's the emotional
accuracy of it feels one hundred percent there. This is a film that will come back to this, I think over and over again, but I think it speaks more on an emotional level than it does on a logical level, and I can't help but assume that that is one of the factors playing into the disconnect between the way the adult world reacted to this film when it came out in eighty six and the way scores and scores of children reacted to it over the years as they grew up with the film.
Yeah, I think we'll have a lot to say about this as we go on, But oh, we haven't yet gotten to one of the main things you would need to know to understand Labyrinth if you've never seen it and have no idea of what's going on here, and it's a movie full of muppets. This is a Jim Hinson production, so the fantasy elements and characters are achieved through the use of some of the best puppetry ever
committed to film. Labyrinth came out a few years after Hinson's previous fantasy movie, The Dark Crystal from nineteen eighty two, which I would say personally is probably the high watermark for puppetry driven movies, Like I don't know what could really be said to surpass it, And it's interesting to compare the two films. We might also discuss that more as we go on. But coming back to what you were saying, Rob, about the way children reacted to Labyrinth
versus the way a lot of adults did. I also, Yeah, I get the impression that for a lot of people who were kids in the eighties, Labyrinth was just part of the common texture of childhood, as uncritically accepted and culturally canonical as Star Wars or Et or the mainline muppets like Kermit and Miss Piggy.
Was that your experience, Rob, Yeah, I mean, I don't remember how exactly Labyrinth was initially introduced into our lives. I think maybe we rented it from the video store on VHS, but we liked it so much that we purchased a VHS copy of Labyrinth. We watched it so many times that we broke the VHS tape and we actually had to go take it to be repaired. I don't even know I repaired. Yeah, we had it repaired.
I don't know who did that kind of thing. What the price point was, I assumed cheaper than buying a new VHS tape. So it was repaired and returned to us. But after that, the audio and the tape was warped from there on out. So part of me still sort of pines for a certain like electronic warping sound to be present in the film even when it's not.
What does the fire Gang song sound like? When it's even more.
Discombobulated, it sounds weirder and more threatening? Okay, I know, as if that were possible. How about you, do you remember how Labyrinth came into your life? Show?
Well? Actually, I'm this is weird because I feel like I should know for sure one way or another about this, but I can only say what I think is the case. I think I actually never saw this movie in full when I was a kid, and yet I had full awareness of it as like a movie that was part of the common culture and that everybody liked. And I think I really never sat down and saw the whole thing until I was an adult.
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of movies like that where they're just I mean, it's really a film like this becomes a part of the atmosphere. You can't help but breathe it in, and you have no idea how it originally came into your house, you know, I just seep through the.
Walls but I will have some more things to say about it when when we get back to I don't know, maybe when we talk about the critical reception. I do remember being surprised by some things about it when I saw it, either for the first time ever in my life or for the first time as an adult, whichever that was. You know, when I saw it in my in my thirties, it wasn't exactly what I expected, And maybe we can talk about some reasons for that when
we get into some stuff about the critical reception. Yeah, but don't misinterpret me. I love Labyrinth. I mean, it's just it's a trip. There's not there's not really anything like it. The closest I could compare it to, I guess is The Dark Crystal. But actually that's a totally different kind of story, totally different kind of world and movie. There. There really just is nothing like Labyrinth I can think of.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it is. It's in many ways, as we'll discuss, it's it was the logical next step after Dark Crystal, but it and it is as ambitious a film in some respect in its use of groundbreaking puppetry, you know, pushing the boundaries of what puppetry can do while also looking to puppetry's past and finding things to uh, you know, to to to utilize and reinvent. But it is a very different story. It's a very different like
entertainment product in its own way. Yeah, So we'll get into some of those differences and similarities as we go here. All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear just a little trailer audio for Jim Henson's Labyrinth.
Tri Star Pictures announces the collaboration of three extraordinary talents, Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets and Dark Crystal.
Where you want what I hay like that?
George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars Saga, and one of the most innovative forces in modern entertainment, David Bowie. Together they will take you into a dazzling world of fantasy and adventure.
There's nothing to be afraid of, a world.
Where anything seems possible and nothing is what it seems.
Everything I've done, I've done for I move the stars of novels.
The world of Labyrinth.
All right, if you want to go watch Labyrinth or rewatch Labyrinth before proceeding with the rest of this podcast episode, well more power to you. This one is widely available in all formats and the special this is one of those releases where I feel like the special editions just keep rolling out. The limited edition steal book from shout
Factory looks really good. I was just getting some some like social media ads about this the other day, and I I feel like it's one of these things where I don't own labyrinth ons and like a special edition physical media release, but I'm always tempted to get one, and each time they roll out a new one, I'm like, oh, this is the one, this is the one.
I should get.
That they keep upping the ante. But yeah, there are a number of been a number of releases, and again that shout Factory product looks really nice.
You know. I wonder if to people out in the disc publishing world, is it especially movies that have nostalgic tie ins to people's childhood that are most likely to get bought up with these like big elaborate special edition blu rays and boxes that you know, the special cases and the posters and all the accessories that come with them. I would have to think that nostalgia is a big driver in selling these kind of things.
Yeah, I would guess so. But then again, I look at my own experience and I think the most money I've ever paid for a Blu ray was for a special edition of Fool Cheese Conquest that came with a special slipcase. And I can't quite explain why, because this is not a movie I watched as a child. I don't have that kind of deep nostalgia for it. But I have a certain depth of nostalgia for the film, and for some reason, it's like I had to have it.
You know, maybe it's like the fomo of a special release slipcase and you're just like, somehow I've missed this. I must have it. Yes, I will pay extra for it on eBay.
There is something really perversely enjoyable about getting an elaborate, lavish, lovingly produced edition of a movie that is grimy and gauzy and is just really concerned with pus.
Yeah. Yeah, it has a prize place in the drawer where I keep the discs. All right, well, let's get into the folks involved in the creation of this picture, starting at the time, of course, with Jim Henson. This is the first time we've really talked about Jim Henson on the show before, you know, in depth. You know, work comes up time and time again, and I'm blanking on to what extent we've ever discussed something that the
Creature Shop was involved in. It's possible the Creature Shop has come up directly in an episode or two, but at any rate, Jim Henson is the director, he has a story credit. He is also an uncredited Goblin performer. There were a lot of Goblin performances in this puppetry wise, he lived nineteen thirty six through nineteen ninety easily one of, if not the most important puppeteers of the twentieth century. I recently watched the excellent twenty twenty four documentary Jim
Henson Idea Man. This was directed by Ron Howard, and I believe it's currently streaming on Disney in most places.
And this documentary does a really, really great, really entertaining job of discussing Hinson, largely from the standpoint of his ambition and his dreams, also getting the you know, litle bit into his personal life, his family life, and of course his professional life being like the main focus because it's about, you know how all these ideas he had ultimately the limited amount of time he had to pull them off and yeah, like he was a guy that's
just constantly coming up with concepts that so many things that didn't even come to fruition, Like he really had all these plans for a nightclub at one point. Well yeah, yeah, and I'd seen these some illustrations, some concept art that he'd put together for this at the Center for Puppetry Arts in a museum display years ago. But they get into this in the documentary as well.
New York's Hottest Club is muppet essentially.
Like even one of the things that they drive home in that documentary is that even you know, early on, he was drawn more to the power of television than he was to puppetry itself, though of course puppetry became
his core performance medium. And yeah, he continued to push the boundaries of what was possible with puppets, the sorts of audiences they could be reached through puppets, sometimes like initially like rebelling against you know, a box that he helped draw for himself, like going from becoming you know, the the creator of Sesame Street in this you know, huge property for children, and then breaking out and doing something like The Muppet Show and beyond and again, you know,
incorporating diverse traditions of puppetry along the way related performance styles, and pushing into new frontiers of things like animatronics, which we see in this film, and even you know, late in his career got a little bit into into CGI and looking at what computer generated imagery could do, though often through sort of the guise of puppetry, like you know, some sort of like computer animated face that is controlled by like live action puppeteering.
Is the owl at the beginning of Labyrinth and the credit sequence is that CGI?
I believe it is. Yeah, I believe that's like early I would argue largely effective CGI. It maybe doesn't look as cool now as it did when I was a kid, but it still looks pretty good. It's not you know, I feel like it mostly it's yeah for eighty six especially Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
Of course, Hinson is famous for his Muppet based shows, again, particularly Sesame Street and all the various series and films to spin off of the Muppet Show, but of course his creative output also includes the excellent Storyteller series we've referenced on the show before, both the first season and then the Greek season. I still hold those up as excellent nineteen eighty two's Dark Crystal, and of course eighty
six is Labyrinth. This would prove to be his last full length feature film directorial effort before his untimely death in nineteen ninety at the age of fifty three.
Yeah. So I guess this brings us back to the comparison between The Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. I love them both, though I think the Dark Crystal is a little more impressive to me just because of the format of its storytelling and its ambitions in that regard, in that The Dark Crystal has no human characters in it. You know, the Dark Crystal is not a like a fairy tale integrated with our world as a kind of you know, bridge fantasy from regular life like Labyrinth is.
The Dark Crystal is like a mythology that has nothing to do with Earth, and there are no humans and no Earth history and no Earth technology. It's just this totally different world and everything in it is pure imagination.
Yeah, I mean, it's otherworldly, and and in fact that the initial cut was maybe a little too otherworldly for some test audiences because they had all these constructed languages, so the sketchies are speaking a strange tongue and so forth, and they had to do like subsequent cuts where they added actual like English language dialogue to the picture. So, you know, the Dark Crystal was certainly like aiming for
something epic and strange and wonderful and achieve that. And so Labyrinth seems to be an attempt to make something that has the same vision and the same you know, like level of detail going into every nook and cranny of the picture, but also calibrating all of that more towards like pure popular entertainment, you know, music, humor, whimsy, and build everything around relatable human actors, one a youth and the other a very popular musician.
Yeah, Labyrinth to me seems like it's taking a lot of the same creativity and creative energy behind The Dark Crystal, but lightening the tone a bit and connecting it to the human world with a human protagonist, and also orienting the story a little. I mean, you could say in both cases that probably the primary marketing was directed towards kids. But the Dark Crystal is pretty as the title would imply dark and Labyrinth I think is probably you would argue a little bit more kid friendly.
Yeah, I mean, you still I certainly know people in real life who are like, yeah, I never liked Dark Crystal. It was too scary for me. It's too scary for me now. And and that will come into play here in a second, because when Labyrinth came out in eighty six, it was famously a commercial and critical failure. It was it was one of a certified bomb, you know, and one that, apparently, according to that documentary, hit Hintson really hard.
You know, he ultimately was able to, you know, to roll with the punches and you know, move on to the next thing. But I think, you know, everybody put a lot of love into Labyrinth and were really bummed out when critics didn't like it and when audiences didn't come out to see it. But of course, as is sometimes the case with films like this, the children did
end up seeing it. They might not have seen it at the theater, their parents might not have taken them, but they ended up renting it or seeing it on television. They told each other about it, they watched it and
rewatched it. They grew up with it, and as such it has it has built up this cult following over the years, and it has become this much beloved film that is, you know, not this not in any way tarnish the careers of those involved, but is sometimes like one of the most iconic things they ever did.
Yeah, as I was saying earlier, it's one of those movies where, again to sort of interpret my perception of its place and culture, it was a movie where you wouldn't, even if you were a child, question whether it was good or not, or whether there could be anything wrong with it. It's just like it's the canon. It is the canon of storytelling.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and yeah, And like I said, you grow up with them and sometimes you do reevaluate these things, but maybe they do have an advantage because they've been with you so long. And if it's a film like Labyrinth, I feel like it's, you know, its flaws are not enough to defeat that fire that was implanted in you early on with the film. But again, the grown up world of film critics did not feel the same way.
I was reviewing some of these, and it's interesting. So Leonard Malton, a mere four years before he was killed by Grimlins and Grimy too, he gave one of the very few favorable like mainstream reviews for Labyrinth. Ebert gave one that I think he gave it two out of two stars total, and you know, like a generally like an Ebert review, it's you know, it's not unkind it it points out things he really likes, but ultimately it
doesn't see the logic in the picture. And then Gene Siskel his review, if you want to dig that one up, is one of the most brutal film reviews I've ever seen. I'm mad he is mad. Not only does he not like Labyrinth, he seems to have hated everything about it and everyone in it.
Yeah. Actually, so we were reading this off mic and this brought up a kind of funny difference between Ebert and Siskel. You know, it's not across the board this way, but I feel like more often when Roger Ebert didn't like a movie, he had a kind of sense of humor about it, whereas Gene Siskel was more likely to come off as like really offended by the fact that a movie was bad like him.
Yeah, yeah, well that definitely holds true when you look at Cisco's review of Elabyrinth. Yeah, he called it quite awful and visually ugly, which I mean, you know, say what you will about Jim Henson Pictures and you know, you don't have to like them. But I mean, generally most people acknowledge that there's a lot of you know, great visual design that goes into these things. But you know, I don't know, everyone's entitled to their opinion.
I guess you might have different levels of personal tolerance, and this might be a very learned thing. Personal tolerance for ugly beautiful, like to see the beauty in designs that are meant to be ugly but capture ugliness in an exquisite way, which a lot of a lot of this movie does. It has monsters in it that are not supposed to be like, you know, Hoggle is not supposed to look super attractive, but Hoggle looks wonderful, and the goblins are not supposed to look like attractive people.
They look like goblins, but they are beautiful goblins. I feel like Ciskel is just not approaching the movie with a tolerance for that kind of ambition at all.
Yeah. So again, critics hated it, and people who listened to critics, you know, probably decided, well, maybe we'll skip this one since everyone seems to hate it so much or dislike it or find it lacking, and I was reading an article or a chapter rather in the Wider Worlds of Jim Henson. It's a book that came out
years back. There's a part in it by the author Tom Holst, and it's titled finding your Way through the Labyrinth, and he points out that some parents are also thought to have kept their kids away due to negative experiences
bringing them to see the Dark Crystal. Earlier, folks had heard oh the Dark Crystal is going to be you know, from the maker of the Muppets in the Sesame Street, and it was maybe a little too scary, and so that might have kept them from going out to see Labyrinth when it came out, for fear that there would be a similar experience. Finally, this is another thing that
Holst points out. We also look at Labyrinth in the way it connects, though to various other themes explored in other Hintson projects, including some of his short film works. That some of those did have buppets and some of them didn't. But these different themes include a fractured view of time, the theme of being trapped a film as a metatext, and the trappings of superficiality. So those are all worth keeping in mind as we continue to discuss the movie here.
Yeah, Rewatching Labyrinth with this knowledge of its reception history is odd and interesting because you have this contrast, like the as we've been talking about the Chili reception it got from critics and people pointing out all of these things that are arguably flaws with it, flaws in the storytelling, flaws in the design, flows in the acting, and so forth.
And at the same time you contrast that with what I've been saying about I'm pretty sure I'm right about this, the way that so many kids just totally accepted this movie as part of the very fabric of childhood. And I was trying to think what accounts for that difference. And I think Labyrinth is a movie where you could easily nitpick a lot of things about it if you're not along for the ride. But if you're along for the ride, it's just perfect and you don't question anything.
And so the real question is are you along for this ride or not? And what determines if someone will be or will not be along for the ride, Like clearly Gene Siskel was, he did not agree to be along for the ride. It's almost in this regard. I was thinking the inverse of a movie we talked about a few weeks ago, Ridley Scott's Legend. Legend is a movie made of amazing parts, but somehow it is less than the some of those parts. Something about it just
doesn't quite click as a story overall. Labyrinth, on the other hand, I think has I mean, of course it it also has amazing parts, and you know, great character designs and puppetry and all that, but it has a lot of specific stuff you could criticize if you were so inclined, But if you just take the movie as an indivisible whole, the way you a lot of times kids take movies as just a totally absorbing experience that
you don't really think about critically. It would never even occur to you that any part of it could be less than perfect. It's just the ride you're on, and it's it's amazing.
I was thinking about something along these lines when I was swimming lapse this morning that like, for me, a movie is often like a Frankenstein's Monster. You know, yeah, you know, sometimes it's made from the most beautiful pieces imaginable and that you can't even see the stitch work and then other times it's ghastly. The stitches are raw and apparent, you know, and there are other like design problems.
But at the end of the experiment, if the creature can rise up and it has something like, you know, cohesive life to it, then like then you buy it. Like that, that's the thing. It has to be able to walk out of the laboratory. Yeah, and if it does, then yeah, the movie like works at least on some
sort of level that I can get behind. And it's it's interesting because you have sometimes you do have a beautiful monster that's there on the slab, But if the spark doesn't happen, if it doesn't rise up, then you know, what can you do?
Yeah, but Labyrinth is getting up and walking, It's it's running around, it's dancing, it's taking its head off and tossing it to the monster next door.
Yep, absolutely, all right, let's see other folks involved here. A story credit goes to Dennis Lee born nineteen thirty nine. He'd previously worked as a composer on Fraggle Rock and We Could would continue to work in the music department and as a composer on subsequent Hints and projects. He is also an author and poet for children. Some of his poems were adapted into the nineteen ninety two TV
movie Alligator Pie. And then, of course we have a screenplay credit to Terry Jones, who have nineteen forty two through twenty twenty the legendary Monty Python, writer, director, performer, and medieval historian. Jones worked on an early draft of the screenplay, and he retains the credit here, though I'm to understand only some of his original ideas remain. But I've always felt that you still get a very strong Pythhonian vibe off of the film.
Yes, I couldn't tell you exactly what those elements are off the top of my head, but I can feel the ghost of Monty Python in this beast.
I feel like the specific things that feel like Terry Jones. And I could be wrong on this, you know, this is often the case the most authentic thing and a work is actually the most fake and so forth. But I always get a strong Terry Jones vibe from the part where where Hoggle is spraying the fairies because we find out it's because fairies bite. Yes, that feels very Terry Jones. And then the logic puzzle of the door
Guardians that we hear we encounter later on. That also feels very Terry Jones, and I again could be wrong in both of those cases.
No, I agree with you there So.
Jones apparently worked off a novella by Dennis Lee, as well as the drawings of artists Brian Froud who will come back to But the shooting script apparently had a number of different fingerprints on it. You had like Jim Henson, of course, producer George Lucas Fraggle, writer Laura Phillips, and also writer Elaine May. Anyway, Terry Jones is best known
for his work with Money Python. He co directed Holy Grail in seventy five, Monty Python and The Holy Grail, and directed both Life of Brian and seventy nine and The Meaning of Life in eighty three, followed by various works including nineteen eighty nine's Eric the Viking. He wrote numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including nineteen eighty's Chaucer's Knight, The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary. All right, of course, as we've been saying, this is a David Bowie film.
David Bowie, who lived nineteen forty seven through twenty sixteen
plays Jareth the Goblin King Again. We previously talked about David Bowie in our episode on The Man Who Fell to Earth, and here we return once more to what would become one of his most iconic film roles, and rather than revisit everything we said before, I thought we might instead just sort of position Labyrinth within his filmography and his discography, So in the case of the latter, it falls between his nineteen eighty four album Tonight and nineteen eighty seven's Never Let Me Down Now.
I love David Bowie, but I don't know either of these albums. I don't think I've ever listened to them.
I had never listened to them before. I had listened to them both at least a couple of times through each bill while researching and doing notes for this episode, because, like the former was long considered and I think maybe it is still considered one of his lesser albums and was poorly received, though it was apparently re released with new instrumentation and the deletion of a track titled Too Dizzy. But again, I didn't listen to the original version of
the album. All I have is this, I believe the new version that's on the streaming platforms to listen to, and you know, I can't compare, but you know, I didn't hate it. The reggae elements are interesting. The title track is a duet with Tina Turner, and he collaborated with Iggy Pop on some of the tracks as well. And then Never Let Me Down was an attempt apparently to sort of course correct, but was also poorly received. Even though you have a track. There's one track, Shining Star,
which features a rap by Mickey Rourke. You I would think that would be successful, but I don't know. But again, I listened to this all the way through and I didn't hate anything. I really liked the track Bang Bang, which is an Iggy Pop cover. Oh and then Time Will Crawl is also one that I thought was pretty good.
But Bowie himself would end up distancing himself from both of these albums later on, so you could sort of see this as like, from his standpoint, you know, this was kind of like a low point in his creative output. Now on the film front, this one occurs after John Landis's nineteen eighty five thriller Into the Night and Julian Temple's Absolute Beginners. The same year, and he'd follow it up with nineteen eighty nine's The Last Temptation of Christ.
So it's interesting that while the mid eighties are not considered the high point of his musical output, in Labyrinth, at least he busts out one of what would become his most iconic roles ever, and also a soundtrack album's worth a material I think, with five tracks in total that I think have stood the test of time, like these are beloved songs today, even though at the time, again the movie was not a critical or financial success, and it's I don't think he ever performed a single
one of these songs live, you know. I think he, like a lot of people, just kind of like rolled with the punches and just moved on from Labyrinth, even though it would go on to generate this kind of love and this kind of an audience.
I think Bowie's presence in this movie is very interesting to analyze. On one hand, he is, you know, he's David Bowie, so he's captivating whenever he's on screen. On the other hand, he seems a little checked out. Did you feel the same way, Like it seems like he's his engagement with the material and in his scenes is often it seems quite muted and like he's he's a little bit hazy.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things where and we kind of got into this a little bit with in the episode of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Like these tendencies might also ultimately benefit the character, because what is Jareth Jareth is he is a tyrant. He is like a manchild who has apparently grown perhaps from infancy into this position of great power without any checks and balances in place. And so yeah, maybe he does
kind of check out at times because he can. He can do so, he's he's a little bit aloof you know, he's vain, but he's also vulnerable. He's charismatic and can also be quite cruel. Like there are a number of sort of paradoxes with this guy.
Yeah, he's villainous, he can be cruel, but he's also a little bit dreamy at a i don't know, a slightly reduced state of consciousness.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, ultimately he's of the fairy folk in his own way. Now, one thing that I was thinking about is that the character of Jared is never fully explained here, not in the final cut of the film, you know, And I've read that like Hinson and Lucas kind of like went back and forth on the final edit, where Hinson would have more dialogue and Lucas would cut dialogue and then they'd kind of like find the balance.
So maybe an earlier cut it went into this, but you don't really know like what he is or why he's there, Like he's the King of the Goblins, but he's obviously or presumably not a Goblin himself. And apparently at some time, at some points in pre production, they intended for Jareth to be a more darkly satanic, more in line with what Legend does with darkness, and knowing what Legend was going to do with that character, they
kind of went in a different direction. But I've read that in an earlier draft of the script it was revealed that Jareth was once a mortal who solved the Labyrinth. And then I also have a Labyrinth bestiari by St. Binde, and she writes that Jareth himself was a changeling, so he was brought into the Goblin realm as an infant to serve as the heir to the previous Goblin ruler. I guess it's because goblins need a ruler, and none of them want to do it themselves, Like can't we
steal a baby to do this? Can't we train a baby to do this? And the answer is yes, that's how they live their lives.
I have a question, which is is it fun to be the Goblin King? I see the goblins having fun, They're you know, horsing around the getting into all kinds of mischief, But David Bowie seems to be just kind of languidly presiding over all the mischief. Is he having fun being Goblin King?
I think he gets bored and I think he gets I think there's a lot of anxiety there. You know, we see like his boredom often turns into cruelty. And yeah, he is also deeply invested in the theft of this baby, in the acquisition of Sarah. I think because he feels like like there's incompleteness in his life and in the stability of his reign, Like he needs fresh blood, he needs an air, He needs someone who loves him as opposed to just the goblins, who certainly serve him. But
I think love would be a strong word. And that's where Sarah comes in. Sarah is, of course, played by Jennifer Connelly born nineteen seventy Academy Award winning actress whose credits as a child actress date back to a nineteen eighty two episode of Rhaldahl's anthology series Tales of the Unexpected. It's one. I don't think I've seen this one, but it's titled Stranger in Town. It stars Derek Jacoby, and
I included it's still from it. Here you can see a very young Jennifer Connolly standing there next to a Derek Jacoby in a ridiculous, I don't know, some sort of a jester or magician costume. Yeah, a cross between the two, okay. She also pops up in the music video for Duran Durand's Union of the Snake from nineteen eighty three. I think she's supposed to be like a
cult member or something cool. And she followed this up with a small role in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America that's an eighty four l and then Dario Argento's Phenomena in nineteen eighty five opposite Donald pleasants Joe. I still haven't seen this one, so you'll have to summarize.
It's impossible to summarize the plot of Phenomena. It involves. It involves like, I think, a super intelligent chimpanze and swarms of insects that are controlled by a psychic and I don't know, because it's it's Jallo film, so he has like murders at a Swiss boarding school, of course, and I don't know. I can't describe it all. But it does involve Donald pleasance and a chimpanzee and insects and murder mysteries, and Jennifer Connolly is the main character.
All right. So these are essentially the credits that led into her playing Sarah in Labyrinth at the age of fourteen, at least in the early stages of the production, and her subsequent credits would include the likes of nineteen ninety one's The Rocketeer, ninety eight's Dark City, two thousands, Requiem for a Dream two thousand and one, is a Beautiful Mind two thousand and threes, Hulk, twenty fourteen's Noah, and the TV series Snow Piercer.
I think she's great in all those later movies, By the way, some of the ones I remember really standing out to me were like Dark City, and all that. But you know, I remember liking her even in movies that I liked less overall, Like I remember thinking A Beautiful Mind is just kind of some some oscar bait. But you know, Jennifer Connolly is always great.
Yeah, yeah, I really enjoy on snow Piercer Now. Sarah's parents are only briefly in the film, but as the only other two adult humans present, they deserve mention. Shelley Thompson born nineteen fifty nine plays Sarah's stepmother, a Canadian actor and director whose credits also include eighty five episodes of Trailer Park Boys.
Really Yeah Wow.
And then Sarah's father is played by Christopher Malcolm who
lived nineteen forty six through twenty fourteen. A Scottish born actor of stage and screen who actually originated the role of Brad in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show, which become The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and he appears in Richard O'Brien's nineteen eighty one follow up to Rocky Horror, Shock Treatment, and he also had small roles in nineteen eighties Superman two and The Empire Strikes Back, and he has a role in Highlander, a role that I think
I always forget that this features into the plot, even the slightest. But there's like a vigilante character running the streets in Highlander, and Christopher Malcolm plays that digilante. I think he's killed by the Kurgan. It's a very forgettable part of the film. Yeah, this one is one that felt like an insert from another dimension, Like really that was part of this film that I've seen multiple times.
But I guess so if you say Internet okay, And of course there's a long list of Muppet performers and voice actors and other creatives. They include the likes of Warwick Davis, Kenny Baker, Kevin Klash, Stephen Whitmeyer, Frank Oz, Karen Prell, Dave Goles, Jim Hinson himself, of course, and his son Brian Hinson born nineteen sixty three, who voices Hoggle,
who of course is Sarah's. The word friend is thrown around a lot, and I guess we'd get there eventually, but mostly he just betrays her over and over again. But yes, Brian Hinson provides the voice there, but he.
Helps her too, and yeah, it's a you know, your friendship is something you grow into.
Yeah, he's I just love the parts where he's like, He's like, she's my friend, I won't betray her. And then Jared is like, Holdtle, I need you to poison her, and he's like, all right, I'll do it. So anyway, we'll come back to some of these individuals as we proceed here, but I will point out that among the voice actors, Michael Horden, who lived in nineteen eleven through nineteen ninety five, provides the voice of the wise Man,
the one with the bird on his hat. He's also known for his performance as the voice of Frith, the sun god in nineteen seventy eight's Watershipped Down, and his other credits include sixty three's Cleopatra, sixty Eights Where Eagles Dare, seventy threes Theater of Blood, seventy five's Barry Lindon. In nineteen eighty two is Gandhi.
Theater of bloods eventsent Price movie, Yeah, with almost the same plot as Doctor Fibes, except with a more overtly comedic Hammi theater orientation Shakespearean theater.
All right, we mentioned Brian Froud earlier conceptual designer and costume designer born nineteen forty seven English fantasy illustrator who had worked with Alan Lee on the nineteen seventy eight book Fairies. His work often calls back to nineteenth century and early twentieth century fantasy illustration, particularly like fairytale inspiration.
And I've heard from friends who have seen him speak in the past that he's something of like a true believer in fairy folk like he doesn't just draw the fairies, he knows that they are real. He of course served as a conceptual as the conceptual designer on The Dark Crystal previously, he also later worked on The Storyteller. His other conceptual artist credits include two thousand and three's Peter
Penn in twenty sixteen's Pete's Dragon Interesting as well. He met his wife, Wendy on the set of The Dark Crystal. She worked in the creature workshop on that film and also on this film as well, and they had a son, Toby famously born eighty four, who of course plays baby Toby,
Sarah's brother in this picture. So real life. Toby has gone onto work in special effects and animation on such films as two thousand and fourteen's The Box Trolls and the twenty nineteen series The Dark Crystal, The Age of Resistance.
Oh nice, but yeah, you actually do get to see a real baby crying in this movie though. I was watching close when the Goblin King Jarrett starts like throwing him really high up in the air. That is a doll. That's not the real baby.
That's good. I mean his parents were on set. They weren't going to allow that to happen. Okay. Alex Thompson was cinematographer on this. I only mentioned it because we brought We mentioned him briefly in Legend, same cinematographer as Legend, so that's that's interesting. And then you know, music is a big part of this film. Trevor Jones did the score. Born nineteen forty nine, South African composer with some very
impressive credentials going back to the late seventies. The other scores include ex Caliber from eighty one, eighty two's The Cinder, The Dark Crystal, eighty five's Runaway Train, eighty seven's Angel Heart, eighty eights, Mississippi Burning, ninety two is Free Jack, as well as the Last of the Mohicans Dark City, and two thousand and one is from Hell and He's Still still active.
I wonder if he's still getting residuals on free Jack.
Well, one would hope. Now I'm not current enough on all of his scores, or even most of his scores. I've never seen The Cinder, but it's it's on my list. But I think his score for The Dark Crystal is really really good, and I love the glistening electronic splendor of his work in Labyrinth here fused, of course, with the musical stylings of David Bowie. And again, yes, David Bowie's music is key here as well. It is a full fledged musical featuring five original tracks from David Bowie.
We'll come back to these as we go, but they are Underground, Magic Dance, Chili Down, as the World Falls Down, and within You.
I say, possibly the opening track Underground is the most memorable for me, like as a good song. But what's the most memorable just as an experience. I think it might be Chili Down? Which is that? I don't know, is this song terrifying, horrible, wonderful? What is going on?
There's a lot to process with Chili Down. I think I think all of us who began watching Labyrinth as a child are still trying to figure out how we feel about Chili Down, and of course the sights and traumas that accompany it. Like if you went into this film having found the Dark Crystal uncomfortable, then the Chili Down sequence is basically like a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, but luckily the rest of Labyrinth doesn't have quite the same flavor.
Yeah. But it is that track Underground that plays with the opening credits, with the CGI owl, because it's got these lines that are uh, these are quite memorable. It says it's only for forever. It's not long at all.
Yeah, Yeah, which fits nicely into this treatment of time in this picture. But yeah, I love the score when it hits us, the score that transitions into Bowie's Underground, a track that's going to play again in the closing credits. Yeah, lyrically, I think it's a It's a song that really captures both Sarah's emotional state and the temptations of the Goblin King.
You know, it just feels emotionally on point as we enter in at first, not necessarily not really into the world of the Labyrinths just yet, but into the real world, into the mundane world that Sarah finds herself trapped in like this is a film that's ultimately about her being trapped in a fantasy world, but in the beginning she is trapped in her mundane life.
So yeah, the action begins in a beautiful outdoor location. Actually the place that's almost shockingly green. It's this park with a small river running through it, stone bridges, lush grass, and these dark, shadowy trees. I am pretty sure this was shot at a place called west Wycombe Park in the UK. I looked it up to do some comparison. But in the foreground of this shot we get the animated owl from the credits, which has become a live
action owl, which settles on a granite obelisk. And then in the background, our heroine, Sarah played by Jennifer Connelly comes running into the scene over one of these low stone bridges, and when we first meet her, she's dressed in a costume, a sort of a Renaissance era gown with a garland in her hair. And I think this is meant to be a kind of fake out, like we might assume that the movie takes place in another time period, but no, it turns out she is I
think rob Let me know if you disagree. I think she's supposed to be rehearsing for a play, and she's apparently in costume for that, but either way, she's practicing some kind of lines. She's trying to memorize something from a book, and as she runs and dances through the park, she says her lines, and the lines go like this. They are important because they recur throughout the film. She says, give me the child through dangers untold and hardship's unnumber.
I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen for my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great. And then she starts to stumble. She can't remember the next line, and she struggles for a bit and then eventually gets the book out of her pocket and looks at it and remembers the next line is you have no power over me.
After she gets the line, thundercracks, a rainstorm is beginning, and a nearby clock tower strikes at seven o'clock and Sarah realizes, oh, she is late for something. So we get to see her run back through the park through a neighborhood through sort of downtown area of a small town in the rain to get back home, and her adorable shaggy dog Merlin is with her. By the way. He's one of these mop like dog breeds, sort of more fur than body. I don't know what breed that is,
but I love Merlin. Question is Merlin the same dog as Ambrosious, the dog of Sir Didymus later in the story, or is that a different dog?
Oh? You know, I'm not sure if we're I mean, in a sense, definitely, but in terms of dog actors maybe.
Okay, So I know it's not part of the main fantasy setting, which is the real draw of the film. But for some reason, I also really love the real world locations at the beginning of the movie, the park, the town, and the storefronts, the rainy neighborhood. I think they look wonderful and they're this interesting mix of dreary but lovely.
Yeah, and it it really works because the more we see of Sarah's real life, we realize that, yeah, it's like she's she's not to discount her displeasure or her emotions, you know, because of course these are gonna be going to be very subjective and all, but like you know, she is what she is in what to all appearances would look like a very comfortable house and a very comfortable life, but that is not how she feels. She
feels very set upon. She feels that she is trapped here and deserally wants escape.
Yes, so, and when we see that conflict immediately when Sarah gets home, she's confronted on the porch by her stepmother. Sarah is late. She was supposed to be home to babysit her little brother Toby so her father and stepmother could go out for the evening, and there are sort of multiple levels of conflict. Sarah is very frustrated and put upon. She resents being asked to babysit when she
should be outliving her own life. But then her stepmother says, basically, well, if you had plans, you could have told me I'd like for you to go out and have dates in a social life. And it's almost like the fact that her stepmother is not being more unreasonable further enrages Sarah, and she runs upstairs, yelling, pouting that apparently she can't
do anything right. And I like this relatively complex depiction of teen angst because it feels real to me, like the conflict is not one dimensional or about just a single subject. Instead, it seems that Sarah is living in a stew of many conflicting emotions and desires, all of which are thwarted at the same time, Like she wants to be an adult and have independence and self determination,
but feels like something is preventing her. But also there are signs that she wants to go the other way and regress into the self centered mind space of childhood and just be free of all responsibilities and all cares about others. And we see this in the way that she hides in a room and finds solace in her collection of stuffed animals, and later in the way she
unfairly projects resentment onto her baby brother. And I think that feeling of complex and even mutually exclusive, thwarted desires is very relatable to anybody who remembers being a teenager themselves, Like I remember what that felt like in a way where it was just like everything was confusing and frustrating and nothing felt right and there wasn't actually one single cause of it. It's just that that's what it's like to be fifteen or sixteen. The conflict here isn't just about babysitting.
Yeah, and it's not that your stepmom is telling you to go water a stump. Yeah yeah, yeah. And so of course she goes to her room, and boy, what a room it is. I think we've talked about kids rooms on the show before, but this is always something that I pay a lot of attention to when I watch a film. How have you decorated this child's room? Did you just print out some stuff from Getty Images and you're pretending it's a poster or did you use real posters? You know? Is it all fake franchise stuff?
Does it feel like a child actually lived in this room or not? And I think they do just a fabulous job with Sarah's room here, with her reality of stuff, which is going to be vitally important to the plot, of course, but it also needs to feel real.
Yeah. What are her music posters? She have like staying on the wall or something.
Yeah.
Yeah. But also we see in the room. I think it's in her room that there's a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. That really caught my eye because currently my daughter is obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are? She calls it Max Boat you know, Max gets in a boat goes across the ocean.
Oh that's a great one. Yeah, yeah, we read that one a lot too.
She likes to here where the wild things are, like while she's eating, she's having dinner, and she wants us to read it to her while she's having dinner, which we indulge in sometimes.
And what's her favorite wild thing?
Well, honestly, I think it's Max. She likes Max. He's the king of the wild things. He's the one who says it's time to let the wild rump us begin.
So all right, solid solid.
I don't know. Maybe as we continue to read it over time, she'll she'll find more more to love down the character sheet. But anyway, Sarah is left to take care of Toby while her parents go out, and so she discovers at some point that one of her old stuffed animals I think it's named Lancelot. It's like a teddy bear named Lancelot has been taken from her room and given to the baby, and this makes her even
more angry. And then the baby's crying and she doesn't know how to make him stop, which again, you know, is a relatable feeling. It does create this feeling of helplessness, and while in the middle of all these frustrations about to boil over, Sarah suddenly gets an idea, a terrible idea, an idea that seems to be related to the book or the play that she's been memorizing. She gets the idea to, I think, sort of say a magic spell from whatever the story is that makes goblins come and
take a child away. And this actually leads to one of my favorite little stylistic choices, one of my favorite editing moments in the movie. So when she's trying to remember the words to say to summon the goblin magic and remove Toby from her life, suddenly, with no warning at all, we just cut to a bunch of goblin faces waiting with baited breath for her to say the words. They're like yelling at each other, like know listen She's
gonna say the words. Such an odd and surprising choice, the way we just smash cut to goblins with no previous introduction or even indication that they exist. Everything up to this point has been fully realistic, no fantasy elements at all, and so the first time we see anything magical is an absolutely unexpected smash cut. It almost reminds me of the moment in the Exorcist when Reagan is at the doctor's office and she's staring up at the ceiling and we smash cut to the Pazuzu face peering
out of the darkness. This isn't as as evil and menacing as that, but it's semi evil and a little bit scary. And I love the way that the magic just bursts in like that with no warning at all.
Yeah, we don't and really get a clear sense of where the goblins are. Are they in the closet, and are in the walls? Are they just in the nether void? You know that's easily accessible, but equally distance distant from you know, our real life at any time. But yeah, all this build up is wonderful. I love too how she's self narrating her plight here, including talking about one day when baby was especially cruel to her, Yes, which of course is just such a deliciously over the top
exaggeration of her current circumstance. Yes, the baby Toby was cruel to you today, Baby Toby definitely stole your stuffed animal.
So anyway, she does eventually remember the words to say, and then the magic descends, Toby disappears, he is gone, and instead she is now faced with David Bowie playing the Goblin King Jerreth. He appears in Toby's room and
she quite quickly regrets that she sent Toby away. You know, she wants him back, but Jared says, at first I think he says she can't have him back, and then finally he says, okay, she can only have him back if she makes it to his castle at the center of the Great Labyrinth before midnight, and if not, Toby will become absorbed into the Goblin Horde. He will just become goblin.
Yes, yeah, I mean, there's just so many great details in this moment and leading up to it. I mean, I love the goblins when they start invading the room. Yes,
I love. I love Jared laying out the challenge you have thirteen hours in which to solve the Labyrinth and making a time go weird on her, and then the first of what will be kind of a recurring element in the film of characters really trying to shoot down her optimism, you know, where she says, Okay, I can do this, and he's like, it's further than you think, you know, and we'll get something similar from Hoggle later on, where he's like, yeah, it just gets tougher from here
on out, you know which, These lines seem to like echo a sort of adult sensibility that has been handed down to Sarah and is reflected in the fantasy world here.
Yeah. Yeah, So suddenly we're in a different place. We have been taken to the Goblin Kingdom. We're not in Sarah's house anymore. How would you describe the esthetics of the Goblin Kingdom? What is this world?
Like?
Oh, it's beautiful for starters, but it's also a little bit desolate and everything. So many surfaces in the Goblin realm, and it varies depending on what section of the labyrinth you're in. So many surfaces look like they have very recently been crawled over by some sort of a fairy slug that leaves just a little bit of a like a glistening sparkle to everything.
A glittering mucus trail overall.
Yeah, but it does, I think read rather accurately like a fine kingdom that has been ruled too long by goblins. Like, yes, upkeep is happening, but it's maybe not as loving as it could be.
Yes now pretty quickly. While finding her way to the entrance of the labyrinth so she can get Toby back, Sarah runs into someone. She meets, a character named Hoggle, who's going to be one of the main characters in the movie. When we first meet Hoggle, he is urinating into a reflecting pool. Yeah yeah, but so that's I guess an inauspicious beginning. But it's sort of a difficult meeting at first. Hoggle is not inclined to be very
helpful to her. Instead, he is busy poisoning fairies, I think, like dusting them with some like fairy insecticide.
Yep, yep, he is exterminating fairies. He is not helpful. He is grumpy. Hoggle is interesting because Hoggle is not maybe not objectively cute, but you do grow to love him. He is a character that will betray Sarah over and over again and really struggles to muster any like true sustaining courage. But you know eventually he's going to get there, but you do have to be patient with him on that journey.
That's right, And he does sort of disappear and reappear repeatedly throughout the story.
Yeah yeah, he's difficult to count on for a while.
Yeah, So, when Sarah first goes into the quick question of terminology, should we continue to call it the labyrinth or should we call it a maze? I think I recall from our episodes on the Minotaur that technically a labyrinth is one in which there is only one path and it does lead ineluctably to the ending. Is that right you.
By some definitions? Absolutely? So, Yeah, in some respects you could think of the labyrinth here as more of a maze. But I don't know. I mean, if the ruler of this room calls it a labyrinth, I guess we have to respect his goblin word choices.
Well, I guess that's true. In any case, it does not seem that this is a place where you just continue walking and you will eventually get to the end. You have to make choices about where to where to go. But when Sarah first gets into the labyrinth, it's interesting that the first real challenge she faces is that she can't find anywhere to turn. It just seems like one endless corridor. And so she has a wonderful little scene where she discusses this with a worm who tells her
he's like, ah, yeah, I can't tell you. I can't help you. I'm just a worm. But then he does provide some helpful advice because she discovers that there are gaps in the walls that she can move through to make turns and find new ways to navigate through the maze,
but they're hidden by optical illusions. And I love the effects used here because from what I can tell, there's no real trickery going on except that they just like, for example, we'll have a gap in the walls of the maze that from the perspective we're looking at it totally blends in with the wall behind it, so you can't even tell their two separate walls.
Yeah. Absolutely, I think it's just a complete practical illusion that they depend on here.
Yeah, now we don't have time to talk through the entire plot seen by scene, but maybe maybe we should just pick out some of our favorite moments as Sarah is navigating the labyrinth and its challenges and and and the people she meets along the way. One thing I know you wanted to talk about was the riddle of the doors. Who with the dogs guarding them?
Yeah? Yeah, these guys are a lot of fun. I covered these on the monster fact a while back. They're they're they're delightfully weird enough on their own, of course, two headed dog like humanoid creatures that are fixed behind shields, kind of in the manner of double headed European playing cards.
It's already a wild design. But then the scenario gets even wilder because we find out, of course, that one door leads to the castle at the center of the labyrinth and the other one leads to Bubba Bubom stain and death. The lower heads have no idea what's going on, which door is which the upper heads do, but Sarah is only permitted to ask one of them. Furthermore, one of the two guardians always tells the truth, while the other one always lies. So Sarah faces a conundrum here.
How can she find out which door is which? How can she risk asking the wrong guardian and being lied to? And this is really fascinating because the scenario here, of course, instantly invokes what is known as the liar's paradox. If a liar tells you they are lying, then they are telling the truth. So you can consider the statement this sentence is a lie. If that statement is true, then it's false. If it's false, then it's true.
Right, hence that it's a paradox it's self contradictory.
Yeah. Now the scenario that Sarah is facing here, I have to admit that I really have to do some mental gymnastics to make sense of the riddle here. I think when I was younger, at one point I did like settle down and think about it long and hard enough to where it clicked. But for the most part, I just really have to trust that the film is not lying to me when it tells me that this is the correct answer. But I did research it a
little bit. As John Tourre points out in the paper objective falsity is essential to lying an argument from convergent evidence published in Philosophy Studies twenty twenty one, Sarah here
is engaging in what is called answer laundering. The truth and the lie dependably cancel each other out in this scenario, provided Toy stresses that lies cannot be true because the answer laundering she engages here is, of course, she asks one of the guards what the other guard would say in reaction to her question, and she uses that answer to figure out which way is which.
But that makes sense because you know either way that will point you to the wrong door. If you ask the truth telling guard what the other guard would say, they will truthfully tell you that the other guard will lead you to the wrong door. And if you ask the lying guard what the truth tells guard would say, they will lie and tell you the wrong door. So either way that indicates which door is the wrong one. So by elimination you know which is the right one.
It's a piece of gay. So Terry points out that the riddle here of the four guards is a variant of, or seems to be a variant of the Knights and Knaves, a logic puzzle from Raymond Smulliam's nineteen seventy eight publication What is the Name of This Book? Yeah, This scenario closely resembles what we see in Labyrinth. It involves a knight and a nave otherwise indistinguishable. Who guard a fork in the road? Which road are you going to take?
Dare you ask these two men given that one is secretly a noble knight and one is secretly a vile nave. The solution, again is via answer laundering. You ask which path the other individual would say is the correct one, and then you can use that to determine which is the correct way. Sarah guesses correctly, but of course Sarah gets cocky and she gets the trap door for her efforts.
It almost indicates that she got it wrong, but I think she did get it right.
I believe so. Right.
Yeah, yeah, So she goes through the door and then immediately falls down a trapdoor into and there's like a so the pit she falls into. It's kind of funny that there are all these hands poking out the walls, you know, like they like stop her from falling, and they say they're helping hands, and they form faces that talk out of the gloved hands. So it's kind of a weird creepy scene. It reminds me of something actually that would be in Return to Oz and they feel right.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, great sequence, a very inventive use of hand puppetry. Yeah, there's nothing else like it.
But they ask her if she wants to go back up or to go back or to go all the way down, and for some reason she chooses down. So that ends up dropping her into an oubliette where she eventually, oh she here. She meets back up with Hoggle again.
Yeah. Rescued by Hoggle, they make a deal over some jewelry, right.
I think there's some addition negotiations with Jareth down here. I think this is the sequence where they have to run from this like nightmare device that's chasing them down a tunnel, threatening to grind them into the wall. But they eventually they bust through and find a ladder up to the surface, after which they talk to like a snoozy old wise man who I think is sort of a dog but also is a human and then has a bird on his head.
Yep, yep, and they gets some limited amounts of wisdom from this character.
Somewhere around here also is where we meet another one of the Lovable Friend characters who become a part of Sarah's gang. This is Ludo. Ludo is initially caught in a trap and hanging upside down and being badgered by a bunch of goblins. Ludo is like a large sort of sasquatch type creature with sort of curving horns on his head, who appears very monstrous but in fact is actually quite sweet natured.
Yeah, or if you're Gene Siskel, this is a ripoff of Chewbac. What a ripoff?
Because he has fur? Is that it I guess he's big and has fur, therefore is Chewbacca.
But yeah, Ludo's great, Ludo's a gentle giant.
You love him, Yes, lovable. Sarah rescues Ludo from being harassed by the goblins.
With the nibbler sticks. Great sequence. And oh and then this is where they're doing the hobby horse technique here for the little guys running around.
It's great.
Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, so they've got like these little monsters attached to the ends of sticks that they're using to bite Ludo with. But then she frees him. She she like gets the goblins all fighting each other until they run away, and then she frees him, and after that Ludo is friend. Now in this sequence, Hoggle runs away, but he'll show back up again later. I think somewhere around in here is where Sarah ends up running into the fire Gang.
Yes, the Fire Gang or the Fieries. Oh, these are creatures that have always been pure nightmare fuel to me. They're a band of musical bird like goblinoids with like bright you know, orange and fire colored feathers fur somewhere in between, and they have disturbing natural abilities in the realms of pyrokinesis as well as dismemberment. They can rip their bodies apart and reattach them at will willy nilly in various positions. They can even connect their limbs together
into new monstrous shapes. It's a sequence full of body horror, dance music, Menace Mayham. It is a lot to process, but it is a musical number. The song here is David Bowie's Chili Down. If you listen to the soundtrack Slash Score album you get to hear Bowie singing on it a little bit of belief. But in the film it is performed by Kevin Klash born nineteen sixty. Know, you know as the voice of Elmo, the original voice
of Elmo. He the voice of the main Fiery. Then you have Danny John Jules born nineteen sixty a British actor, dancer and singer who is also a member of the Blood Pack in Blade two. He voices Fiery four, the really dangerous looking one. Then you have Charles Oggens, a British actor, dancer and choreographer who also choreographed this scene as well as the excellent magic dance scene from earlier. And then also you have the actor Richard Bodkin doing
a voice as well. So just some horrifying, freaky goblinoid creatures here performing a very wild song. And this whole sequence, of course, escalates into them deciding they need to dismember Jennifer Connolly Sarah. They need to rip her head off, because you're not supposed to throw other people's heads, even though they throw each other's heads around earlier, Like they don't even follow their own rules. They're just pure creatures of chaos.
Yeah, what are the lines where they're like trying to pull her head off? They're like, Eh, it's not coming off. What's going on?
Yeah?
Pull harder?
Yeah. And that's one of the things that I think always like really struck me about this scene. It's like it's two different realities clashing. Their reality is one of just fun dismemberment. It's easily reversible and you can play with it. It's a good time for everybody. But Sarah is from a world where dismemberment is permanent, is permanent and fatal, and they just don't understand that. Why don't you want to take your head off? What is the matter with you? Now?
You mentioned that there was an earlier part of the movie that featured a musical number called the Magic Dance. I didn't remember exactly where this came, but this is the one where we get to see inside the Goblin Castle where David Bowie's hanging out. Toby is there with all the goblins. He's sort of crying. It looks like Toby's not having a great time, but the goblins are all partying, and I guess this song is sort of about how Toby's going to become one of them.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great sequences, a great song. Bowie seems to be having a great time as Jareth here with throwing the bait be around and just so many goblin shenanigans as well. This is a goblin packed musical number.
You got a goblin doing the Barney gumbel, like laying down with his mouth under the tap of the beer keg.
Yeah. When I was watching it here, I said to my son he was watching with me, I was like, why why doesn't this goblin just get a cup? Like they're not charging by the cup here? This is just this seems to be free for any goblins. But now he's like, it's just so much easier if I just lay down underneath it on the floor and just catch straight droplets of the stuff.
Yeah, the cup requires too much arm exercise. It's difficult. It's goblin mode, I guess. Yeah, so at any rate, Yeah, the fire Gang is something else, Yes, But Sarah does eventually escape the fire Gang with the help of Hoggle. I think Hoggle like throws down a ladder to her from the top of a top of a wall to help him get away, or maybe a rope. Maybe that's it.
Yeah, yeah, And so she's able to escape and doesn't get ripped to pieces.
But Hoggle and Sarah end up in the Ball of Eternal Stench. This is a place Hoggle has been threatened with before. I think that, you know, it's like, if he doesn't do what Jarreed, the Goblin King says, he's going to be cast into the Bog of Eternal Stench. The premise is that the bog smells very bad, and if any part of your body touches the liquid in the bog, you will stink forever.
Yeah, for the rest of your life. And I've long puzzled over that, like how it works. How does it permanently taint you like that? Does it change your biology? What would it look like in like Dungeons and Dragons rules. Is it like a permanent like disadvantage to all charisma roles or something I don't know.
Yeah, now here in the bog of Eternal Stench, they're trying to get out without touching the cursed water, and at one point they need to cross a bridge, but their path is blocked by a feisty little character who will later become part of our group of friends. This is Serditimus, who I think is either supposed to be a fire or some type of dog. Though it's sort of confusing because he's a muppet who is an anthropomorphic
fox or dog, but he rides a dog. He's got a dog that is a dog, and he rides the dog.
Yeah, it's kind of the Pluto goofy paradox once more.
Yes, Yeah, Sir Dinamus is kind of a reap, a cheap sort of character. He's like, he's very small and feisty and thinks himself very chivalrous and he's always itching for a fight.
Yeah, he's a lot of fun. He's always down to joust. But his mout, of course, frequently is not as we'll see.
So Sarah Ludo and Hoggle are trying to trying to get through this place, and I think they get blocked at a bridge by Sir Dinymus. But I think Sarah is the one who figures out that Sir Dinimus is saying, no one may pass this bridge without my permission, so she realizes she can just ask his permission. It seems this has never occurred to Sir Didymus, that he can just grant permission and still keep his vow.
Yeah, yeah, He's like, oh, yeah, sure, granted. They're like all right, good, let's go.
Yeah, and so they're like leaving. Now there is an interesting thing here where we discovered that Ludo is not only friend to Sarah, he is also friend to rocks. Because there's one point where Sarah is sort of like, I think a bridge collapses underneath her. She's dangling over the bog by hanging onto a tree branch, and she is saved when Ludo summons his rock friends to emerge up out of the earth so that she can use them as stepstones to cross the water.
That's right, and of course this will come into play in one of the climaxes of the picture.
Now there is up here somewhere we get one of the Hoggle betrayals, because Hoggle gives Sarah a poisoned peach that the Goblin King gave to him, and this turns this sort of sends Sarah into a trance where she experiences a magic masquerade ball where she is she is tempted to divert from her mission to save Toby and instead just sort of, I don't know, becomes some kind of evil queen of magic.
Yeah, yeah, it's like this is one of Jared's temptations to her, like this is what your life could be if you just loved me and stayed with me here in this realm. And so it's this dreamy but also frightening sequence, you know, it is it feels like some sort of a weird trip, you know, it's it's a great sequence, but it's not like there are there are a lot of uncanny elements to it. They're creepy masks, you know, sort of typical I guess, you know, period
masks that the other dancers are wearing. They're also there's a feeling of actually being like drugged, of reality being slowed down because she is drugged. But we have to remember if she ate a poisoned peach, and that's how she's entered into this realm. And it's this feeling of like, Okay, now the hallucination is upon her, and can she recognize it for the hallucination it is and break free from it?
And in the midst of this, of course, we have another musical number, we get as the World Falls Down, which I mean, no big surprise. I love all of these songs, so I will also say this is a great one. But yeah, it has a nice dreamy air to it, a nice dancing and slow motion within a silver prison kind of a song.
Now, Sarah does not fully succumb to these temptations, and
she does wake up in a different place. She wakes up in a sort of a garbage world, a giant junkyard that seems to lie outside of the Goblin City, and she meets a character who is like a junk trader woman who I think is trying to like Sarah's memory seems only partially intact at this point, and she's not fully aware of what she was supposed to be doing, and this junk trader woman is like offering her up a little like trinket and baubles and toys to I
think this is part of a different type of temptation we were talking about earlier about her like multiple different desires at the beginning of the movie, and this is the temptation to just sort of regress, to go back into childhood and just obsess over over little trinkets and selfish toys and collecting little magic, glittering things. And the Lady of the junk World is trying to tempt her into that fate.
Yeah, it's a great sequence. This also perhaps a little bit frightening, because you know, she goes into what seems to be her childhood room and it seems like maybe she's back, but then imburse the junk Lady, and the junk Lady has this enormous backpack of stuff that has
just seemed to like crush and wither her. And there is this scene where Sarah's seated in front of her mirror in her childhood room, but the junk Lady is bringing her all over things and at least visibly from an invisible sense, piling up like a pile of things behind and Sarah's back, as if constructing her own backpack that will eventually wither and crush her, you know, like, here are your earthly possessions, and they are meaningful in and of themselves, and this is what you should cling to,
you know, forget what they might represent. That's not important. Here's your stuff. Just focus on your stuff.
But fortunately, while being weighed down with these things that I think, in the view of the movie, don't really matter, all these trinkets and treasures, she is saved by the things that do matter, which are her friendships. She starts to kind of realize something is wrong. The place is sort of crumbling, and she's like climbing out of this false room prison, and she meets up with and is rescued by her group of friends, including Hoggle and Didymus and Ludo.
And so from here, basically to get to the castle at the center of the center of the Goblin City, they're like two more obstacles. First there's like the gate, which has a big automaton in it, and then there is the Goblin City. The automaton battle is a sequence that I've always found to be very visually impressive. You know, I really like the creature design here, but it also has always felt like kind of a natural bathroom break. I don't know there's something about it that it shouldn't.
I'm not saying it's boring, but it is not as exciting as it should be.
Hoggle is actually this is one where we get to see Hoggle. You're brave though he's the one who defeats the Goblin mech.
Yeah, it's actually it's absolutely essential from that standpoint, But I don't know. I've always found something was lacking here. But anyway, we passed that test and now the party is united. Everyone's behind Sarah. But yet they have to move through the Goblin City and that's where they are met with the Goblin army and we get this enormous battle. It is. It's a real blast, a mad cap slapstick battle for the ages, featuring every goblin you've seen in
the film thus far. Just hordes of goblins of varying types, all sorts of shenanigans, explode usions, sword fights, Ludo calls the Rocks. I always enjoy watching this sequence.
It's a great thing when he calls the Rocks for help, and then we get to see boulders rolling uphill to attack the goblins.
So they get through that, and then it's time for the final showdown. With Jarreth in Jared's stronghold, and we get the scene where we see versions of this in a lot of pictures, right, and a lot of stories. Sarah has to go in alone, she has to confront Jarreth alone. Her friends can't help her in this part of the quest, and so they say goodbye to her and she ventures into this mc escher world of you know, mind bending paradoxical staircases.
That's right, And it's not just a comparison. She basically literally is in the MCEs you're drawing with the staircases and the doorways going in every direction.
Yeah, this was another I think there's a poster in her room to this effect as well.
Yeah, and we get a song here, right.
Yeah, this is within You. That is is really great because it's threatening, it's very threatening in places, but it's also very vulnerable in places. And Bowie's vocal performance here is great too, because you have these parts of it where he's very firm and commanding, and then other bits where his voice is like trailing off and growing weak,
like almost like he is dying while singing it. Because this is all of course, Jarreff's final appeal to Sarah, like please you know, just fall in line, you know, be here with me, don't defy me. And but no, Sarah is going to stick to her guns and she is going to do what it takes to defeat Jarreff. What exactly that is I still have questions about but she doesn't.
Well, I checked. So what she does to defeat him is she remembers the words, which is interesting because that's the same thing she did to get into this trouble in the first place. By remembering the words, the lines from the Goblin story. That's how she got Toby kidnapped by the goblins. Remembering the lines from the story is
also how she defeats Jarreth. She says she has the same lines she was reciting at the very beginning of the story when she says, through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City, and so on and so on. It goes on several more sentences, but it ends with her remembering the final line that she couldn't remember at the beginning. My kingdom is as great and you have no power
over me. She repeats this, you have no power over me, And then I think the clock chimes midnight or one whatever it is that the time that she had to rescue Toby by and Jareth is defeated, and so she gets to go back home with Toby.
Thirteen o'clock, I believe, think I don't know if it's thirteen pm or.
Am, But I like how there's an ending where she sort of reconciles her earlier frustrations with Toby, Like she repents of her earlier scapegoating of Toby because Toby wasn't really the problem, you know, she was. Like she's just struggling with herself and her role in life at this point, and I think she has some perspective on that. But also I like how she ends up sort of reconciling
her relationship with fantasy. She realizes she has to part ways with her magical friends, she has to live in this world, but she also needs to see them from time to time.
Yeah. Yeah, So she defeats Jarreth again. I never doubt this on an emotional level, you know what's happening, Like she finds the strength to overcome him, and then she's back in her room. She sees like the reflection of her friends through the mirror. But realizes she can call on them when she needs them, and then she does and we get like a final big party sequence in her room, which is great. Though I've always been disturbed by the fact that the Fire Gang members are there, Yes, like,
why did you invite them? Why did you could have maybe just let them go, Sarah, It's right, you don't have to keep all of these strange creatures. Maybe let the fire guys go off and live their own life and oblivion. But no, they're there as well, but they seem to be well behaved. They're not trying to pull anybody apart.
I invited the bog of eternal stench here it's in my sink now.
And we once more get the theme song underground and we roll back. We see that the owl, the animal form of Jared, has like been watching through the window and then takes off and flies away into the night. It's beautiful. It is. It's, like I say, very like emotionally and visually beautiful, satisfying conclusion to the picture.
So in the end, you agree with Ciskel that it's awful, ugly and terrible.
I could not disagree with ciscl more on Labyrinth. I mean, it really was challenging to talk about Labyrinth here in some respects because you could go on and on, or I could go on and on about just about any moment in the picture. There's always something interesting going on in the set design or in the costuming, in the particular dialogue choices that are in play lyrics to the songs. There are some weird lyrics to these songs we didn't
even get into. There are also lines of dialogue, particularly from David Bowie. Some of them I never fully understood, Like I couldn't really understand what he's saying until like this viewing of the picture where I was like, all right, I'm going to turn on the captions for a minute, and it's like, oh, he's saying, well laugh. And I always thought he said well love. I don't know why I thought that was the line, but that's what I've been hearing for decades.
Huh. Yeah, this is the kind of movie where I feel like a lot of things, especially when you're watching as a kid, can just go right over your head.
But you know, there are lots of confusing things in the world of the Labyrinth. Yeah, you know, it's a film in a world full of paradoxes and illusions, and it's part of its texture. There was some essay I was looking at. Maybe it's the one I started earlier talking about, Well, some people were confused when they saw Jared, when they saw David Bowie's charif, and it's like, well, yeah,
you should be confused whole Jared. He is supposed to be this alluring and kind of confusing character, Like that's that's intentional.
It was the confusion like why isn't he a goblin like the others? Like why are the goblins ruled over by a rock star who with a human form?
Right? That? And then also some of the aspects of Jariff being a like a sexually alluring character, but in a way that makes sense, like he is he is like his role is in relationship to Sarah, a young woman, and therefore he has these kind of like pop star elements to him, you know. Yeah, And and so there are a lot of deliberate choices with the way that he is presented as an object of obsession and desire, Like.
Would be on a poster on a bedroom wall.
Yeah, yeah, but a bedroom but a poster on the bedroom wall that also is directly bordering the fay world and is influenced by the strange energies of the fairy folk.
Yes, why do you think Jared is an owl?
Well, you know, the owl is a is a magical bird of the night, so I guess it is a fitting animal form.
The owl is dangerous, the owl is inscrutable, the owl is yeah, yeah, it seems like it's got secrets.
Yeah, all right, Well, we're gonna gohead and close this one out, but we would love to hear from everyone about Labyrinth. I'm sure a lot of you have thoughts, thoughts about things that we discussed in this episode, but also again, many of the details in the picture that we didn't have time to get into, so right in
we would love to hear from you. A reminded The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. And if you want to see a full list of the movies we've done over the years on Weird House Cinema, go to letterbox dot com. That's l E. T T
E R B O x D dot com. Our user name there is weird House and you'll find the nice list and if you're on Instagram, follow us at stb ym podcast.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.