THE ULTIMATE QUEST

Throwing a puppet off a cliff is a lot harder than you might expect. For the best part of 40 minutes, a very focused puppeteer on the Langley Studios set of The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance has been trying to lob a Gelfling, a small elf-like creature, to his death, but the stupid doll refuses to die properly. He hits a camera. He plops to earth before making it to the edge of the cliff. He frisbees off in completely the wrong direction. After repeated resurrection, persistence pays off and the Gelfling whizzes past the camera in just the right way, plummeting to his end as intended, his successful murder receiving a round of applause. On The Dark Crystal, you keep going until things work out. It took almost 40 years to get here and nobody’s about to let an uncooperative Gelfling keep it from crossing the line.

Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s 1982 movie was a mad idea. Henson was, of course, the godfather of puppetry, but he was known for funny puppetry, like and . , a fantasy epic, treated puppets as seriously as you would live actors. Set in a magical land called Thra, it followed the last two members of a once thriving race of peaceful Gelfling as they tried to bring an end to the evil reign of the Skeksis — monsters that looked like the result of a horrific union between a buzzard and an old crocodile, who derived their power from a magic