Labyrinth

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so

“happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them let alone a good one,”

let alone a cautionary tale about what happens when you're a dick to your parents who just

want to go out to dinner. I am one of your host Lizzy Bassett here as always with Chris Winterbauer

and Chris, what cod piece do you have for us today? The biggest cod piece ever bestowed upon Millennials and Gen Xers, the movie that defined or confused the sexuality of at least one and a half generations. The reason I wake up in a cold sweat every time I hear a starman, this is labyrinths. Jim Henson's labyrinths. I'm really excited to talk about this movie. We went pretty deep on this one. It's going to be very fun. Great, I can't wait. Lizzy, had you seen labyrinths before and

what were your thoughts upon watching or rewatching it for the podcast? Yes, of course, I've seen labyrinth before. I've seen labyrinth many times. Although, you know, I don't know that I had focused heavily on it before. It's not really what labyrinth is for. I don't think, but I saw this probably the first time in college. I don't know why I didn't watch this growing up. Oh, you didn't watch it as a kid? No, I didn't. And it was because by parents both love David Bowie. And we

love them up it. So I don't know maybe because this is horrifying, is why, but never the two

of me. Yeah, so I didn't watch it as a kid. I watched it in college. My roommate in college loved labyrinth. And so we did watch it quite a bit then. And it's one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. I have a lot of questions. I can't wait to get into this. Question number one was David Bowie only available for 10 minutes. And is that the amount of time that he spent on both the songs and on set? Number two, what are those horrible, horrible feather dragon fox creatures that

kick their own heads around? I hate them. So I've always hated them. The fireies. We do have a little section on them, actually. Okay, great. They're the stuff of nightmares. I do not like them at all. This is so interesting because it's like they make very clear that it's not a movie for children. I think pretty early on in this. And then you're like, who is this boy? Yeah, which is fine. And I love it and I enjoy it. And I am a big fan of Jim Henson and puppets in general. So this is very

much right up my alley. But yeah, the first thing Jennifer Connelly says is she's trying to recite

“the line and then she goes damn. And I was like, whoa, bad kid, a movie for adults. The only thing”

that was unpleasant about this viewing was that the little baby Toby looks exactly like our daughter Eve. And pretty much all he does over the course of this movie is just scream and cry amidst a sea of the most horrifying puppets you could possibly place around to baby. But yeah, I love it. You know, the music, it's not good. Dance magic dance is very fun. That's the only song I can remember in the entire thing. The final song is so bad. It's like I was laughing watching it

because I was just like David David. You did not. This was your lowest effort. Which is fine. He's allowed to do that. He's David Bowie. But that's all I have to say about this. I absolutely love it. I can't wait to get into it. I expect to hear from you what your favorite character is and I will tell you upfront that mine is serdittemus. Ambrosius. It is serdittemus and ambrosius. Okay. Ambrosius is arguably the hero of this movie, which you know, we can discuss. But yes, it is the

two of them. I absolutely love them so much. Yeah. So what about you? So I did watch this as a kid. Quite a bit. There was like a quartet of movies. Three in particular that I watched a lot that feel very thematically similar, tone-only similar. And they actually share a lot of creative DNA that art crystal, which we're going to talk about today. Legend. Okay. 1985, really Scott Tom Cruise,

“which we'll also talk about today. I think I only actually saw that once when I was very little.”

I have not seen that. Oh, legend. We'll talk about it. Legend is a very weird bit of a mess,

but incredible visually and willow was the fourth one. Those were, I mean, I loved them and I love them

for the reason you mentioned Lizzy, which these are movies that do not feel like they're aimed at children. I think that these are very much YA before YA existed. Really? 100%. They're like the four-runner to something, you know, from the Hunger Games to various other franchises. This one in particular, because the choice to make Jareth David Bowie is a very interesting one, because he is obviously a very sexual creature and continues to be in this world in a creepy and

weird way with their like eyes wide shut masquerade party that happens halfway through this thing. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So, okay. I love the puppets. I love the creatures. I love the practical effects.

you know, we researched this episode and I only fell in love with him more. I think the first half

of this movie is a bit of a slog at times. It kind of stops and starts and stops and starts and

“I'm not really sure what world we're in. It's a bit confusing. Let's crisp. That's how it is inside”

that's how it is when, yes, you know, what are you doing here? Huggle. It's confusing. But I do think the movie really hits for me. It really hits its stride when Sarah kind of puts the gang together. Right. And Ludo, especially when Ludo comes in and then you have Huggle and you have Sir Dittamus and Embroja. And then, oh, great. We've got this, you know, rogue group of misfits that are on this journey to the goblin castle and that's very fun. It's like Huggle is fun. Ludo is better

and then Sir Dittamus and Embroja's steal the movie. Yes. Sir Dittamus is hilarious. I completely understand why a lot of people love David Bowie in this movie. I don't love David Bowie in this movie. I don't really, I like I love that he's there, but I don't necessarily love him in the movie. Yeah. To me, he really distracts me, he bumps me out every time. As you mentioned Lissy, I don't love these songs. I think a lot of people love these songs. I think that's great.

And I don't love his acting in this movie either. So basically, every time Jared comes in,

I'm like, get out of here, Jared. Let's just go hang out with the puppets some more. But again, I was reading a lot of millennial and gen X blog posts and articles about the significance of this film,

“especially from a number of women, but also of men, Bowie. I think definitely has a very”

androgynous sexual appeal. And they really say that Bowie captured the seductive allure, but also danger of a grown man. You know, as a icon of sexuality, I know it's a little interesting. We'll talk about it. I'm making a face because I agree. I agree. There are complications with that around David Bowie, but yes, and I love David Bowie. Yeah. But anyway, so I understand that appeal. That element of the movie is not for me. That's not a big deal because there's just so much

going on in every frame of this movie with all of the puppeteering with all of the optical effects in camera effects, et cetera. And we're going to dive into all of it. So, laverance is a dark fantasy film directed by Jim Henson. It was written by Terry Jones from a story credited to Dennis Lee and Jim Henson. But as we will get to, those were far from the only writers on this project. It was produced by Eric Brattray with George Lucas and David Laser serving as executive producers on the film.

And it stars. Jennifer Connelly is Sarah. David Bowie is Jerry. That fucking name. I know. I mean, in the Dark Crystal, the lead character's name is Jen. And it's a guy and he's just like,

“Jen, and you're like, what? That's come up with a better name than Jen. What are we doing?”

Jerry, it's like they were trying to make a cool British sounding version of Jared. Like, it's just you can't. I think it's kind of fun. Sounds like the name, like you would go to a park and silver lake in the mom would be like, this is my son, Jared, that's me saying, yeah, I don't think we're gonna be friends. No. Toby Fraud as Toby. Sherry Wiser is the actress who brings Hoggle to life. She is the actress in the suit who is doing all of Hoggle's movements. And Brian

Henson is lending Hoggle his voice more on that later. Frank Oz and many, many more. It was released on June 27th, 1986 by TriStar Pictures, under the Henson Associates and Lucasfilm Limited Banners in the IMDB Logline Reads. Teenage Sarah, journeys through a maze to save her baby brother from the goblin king. And that's, you know, the whole movie. Yeah, I think. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to. Jim Henson, the biography by Brian J. Jones, Jim Henson's red book,

which is an online curation of Jim's journal entries from the Jim Henson Company Archives. Inside the Labyrinths, the 1986 documentary on the making of the movie, Starlog Magazine, number 109, Alex August 2015 interview of Brian Henson at USC and many more articles, retrospectives and interviews with those involved in the film. All right, Lizzy. It's time for us to dive in and get lost in the Labyrinths. And if we were to wind the clock back to December of 1982,

and squint our eyes hard enough and sink in terms of metaphor, Jim Henson was trapped in a bit of a labyrinth. Maybe we should call it a maze of success. But that didn't change the fact that no matter which corner he turned, he could not escape which of his creations. The Muppets Sesame Street.

The Muppets. That's right. Which came first, by the way. The Muppets are Sesame Street.

So technically, the Muppets came before Sesame Street, but the Muppets show came after coming into that chronology in a few minutes. All right. Well, Lizzy, if there were ever a time to be a puppet in Hollywood, it was the late 70s and early 80s. I mean, I feel like any old puppet was just minting it. So the Muppet movie. Any old puppet will do. Any old puppet just hand up to butt puppet. We've learned on one of our other episodes, butt puppets. Yeah, the Muppet movie

that one was not directed by Hansen. James Frawley directed at Hansen Produced it. A year later, Yoda, do you want to do your Yoda impression briefly? There we go. That little bastard stole our hearts and the Empire Strikes Back. The great Muppet Capre of 1981 wasn't quite as successful

as the Muppet movie, but it still made $31 million against a $14 million budget. Hansen did

direct that one and in 1982, E.T. phoned his way home to nine Oscar nominations for wins and the highest box office gross of all time, beating out Star Wars. Puppets make money. Puppets make money. So, Jim Hansen teams up with the man behind Yoda Frank Oz and the man behind George Lucas, producer Gary Kurtz, to try to break away from the Muppets and the idea that puppets are just for children.

“So together, they made a movie called The Dark Crystal. Lizzie, have you ever seen The Dark Crystal?”

Yes, but I literally can't remember. I've seen it more than once and it's another one that we watched in college, but it did not stick with me the way the lab ramped in. Well, to refresh your memory, the IMDB Logline reads. On another planet in the distant past, the last of the gale fling rays embarked on a quest to find the missing chart of a magical crystal and restore order to his world. And to be fair, I think the tough thing with this movie is that a lot of

lore and not a lot of story and the lore is not necessarily that original, more on that later, but what is really unique about this movie is that it is only puppets. There are no humans. It is an entirely puppet cast. You gotta have one. Yeah, he didn't. Hence, it's very determined. He is going to prove that puppets are serious business. And this movie, by the way, is an enormous technical achievement. If you watch it, these frames, the way that these giant sets with enormous

puppets are moving around and everything is practical, you know, for the most part, in camera,

“it's really incredible, but I think audiences were generally a bit confused. This is completely”

original IP, although maybe not that original, we'll talk about that in a moment. And as I mentioned, there were only puppets and the puppets looked very dark and very serious. It's just a very dark fantasy, and that's because they were based on art by the fantasy illustrator, Brian Fraud, talk more about him in a minute. Henson was known as the Muppet Man, literally, headlines call them that. And the Muppets are fun, and this movie Lizzy is a lot of things, but I don't think

it's fun. Critics call it a rip-off of the Lord of the Rings, which I can totally see. The two main characters are called Gelflinks, and they're basically Hobbits, you know. Halflings, yeah. Yeah, exactly. They also call it a rip-off of Star Wars. I see that a little less, but I can understand the idea of prophecy and whatnot. They're all just pulling from very broad origin, heroes, stories, you know, Cambalion trajectories. A critic for time magazine wrote, "No

Kermit, No Burton, Ernie." This movie is serious. Jim Henson's foray into the art, "Damn it of puppetry."

Now, the Dark Crystal was not a total flop. It did make $40 million or so, and it would

develop a cult-home video following, but it was very expensive. So the Muppet movie cost $8 million, because the Muppets exist in a real world, and there are a lot of humans around them. The Dark Crystal cost $25 million over three times as expensive. And if you watch the movie, you can see every dollar on the screen. It really is an incredible accomplishment. Serious puppets were seriously expensive. And the thing that I didn't know is that Jim Henson

hadn't been very serious about puppets at all. So let's go back in time, Lizzy, and listen to a clip from just one of our absolute favorites on this show, Orson Wells. Yes, interviewing Jim Henson, who has first, and Frank Oz. Is Orson Wells drunk? How drunk is Orson Wells? Well, it is about the

same time period as that champagne commercial. Oh God, if anyone has never seen the Fritz Pierre Mason,

is that what it is? I can't remember. Oh, the French champagne. Oh, the French champagne. Oh yeah,

“we're in French champagne territory. All right, here we go. What was the first puppet show you ever saw?”

I don't recall ever seeing a puppet show when I was a kid. You never saw a puppet. No. And I never played with puppets. I never had any to play with. Right? Well, I started when I was 12 years old and puppets. And I was a strange kid. You're nothing of the kind. Jim was this strange one. At least you admit to getting started at 12. So, Lizzy, could you describe the way Orson Wells is reacting to learning that Jim Henson

did not grow up playing with puppets? He's treating it as the graveist. It's like a bomb just dropped, and he spikes the camera directly with this like a thousand yard stare. God, I love words and words. So, Jim Henson may not have been into puppets, but throughout his childhood,

He was the second of two sons, and he split time between Mississippi and Washington, DC,

because his dad, Paul, worked as a researcher for the United States Department of Agriculture. And despite his science background, Paul married Betty, who was a Christian scientist, although I heard he was a more relaxed adherent to that faith. Now, Jim's technical background may have come from his father, but his sense of humor seems to have come from his mom and her family. And Jim and his older brother, Paul, liked to take things apart and rebuild them,

like radios. And the Henson's didn't have a television growing up. So Jim would listen to radio dramas, and one of them in particular featured a ventriloquist, which is a little odd because you think of ventriloquism as necessitating a visual component, right? Yeah, are they just sitting there doing different voices? I can do that. Give me that job. Well, basically, can I play you a clip from it?

Yeah, that's not a ventriloquist. That's a voice actor.

John, I'm afraid you don't know the difference between news and gossip. All your side do. If the man bites your dog, that's news. Yeah, that's right. And if the dog goes around telling everybody about it, that's gossip. Yeah. So, that's it. You're right. It's a man doing

“voices. But I think what's important to note about this interest in ventriloquism, even without”

a visual component, is that one of the things that made Henson's puppeteering unique, especially throughout the 60s and 70s, is that he was on the television side of things, it seems generally kind of unconcerned with revealing the puppeteer to the audience. So it allowed the camera to get a lot closer to the puppets that allowed for a more dynamic variety of shots and whatnot. And he kind of assumed, while as long as you can really make the puppet come alive, we'll believe that

it's autonomous, even if you can see the people around them. Jim was also really drawn to things that were more complicated than they appeared. One of his favorite comic strips was called Pogo, and it followed this every man's straight man possum who has these eccentric animal friends, and it looks like it's for kids, but the writing actually included a lot of political satire that was aimed at adults. So bear in mind, he painted he drew comics of his own, and at 13,

the Christian science monitor published one of his comics, and at this pivotal moment, Jim Henson

discovers television. He first watched his TV at a friend's house and he comes home and he goes,

"Mom, Dad, holy shit, we need a TV." We need it now. I don't know if he said that exactly. They buy him a set and he falls in love. Sid Seasor, Carl Reiner, Ernie Covax, Mel Brooks, like very funny, very edgy in a lot of instances, comedians. And so fresh out of high school, Jim wants to work in television. He wants to be on TV. And he hears that there's a station that's looking for a puppeteer. So he says, "Well, I could probably do that." So he checks some books out

from the library, teaches himself how to manipulate a Mary Annette, and it works. He gets his job as a puppeteer on the junior morning show. And he's got this real talent for it. Everybody's like,

“"Jim, this is your calling. This is what you were meant to do." He got that. Puppets?”

I don't know. That seems a little weird. So he goes to college. He meets his future wife, Jane Nebel, and together they develop a TV show called Sam and Friends. And this features a cast of puppet characters, including Lizzie, who is probably the most famous individual puppet that Jim Henson is responsible for. Kermit. Kermit the Frog. Exactly right. One of our listeners once I believe affectionately said that I sound like Kermit the Frog in joint auto erotic asphyxiation,

which is actually something Jim Henson might have been into. Let's get into it. So great. Sam and Friends was a big success, but Jim Henson was not sold that this was his path in life. In fact, he took a year off from the show Lizzie to just paint and travel around Europe. Now, it's possible, but we couldn't confirm that Jim's brother, Paul, who died in 1956, may have tied into this sabbatical. So I believe it was Sam and Friends started in 55. His brother

died in 56, and then he did this sabbatical in 58. And Frank Oz later said, "When his brother died, he felt like maybe he didn't have enough time." Not like he was feeling his mortality or a premonition that he would die young or anything like that, but he just realized that he just didn't have an infinite amount of time to do all the things he wanted to do. But it was on this journey across Europe that Henson discovered the potential of puppetry as an art form. He said,

"I wandered around and met a lot of other puppeteers." And in the course of that little trip, I found that it was good art form, and people were doing interesting things. And it was something that you get into and develop and turn into something else. Puppets didn't have to be just for kids, and Jim Henson was a lot more adult than people realized.

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“So Lizzie, have you ever seen any of the experimental films that Jim Henson has made?”

No, I don't think so. Neither had I. I had no idea. They're amazing. So throughout the 1960s, Jim Henson is doing this completely other set of work from his, you know, primary puppeteering work. That is existential absurdist deals with, you know, very adult themes of what does it mean to be human, to be a man, to live in our society? It's Charlie Kaufmanesque, it's like Louis Boonelle, for example, and so let's just hit some of the hits. So in the 1960s he made a series of these very

artsy short films for IBM. One of them is called the paperwork explosion and the theme was machine should work. People should think. And it feels very modern in the way that it's shot. It's these, you know, kind of straight-faced executives talking to camera about the virtues of eliminating paperwork, but you're smashed cutting to papers exploding to people shredding things to this random farmer. It feels Lizzie like, Jim Henson, Dr. Strange,

love trailer that you played for me? Yeah, like the very MK Ultra subliminal messaging. So that's what this feels like. It also features this older man who I swear is the inspiration for a stat-ler of, you know, stat-ler and Waldorf. Stat-ler and Waldorf? Yeah, it looks exactly like him. And so this is where he meets executive David Laser, who he would go on to work with as a producer on Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. And then he wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated short film,

“tying piece. You should totally watch this. He plays a man who's in a hospital bed.”

The doctor comes in, he starts listening to his heart, and that sets this rhythm for the story.

And the story basically goes through these like stream of consciousness absurdist moments of

kind of this man's life, but also man's journey across time, and also like very ridiculous associations, you know, of seeing a woman, and then pulling a chicken out of a bag, as if you're choking the chicken. It's very adult, and it's very surreal. It sounds almost twilight's own, ask. It's maybe a little twilight's own, as again, it felt more like something like Winston on the Lou by Louis Buñel, for example, it's very well made. And again, it's nominated

for the Academy Award for Best Short Film. He takes out scripts and pitches. He wrote a dark Western. He was considering an adaptation of the Lord of the Rings. He had a TV pitch called "inside my head" that again sounds very Charlie Kaufman-esque. It's a conversation between a

“man and a woman, but from the perspective of "inside the man's head," another than it works one”

at it. But he did write a couple of scripts for NBC's experiments in television that did get made, and the one that we should note is called "the cube." So it's an hour of standalone television directed by Henson is very twilight's own, ask Lizzy. It follows this guy. He looks like a white collar worker. He wakes up inside this, you know, roughly 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot, virtually featureless cube. He has no idea how he got there, and he can't seem to leave as

other people are coming and going. There's a maintenance man. There's the manager. There's like two Gestapo police officers executing a search warrant. There's this like Bob Dylan Paul McCartney hybrid musician that shows up in plays. This extremely existential depressing song. And it really feels like it's both a four-runner to labyrinth, but more from like a middle-aged man's perspective, and also David Fincher's the game and even Severance. And you know, in reference to

the game, I'm not sure if you've seen that movie. I have not. This literally ends with the character. I don't want to give too much away, but the ending of this, go watch the cube, guys if you like the game, the ending of the cube feels like it directly inspired the game.

Basically, what I want to convey is the cube and timepiece to me. Emphasize that Henson's

strengths are really as a stream of consciousness storyteller. It's not really plot, but more dream logic, consistency of tone, lyrical connections. And they really capture the terrifying lack of control in our lives. So he makes some other serious plans to open an interactive nightclub called Sikliar, just to show you how eclectic Henson was. I don't want to interact with anything in a nightclub. I don't know what that means. Well, don't touch me as Elaine Strich said

about cats in cats. Let me pitch it to you. It was going to be the entertainment experience of the future. There would be films projected onto the wall, ceiling and floor. And once every hour, a woman, not Lizzie apparently, would stand at the center of the room and a film would be projected onto her white leotard. The films would be divided into five categories. Woods, junk, city at night,

And it's important to note, Henson was cultivating some incredible talent.

“Frank Oz said of this project, quote, "I shot thousands of feet of 16 millimeter film,”

it's where I got the first experience to become a movie director." Sikliar never actually happened.

But Henson was still trying to bring some edge to his projects. He even tried to bring some edge to the muppets. Back in college, his shows often ended with moments of violence or shock, like, you know, one of the puppets eating another one of the puppets. Henson brought them up at the Saturday night live, and when he tried to sell them up at show to ABC, he made two pilots, and one was called the Muppet Show, Sex and Violence. Okay. So this title was definitely

tongue-in-cheek. But the puppets that he brought onto SNL, the Muppets that he brought onto SNL, were more adult. They were actually different characters, who he said were from the quote, Land of Gorge, and they'd really flopped on SNL. So the sense that I really get is at this point in time, Henson and his puppets feel very boxed in. And if anybody could understand what it was like to be fenced in by their own creation, it was George Lucas. Uh-huh. So after the American

networks passed on the Muppet Show, a British entrepreneur named Lou Grayd bought it for a network in England called ATV. This is why the Muppet Show was shot in England at L Street Studios, where George Lucas would wind up shooting the Empire Strikes Back, far away from Hollywood. He asked Jim Henson to help him make Yoda. Now Henson didn't have time to perform the character and suggested Frank Oz for the job. It's the perfect marriage. Henson's team knows how to do puppets

and Lucas's team knows how to do remote control technology. Yoda is the experiment, the Dark Crystal is the full execution, and it really seemed like it was primed for success.

You've got the producer of the first two Star Wars films, British illustrator Brian Fraud,

who had done this illustrated book called Faris. It's this art book about folklore, and he had done it with Alan Lee, who would go on to work on the Lord of the Rings, if you remember Lizzy. It was a bestseller. They spent five years creating the world of the Dark Crystal,

“and then at the very end they said, "What should the story be?" And I think that may have been”

the problem. Yeah. So Brian Fraud worked himself to exhaustion on the Dark Crystal, which we will cover another day, and after a really rough screening in San Francisco, Henson, Fraud, and Wendy Midener, who'd helped design Yoda and operate his ears and would go on to marry Brian Fraud, were riding in a limo, and it's very quiet. The response had none, not so great.

And Fraud's thinking, "Well, that was fun. I'm probably never going to work with Jim again,

and then Jim goes, "Ooh, should we do another one?" And looking back, Fraud said, "For some bizarre reason, we heard ourselves saying yes." And Henson knew this movie had to be different from the Dark Crystal. So Lizzy, based on what I've described, could you maybe point out a few differences between Laverenth and the Dark Crystal? The most obvious ones you could possibly think of. There are people? Yes. There is a very clear story and objective, even if it is, you know,

wandering through a Laverenth? Yes. And it's not exclusively geared towards adults, I would say. It's a little lighter. It's a little lighter. Yeah. You nailed it. They wanted it to be lighter. They wanted to have at least some human characters, and they wanted to give the characters more personality. Henson pitches Fraud and Fraud has a vision. "What I saw immediately was a vision of a baby

“surrounded by goblins, because in folklore goblins steal babies, and that's what fairies do as well.”

I have a suspicion about who his baby that is, and I guess I'm glad. Considering how or applying those shots are." Hold that thought. Despite Henson having created the cube, Fraud was the one who suggested that there should be a Laverenth. Fraud starts sketching characters, and he paints the scene he saw in his mind of a human baby surrounded by goblins. Six months later, his son Toby was conceived, and when Toby was born, he apparently looked just like the baby in the painting.

Remember the name of the character in the movie? It's Toby, and I already know his name is Toby Fraud. Yeah. Now Fraud had also learned from his mistakes on the dark crystal. He now knew how to design for puppeteering. So he now knew how to farm his own child out into the middle of a bunch of horrible muppets. That's right. It's a family business, Lizzy. Brian Henson's working on this. Get in early. Toby Fraud's working on this. Who cares if Brian Henson's 21? Toby Fraud's in the movie. The kid stays

in the picture. Yeah. All right. So Fraud's designing for puppeteering. Basically he knows the ways in which puppets need to be manipulated, so he can design it in a way that the puppeteer can actually manipulate these characters. And as the drawings are finished, a somewhat episodic story starts to form. And at first Fraud and Henson had decided that the whole story would take place in the fantasy world. There's going to be a king and a queen and the king would quote rescue his baby from an enchantment.

They were juice. They said this is it. The dark crystal didn't quite work. This is going to be the one.

unfamiliar, listen to our episode on Lord of the Rings, Alan Lee was one of the main concept artists, you know, designers on Lord of the Rings. Lee had just started working as a concept artist for movies. And according to Henson, Alan Lee says, gee, that sounds an awful lot like the movie I'm working on. Lizzie, any guesses as to which 1985 fantasy film starring a young Thomas Cruz, legend legend directed by Ridley Scott. Now I watched legend last night and seen it in 30 years.

I don't know. Here's what I'll say. Borderline incomprehensible story for me. Maybe I hate it.

One of the most incredible visual masterpieces I've ever seen. Maybe the best production design costume design here and make up the design work by Alan Lee. Put this on and you'll say, oh my god, this is Lord of the Rings. Like they'd like Lord of the Rings used this, obviously the same designer,

“you know, Alan Lee. I think in some ways it looks better than Lord of the Rings. Like it is a visual”

feast. And I actually think legend steals more from the dark crystal in a weird way than the version of Labyrinth or describing where to steal from legend, but who knows I didn't see early copies of the story. And it's more of a garden of Eden's story anyway. But the point is, Henson and Fred decided we do not want to be stepping on the toes of legend or Ridley Scott. So let's change it up. Instead of having a man as our lead, let's have a young girl as our lead. Henson had daughters. Initially she was

going to be a fairy tale princess in a fantasy world and then she was going to be from the Victorian

era. And finally they said, well, just make her a regular girl living in the US present to which I

would say, or maybe a really weird girl living in the US present. Look, she's a Renaissance girl. You're going to be a Renaissance girl. She's going to be a horse girl. You're going to be a horse girl. She's a horse girl. You might be a bug kid. You might be a bug kid. You just don't know. I was a bug kid. You were a bug kid. I was oh my god. I was a bug kid. I was a bug kid. Yeah. She was a horse girl. They said, what if she was full? I mean,

you know, she comes in and she pretends to be a horse. No, she's a reindeer kid and that's fine.

“I get it. I went to the Celtic games every year because it was cool. I think. All right. So they”

worked on the story for about a year. And then they bring in Dennis Lee. Now Lee had done some dialogue and narration polishing, uncredited on the dark crystal, and he's currently working in the music department of Penson's TV show "Fragile Rock." So Lee goes off and turns the story into a coming-of-age story, set in a fridayin, not Freudian, although kind of, world of goblins, hairy beasts, and animated masonry. This time, the humans were central to the story. That's the key

distinction. He finishes writing in December of 1983, but it's in novella. So Henson says, okay, well, now I need a screenwriter to turn it into a screenplay. It's what she said, why didn't we start with the screenplay? But that's fine. Regardless. According to one Henson biographer, Henson briefly considered writer Melissa Matheson, who was best known for writing E.T. The extraterrestrial.

Wow. It should make a lot of sense. But he ultimately decided he needed a comedian, and he

chose Terry Jones. Lizzy, are you familiar with Terry Jones? Of? Monti Python. Monti Python. Okay. That's right. Thought. Yes. Writer, director, actor, best known for his work as the member of the world famous British comedy troupe, Monty Python. So Jones takes the job, sits at his desk with Bryan Fraud's drawings. He said he basically discarded Lee's novella, which, quote, wasn't even a complete thing, rude. But he did keep the scene where Huggle

squirts the fairies, which is a very funny scene where Huggle's like counting the fairies, says killing us, spraying them with bugs. Yeah. Every time he hit a wall, he just looked through Bryan's drawings, find a new character, and spark something new. And this is kind of how we get a very meandering story as a result. But he said it was wonderful. So strange way of collaborating,

“although Bryan and I never sat down and worked together, it felt like that's what we were doing”

the whole time. And Fraud felt the same way. I think because Jones was English, he caught references and Fraud's work that Henson, an American, missed. And so Jones was really wrapped from seeing and Fraud Alice in Wonderland. Obviously, a hefty dose of whimsy, but, quote, "underpinning a profound story about a teenage girl coming into maturity." It's kind of the weird part of this movie. I don't I don't love. You could also read it as a teenage girl, just not being as much of a dick as she

had been. And maybe that's a more wholesome viewing of it, which is maturing in some capacity. I like the idea of the maturity more is leaving the childhood behind, which is why I really love the last scene of the movie, where they kind of, all the monsters, like, will still be here for you, you know, when you need us, less so the David Bowie element of it. I agree. I don't actually think that it's there. I don't think it's the main focus of it. I think it's more that she's understanding

the importance of family and her brother and those things outside of herself. And then that's how she's maturing. I agree. So one of Jones's early ideas we should mention was to write sort of an environmentalist parable and you wanted to keep the goblin king off screen until the very end, like the Wizard of Oz, which could have been interesting. Now, only three writers are credited on this movie, Henson Lee and Jones, as I mentioned, but writing the script would take nearly two

and a half years with more than 20 rewrites and revisions. Now the details are hazy, but at least

So Henson gave her one of Jones's early drafts, and she either wrote another script or treatment,

“while Henson was also tinkering in parallel, so her draft was more focused on Sarah and the relationships”

of the story. And according to Henson's son, Brian, it also improved the structure of the story, but quote unraveled all of the dialogue and it wasn't as funny as Jones's past. So according to

some sources, Jones then took another pass to add back to comedy. He says, quote, "He basically

pulled it back to my second draft. I was actually thinking at one point of taking my name off of it, but then Jim rang me up and said he'd like to give me soul screenplay credit, and I just couldn't for the life of me think of how to refuse." Now according to another source, Jim liked both of their drafts, and he wanted to combine them, so he basically just asked them both to keep writing. Now the early 80s, as I mentioned was he were really good for puppets, but they were rough

for Lou Grade, the man who'd taken a chance on them up at show. He was slowly losing his media empire with a couple of flops that were going to have to cover at some point. So in 1980, AFD, which was the film division under his company, ITC, released two movies within six weeks that were not well-received.

Can't stop the music? A showcase for the village people made $2 million against a $20 million

dollar budget? $20 million on the village people? Listen, this was the peak of disco. This makes sense on paper. Less so in execution. And six weeks later raised the Titanic, based on Clive Custler's Dirk Pit novel of the same name, which I read when I was in middle school, was the nail in the coffin. It made 7 million against a $35 million budget, so ITC has to sell AFD in its library of films to universal pictures, which includes the then-in-production the Dirk

Crystal, which is why you see universal. So what's kind of tragic is that one of the movies that was in production that gets sold off to universal was on Golden Pond, which made over $100 million against its $15 million budget, and one three Oscars. Because you know that somebody was like all people on a pond, sell it, get it out of here. I know, and it would have actually totally reversed the fortunes of this company. If you think about how much they lost on the last two,

they would have made that in more. But basically, Henson couldn't go to Lou Grayd for financing on Labyrinth because Lou Grayd had sold off his film division, but he knew another outsider who would back something as crazy as Labyrinth. So sometime in the first half of 1984, Henson flies to California to meet with who Lizzy George Lucas? George Lucas. Yeah, the man who has kind of the same voice

“as Jim Henson. In many ways, I think George Lucas probably needed something new in his life.”

He literally needed new material for his company for Lucasfilm because Star Wars had wrapped in May of 1983 with the release of Return of the Jedi. And I think he may have needed something a little new emotionally as well, because as you remember Lizzy, he had gotten divorced about a year earlier from Marsha Lucas, his wife and creative collaborator of nearly 15 years. And so in August of 1954, George Lucas signs on to executive produced Labyrinth, but Jim Henson still needs his Sarah.

So let's talk about casting Sarah Lizzy, because this is a really fun, sliding doors, what ifs sort of casting scenario. So in April of '84, Henson starts holding monthly auditions in London. And he was focused on actresses who were either over 18 or would be over 18 by the time filming began to avoid child labor law limitations, which I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah, candidly, I also think it softens some of the awkwardness of the Bowie

components as well, or it would have. So three months in, he had a top choice. I'll give you a couple of hints Lizzy, and you can take a guess. Great. She's a British actress, and she would break out in 1985's a room with a view. Helen and Bonham Carter. Very good. She would have been a really interesting choice, but Henson wasn't sold. She's spicier for sure. She's super spicy. She feels like she could have actually been, if they had had a female character who was already

part of the world of Labyrinth, like who she comes across. Henson also considered a few actresses that I'm not going to make you guess, but would have been just very different. Sarah Jessica Parker.

She was up for literally everything in the mid-80s. Yeah, she had done this CBS sitcom. I never saw

“called Square pegs. I think it only ran a season. She would have been roughly 18 or 19. Laura”

John. Okay. That makes sense. 1617. I think she'd done foxes with Jodie Foster. Mia Sarah, who had done all my children, and who was doing legend, right? Like she would have probably been shooting legend. And then, of course, goes on to do Ferris Bueller. Exactly. And Mary Stewart Masterson. Very, very interesting. She makes less sense to me than the others. So Henson decides at this point I actually want Sarah to be played by an American, and maybe she could be younger than 18. So we

brought into search. And by late December, he has a new top five. And this includes Jane Krakowski. Wow. Wow. She had just done vacation. She would have been 15 or 16. And Ali Sheidi.

relatively young, but she was actually one of the oldest considerate, like I think she would have been around 21 or 22. So Henson reviews their tapes one more time. He decides to start over and a few weeks later, 14 year old Jennifer Connelly walks in. She's been acting for a couple years in Henson knows she is exactly right. Connelly felt about acting, much the same way Henson had about puppeteering.

There's this quote where she says, like, "I had no interest in acting. I was interested in

being a vet or a carpenter or something." Basically, a friend of her parents asked if she wanted

to try modeling. She started modeling because she's gorgeous. Yes. She then goes on to be commercial work. Then she gets a film audition for Once Upon a Time in America and then she gets music video work. And then she's in Dario Argento's Phenomenon, which I don't know if you've seen. It's an Italian set, supernatural horror film. It's very good. And then with all of that under her belt, like literally two features kind of one lead role, she gets one of the biggest co-stars in the world.

So two weeks after Jennifer Connelly signs on, David Bowie is officially cast as Jeras. That would be so scary as a 14-year-old that you're going to be starring opposite David Bowie. Like, this is the height of Bowie's start-up at this point, pretty much. Yes. What's funny is that Connelly has said that she didn't really grasp it at the time, and I wonder if that's because she could be too young. She would, yeah, I think Bowie was actually

kind of in his second act and we will get into it kind of where he wasn't his career in just a moment.

Perhaps we should briefly mention there are allegations that David Bowie had a sexual relationship with an underage girl, Laurie Maddox, has accused him of this when she was 14 or 15, as part of she was like a underage groupie with his, I don't know how to say this.

“Yeah, I'm looking, my understanding about this, and I think it's important to mention just”

because we are going to discuss that there are elements of this movie that Teter on vaguely sexual between Bowie's character and Jennifer Connelly. We are aware of the fact that these allegations exist. Laurie Maddox, unfortunately, sounds like she had quite a few sexual encounters with many rock stars. She seems to say that they were all consensual, but of course, if you're 14 and the person you're sleeping with is in their 20s, that's not consensual. So that's I think all

there is to say about that is that we are aware of those allegations they exist. She said it happened, and it very well may have. Thank you, Lizzy. Let's talk a little bit about where Bowie is in his career at this point in time when he's cast as Jaris. So in some ways, Bowie was a bit like Hanson. He's this experimental oddity. He's obviously enormously talented. And so 1969, space oddity is his first top 5 hit in UK. Then you have the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the spiders

from Mars in 1972, worldwide popularity. I know he was technically acting in the 60s in a few things short film stage productions, but I feel like he really starts being noticed as an actor with the man who fell to earth in the 1970s. Minor cinemas he has a somewhat shaky late 70s musically, but then he re-establishes himself in the early 80s with ashes to ashes. One of my favorite Bowie songs, yes, under pressure, and then let's dance in 1983. The whole let's dance album,

yeah, has a ton of stuff on it. Exactly. Yeah. Jim Henson, though, had not originally pictured Bowie for the part. So for one thing, he was human kind of, and Jaris was originally going to be

“another creature, which is, I think, interesting, but let's talk about that in a second. Now,”

once Henson decided to make him human, he was actually considering actors. So British actor Simon McCorkandale, who I did not know, but I guess he was known at the time for playing Simon Doyle in the 78 adaptation of Death on the Nile. He was also in Jaws 3D in 1983. And Kevin Klein. Oh, I love Kevin Klein. I might be team Kevin Klein. I know he's very funny. I think of something like a fish called Wanda. I think very less sexual. He's less sinister. He's less sinister.

There's something I totally understand the casting of David Bowie, and I personally very much enjoy it. Even this is, this is not his best performance. He is actually, he's a very good actor. He's been in a lot of stuff. He's a very good actor. This is not that, but that's fine. But he's,

you know, he's always dabbled with the idea that he's not entirely human, that he's something

alien. You know, he's very endogenous. He's a man who fell to Earth. Yeah. Exactly. He feels very other, whether it's his eyes, one of which the pupil is always dilated. It's not heterochromia. Okay, so anyone's wondering. But yeah, I think I totally get it. But when you are dealing with children, which they are in this movie with both the baby, although I love David Bowie throwing that baby around. But with the baby, and also a 14-year-old girl, I think someone like Kevin

Klein may have been a little bit more palatable, but I don't know that he would have brought the attention that they needed to this movie that David Bowie did. Well, it's interesting, you mentioned that,

“because I think the attention is important. So Kevin Klein was a big, you know, stage actor at the”

time. And Hanson describes, to scrap this idea when he realizes, you know, let's make

to go after a musician and some sources say his top choice was sting. I'm bored. Hanson has said he

considered sting, but he was not his top choice. Either way, he goes to his kids. He says, "Your young, who should headline this movie?" And Brian Hanson, who's 21 at the time, says Michael Jackson and David Bowie are the two biggest names in my generation. But he specifically suggests Bowie, Lizzie's face. Yes. A plus choice. Okay, what's interesting is yes. Obviously, off-screen allegations/confirmed instances of Michael Jackson being wildly inappropriate with children,

aside, I completely understand creatively, like this is what shortly before thriller, like Jackson's

“the better dancer of the two. I think you could argue Jackson's the better singer. Yes. I do think”

David Bowie's off-beat nature fits Hanson's style better. But I understand considering Jackson. I'm not actually saying that Michael Jackson would have been bad in this at all. No.

Michael Jackson is was an incredible performer. Why do these people all have to be

goddammit? Anyway, keep going. They're all very talented. Yeah, I don't think Michael Jackson would have been right for this. Just because, like, the world of this, he doesn't quite make sense in. Michael Jackson makes sense in thriller. Michael Jackson doesn't necessarily make sense in fantasy the way that David Bowie does. I mean, the whiz, but yes, but the whiz is not. I'm sorry, guys. The whiz is not great. Yeah, I don't know if that's his fault. No, no, I don't know that

is either, but I'm just saying I don't know that it works super well. Hanson decides Bowie's the way to go. So he meets with Bowie in New York. He's got frowns drawings. The most recent draft of the script by Terry Jones. He's got a copy of the Dark Crystal in video. And Bowie really likes to Dark Crystal. He thinks it's really interesting. He says, okay, this could be cool to make this movie about with humans. And at the end of the meeting, Jim has three questions. Will you do this

movie? Will you sing in it? And will you write songs in it? And according to Hanson, Bowie said, yes, yes, yes, and yes, and according to Lizzy, he said, but only for 10 minutes. I stand by that. But what he actually did say is only if I like the script. Now, I cannot figure out if that means that Hanson gave him the copy he had or said, well, hold on to beat because we're still rewriting this thing because the script continued to change a lot. So when Lavernth was released,

Hanson was very open about the fact that George Lucas had come in towards the end of the writing process and worked a great deal on the script. What he was not as open about was the involvement of another big name writer, Lizzy, which female comedy icon turned infamous director of a flop of a movie that we actually kind of liked, a lame man, worked on credited, a lame man, worked on credited on labyrinths. Interesting. According to Bryan Henson, she was quote,

"not meant to be there" and she flew in in the dark of the night, stayed in our house and

“worked in an upper room. To which I say, like, did she have leprosy? What is going on here? Why?”

I don't know. It's unclear. We couldn't find a reason. Some guesses? Maybe he didn't want to freak out the other writers or let Harry Jones, who was getting credit, you know, that Elaine May, who would have been intimidating to, you know, their both comedy giants. Maybe there's like a guild issue, maybe he was doing it without telling the producers. Regardless of the reason, Bryan says that Elaine worked with Jim for roughly two to three days to try to bring back the comedy and better

retain the structure and all this was happening when we were not far out from shooting, we were real close to shooting and we were able to confirm this. According to Hanson's notebook, he met with May at the end of February 1985 and they worked together in April and the final script was dated April 11th, 1985, just four days before principal photography. So we don't know what emergency surgery Elaine may did on this movie. It may have been very little it might have been a lot, but that

draft is credited to Laura Phillips and Terry Jones. Elaine May's name is not on it. So, Hanson's team meanwhile had spent 18 months creating labyrinths creatures. So the dark crystal had kind of been

a 25 million dollar R&D projects for the show, Fragle Rock, and then everything they did on

Fragle Rock was now informing what they were doing on labyrinths. So on Fragle Rock, they did little radio-controlled characters, the doosers, they had these big walk-around gorgs with remote-controlled mouths, and they had really refined the integration of remote-controlled technology and puppetry. And so now they have motor-controlled that can be operated from 10 feet away. There are fewer wires, but there's still a lot of challenges, including making these creatures

lightweight enough that they can be operated by a human inside of them. So Lizzie, which creature is particularly large and looks like maybe requires a person to be inside of him? Ludo.

“Ludo. So he has a radio-controlled face, which is so expressive, isn't that impressive?”

Wow, yeah, that's amazing. But the rest of the suit isn't habitable by a performer. Halfway through the build, Jim Henson is getting nervous. He's going, "How much is this going away?" They do some calculations and they say, "Well, it looks like it's going to be a hundred and some odd pounds." And Jim Henson says, "That is too much. I need this performer to be able to move around in this thing." So they start over. They go back to the drawing board.

The final product they get down to roughly 75 pounds. That's still really heavy. The suit is very heavy. Yeah. It was too heavy for one actor. He hired two actors, Ron Meck and Rob Mills. They're close enough in size that they can switch off.

And then it's put me on the bench coach and tapped me in to the other one. There was a giant automaton guard robot. He's called humongous Lizzy. You remember him when you get to the goblin city? Mm-hmm. This was not a man puppet, but at 15 feet tall,

it was the biggest creature Henson's team had ever built. It's amazing.

They made the first version entirely out of fiberglass, but it wouldn't flex properly when it moved. So again, they scrapped it and started over. They used polyurethane foam. But if you had a guest Lizzy, which creature was the most complicated to bring to life. The hint I'll give you is screen time. Uh, yeah, I was going to guess Hoggle, maybe. Hoggle was the most complex. He had a motor controlled face, like Ludo, and there was a

performer inside, but they had to jam a lot more into a much smaller package. Oh, wow. So Brian Henson, whose credit is the puppeteer coordinator on the movie, said that at first, Jim wanted to use a hand puppet for the close-ups of Hoggle's face. And there's a lot of amazing

“hand puppeteer in this movie. The knockers, if you remember that scene Lizzy, or she said the door.”

I love this. Oh, my God. They're made to look like brass. Yeah. And it's so effective the way that they're talking to her. It looks seamless. I mean, you could not see GI that better than the way that it looks in the scene. No. But when they did these close-ups of Hoggle's face with a hand puppet, they look too different from the wide shots. So they decided everything had to be done by motor control, which required

18 motors inside of Hoggle's face, which were remote controlled by four different people. Brian provided the character's voice, in addition to being one of the people who was doing the motor controls in the face. But Hoggle was moved by an actual actress, Sherry Wiser. And it was an easy she had to wear these huge mechanical hands that were basically ornamental. So basically her hands were small enough that they fit inside the palm of Hoggle's mechanical hands.

And they were designed that so when she moved her fingers, Hoggle's fingers moved.

“But she didn't have any gripping power. She couldn't pick anything up. So anytime she had to hold”

something catch something, they had to swap in another hand in a fixed position to hold the problem. Wow. But Lizzie, if you had to guess what the real problem was, knowing that she's wearing this giant remote controlled mechanical head, what do you think would be very difficult for her to do inside of this costume? Besides, go to the bathroom. Breeze? I don't know. See, she couldn't see while she was in the costume. So the original plan was to do what

they had done with Ludo, something they'd done on Frago Rock, which is they would put a camera inside the stomach of the costume. And a viewfinder up inside its head. My god, that's so disorienting. But at least you'd be able to see something. It caused her extreme motion sickness. Yeah. So they had to ditch the camera. And I would like to play a clip Lizzie of Brian Henson explaining how they solved this problem.

So people you would say to me, I really like what you did with the voice of Hoggle. How he's always

going, "Oh, crack, crack!" He just, he can't shut up. I just loved that. I was like,

“"Yeah, because that was the only way Sherry could see." Because the way we would shoot,”

it's Hoggle would be walking along and he wouldn't have any dialogue. You know, it would be Jennifer, who would be speaking, but Hoggle would be heading right for a tree. So he'd have to go, "Yeah!" So he had to make ridiculous noises all the time or he'd walk on off of cliffs and into trees. So basically the only way she could see was through the open mouthhole. It would be opened as mouths of Hoggle. And so they had to just make him, "Oh, I wrong. I wrong." The whole of the piece

so she could see. It's very funny. It's a very clever solve. Yeah. Just before production begins, Brian and Kevin Clash, the assistant puppeteer coordinator, realized, we have too many puppets and not enough puppeteers. So they bring in and train 40 more people and they would not be the last hires on Labyrinth. So cameras roll on April 15, 1985 at L Street Studios. Henson and his team are spread across all nine sound stages. The set pieces are massive. I mean Lizzy, you just

watched this movie. Yeah, it's crazy. You can attest to how big some of these scenes actually feel

as built. It's a really remarkable. It's amazing. $25 million budget. Same as the Dart Crystal.

But Jennifer Connelly said it felt like a playground. And maybe a dangerous playground. Because there were a lot of holes in the ground. Of course, because they had to be able to operate the puppets to them. When doing the dance magic scene, Brian said, "When you get all the puppets out of there, it looks like Swiss cheese." There's no set left. There's holes everywhere. People were walking around saying, "Any minute, the set's going to fall down." Jim Henson, for his part, said he didn't

realize how risky the shoot was going to be until they started shooting. And there was a mere tragic accident. I don't want to overstate it when they were shooting in the bog of eternal stench. The fart bog, yeah. Exactly. The butt hole fart bog. Mm-hmm. It was very hot, very slippery. And apparently very stinky. It really did stink in that set. And the first assistant cameraman, this is the person who is responsible for pulling focus, manipulating the focus of the lens to

keep the desired action of the scene and focus. They're carrying this big, panivision camera, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because of that quote, I assume it has a lens mounted on it,

It's the tank section where the rocks form under the bridge, Lizzy, if you remember. He grabs

“the nearby chain as he's falling, but it's covered in bog-goop. So he slides all the way down,”

and he just lifts the camera up with one hand. The other AC pulls it out just in time, but that first AC was lost forever. I'm just kidding the first AC was fine, but he was very stinky for the rest of the shoot. Another very challenging set piece, Lizzy, if you had a guess, which set piece that involves Jennifer commonly falling would be very challenging, which was you guess. Falling, is that when she falls into the dump zone with all the critters? No, I love that scene,

but this is the tunnel of hands. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The shaft of hands. Yes. So that is a 40 foot

tall set. And guys go on YouTube and look at how they built this. It's amazing. There's a 40

foot tall set and they started with 24 performers. So Brian Fraud had initially thought, "Oh, it could be fun if the hands kind of, you put lipstick on one, you know, your top finger and on the bottom, the hands talking and Jim Henson expands. It's like, well, what if multiple hands make a single face?" So they start with 24 performers and it's not nearly enough. Henson said, "When we got everybody in there, I looked at it and said to George Gibbs, who had been preparing

these hands, there aren't enough hands. Can you give me another 150 hands without people in them?" So they brought in another 75 performers. And then in the foreground, they have all of these rubber hands that are attached to these giant poles that they're moving up and down to create, you know, foreground action on it too. You basically said, "What are these hands for ants?" And he said,

"Give me 75 more." So it compounded another issue, which is that it was impossible for Jim to

direct the scene. He'd say, "Okay, let me see the hands move up there." And they go, "Which ones? Because they're all behind these boards and they can't see what they're doing." So they had they create a graph that mapped out the different sections of hands and know which ones would create faces and which ones would grab because again, my God. It's like one person's doing the right side of the face, the other person's doing the left side of the face, but they can't see anything. And they can't

see anything. So impressive. Now the creatures weren't the only practical trickery going on in this movie. I'm sure you noticed some really great in-camera effects, Lizzy. There are walls that are actually openings. That's my favorite at the very beginning with the worm. The one where she walks through the wall. Yeah. Yes. I love the worm. I also love the worm. Well, come and they make the

“messes. Yes. So good. So you should go in that way, should go to what a gone straight to the castle.”

It's a castle. Warmen. I want to made this movie 10 minutes long. How the worm turns. It's great. I love the doors that when hogels opening the doors and at each time you open it in a different direction, it reveals a different set behind it. They used a lot of force perspective too. So they would use force perspective to make the goblin village appear a lot bigger than it was. And that's actually how they make the maze look like it goes on forever. Which I think is very effective throughout

this movie. Yeah. So Jim Henson actually called the goblin town one of the prettiest sets he ever worked on and credit to production designer Elliott Scott. His team, Elliott Scott, who frame Roger Rabbit, Temple of Doom, last Crusade, like prolific production designer. Now industrial light and magic did provide some special effects, supervised by George Gibbs, including Lizzie your

favorite scene, which monsters did you hate? I hate those demon bird things. I hate it. My always

have the fireies or the fire gang, which were composited. So basically, yes, which you can tell. Yes. It doesn't match the seamlessness of all the in-camera stuff of the rest of the film, but this is for early in compositing. So this is basically, you know, the fireies are operated each of them is operated by two to three performers. They're wearing black behind them. They then cut them out and they composite them onto the background. Now there wasn't a lot of drama about the execution

of the fireies, but there was about their name. So sometime in late 1985, Henson's longtime friend Marie Sendak, either read the script or saw a rough cut of the movie. And Lizzie, what's his most famous children's book? Where the wild things are? The fireies were originally called the wild things. Yeah, and they look a little bit like Marie Sendak creations too. He was, he was pretty upset. He thought this was way too close to his book. And it turns out that the whole plot of

labyrinth sounded a lot like one of his other books. I had not read this book, but let me describe the plot. A young girl is watching her baby sibling while her father is at sea and her mother at the harbor. She focuses more on the music than her baby sister. So goblins come and steal the baby sister, swapping in a changeling made of ice. She flies out of the house and her mother's cloak. She flies around town. She finds her sister. All the goblins are disguised as babies. She

uses music to get the goblins to heat her instructions and identify which ones her real baby sister and she returns home. Not exactly the same, but yeah, it's pretty close.

“Do you certainly similar? Yes, it does sound very similar. The only thing I will say, however, is that the idea”

of goblins taking a baby or changing, taking a baby fairy, taking a baby and replacing it with something. That is a very common folk tale from, you know, whales, Scotland, Ireland, like, for the last 400 years. Yes, yeah, yeah, so I will just caveat it with that. I think that's a great point. Let me present you a different piece of evidence that would perhaps be in Sendak's favor and then I will counter it.

Magic maze into the labyrinth, Sarah's maze, lost in the maze, trapped in the mind maze,

inside outside, outside inside, turning inside outside and outside in. You're losing the thread, Jim. Well, Sendak's book was called "Outside Over There." Sendak's lawyers sent a note to Jim, who was apparently very hurt at the assertion that he'd plagiarized Sendak.

“, and that's what he said. And that's what he said.”

And now, in Henson's defense, if you go back and watch the cube from 1969, which he wrote and directed for NBC, there is a scene where Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, kind of guitar player, comes in and sings a song for the protagonist. And Lizzy, because I just can't resist, I gotta play it for you. Great. Oh, he's physically gonna play it. He's getting his guitar out. Wow. Let's say if I can do this. Just listen to the lyrics. Okay. Okay. There are places that contain you.

There are corners in your soul. Plastic, laminations in your life. But when you're on the inside of the outside of your thoughts, do they restrain or do you stay the self? But when you're on the inside of the outside of your thoughts, Henson had written that in 1969. Okay. So I don't think he plays Rice Marie Sendak. That's my evidence. I don't think so either.

First of all, very good. Very good. Round of applause for Chris. Thank you, forget your guitar.

You can sing. There's gonna be a call back. No, I don't think he did. The idea of the changeling the idea of Goblin's taking a baby, the idea of like so much of this is archetypes that I do not think that this is play dressed. I agree. But Henson did rename the wild things to the Fires, and he even added a credit to the end of the movie. Jim Henson acknowledges his debt to the works of Maurice Sendak. Very nice. They also changed the name of one of Bowie songs from wild things to

“chili down. Doesn't matter. I didn't remember it anyway. Chili down. Okay. Let's talk a little bit”

about David Bowie on set. So according to Brian Henson, David Bowie's first scene was when Jareth

reveals himself in the tunnel to Sarah and Hoggle. If you remember, this was a huge disguise as a beggar, he rips his hood off. He stands up tall. The daily's going to the studio and the call start coming in, Lizzy. What do you think the studio's concern is? Where are his eyebrows? What's in his pants? What's the deal with his hair? What do we do in here? It was just the pants. It was the cod piece. They said you're absolutely nuts if you think David Bowie's going to keep wearing

that thing. Oh, they're wrong about that. He probably requested it. I don't think he did. So let's talk about this. Okay. They didn't reshoot the scene. Jim was very against reshooting scenes. He says it's a failure if we have to reshoot something. But they did make the cod piece smaller for all the scenes after that, which is the opposite of what Brian Froud had intended when he created Jareth originally. So according to Brian Henson, Froud's designs intended for the cod piece to get bigger

across the movie and Jim loved it. This is great. It's terrifying to a teenage girl. This is great. This is what the movie is about. She's like 15. She wants to be treated like an adult, but like, whoa, that thing's scary. What do you think, Lizzie? I don't like that. It was my least favorite quote in the research of this episode. That makes me unhappy. She doesn't need to be scared by

“your giant dick in her face. That's not the only thing that scares teenage girl about being an adult.”

All right, whatever. You know, I do think in a weird way what this quote reveals to me a little bit is that when I watch Henson's early experimental work, what's so clear and if you watch his map itself, but especially the experimental work where he's dealing with more adult themes, he is so glued in on, you know, a lot of masculine fears or contemporary fears about living as a man specifically a 30 40 year old man in America blah blah blah. It feels like he and

frowder kind of grasping at straws a little bit and trying to conceptual understand a teenage girl

to the part. She does, although I will say even the very beginning, she is portrayed as like almost non-sensical.

“She seems like she's nine. Yes, she's like, it's weird. I was like, oh, she 11, you know, she 15. No, it”

felt very much like just sort of a heightened idea of what a teenage girl's tantrum might be versus something that is more realistic. And believe me, the real reality can be terrifying as we're going to find out. Yeah, having lived through it with both of my sisters who I loved dearly, I am well-aware. Jennifer Connelly, I don't think thought anything of David Bowie's copies, but there was somebody on set who had stand behind Bowie and juggle his balls. So to speak, because David Bowie didn't

juggle the crystal balls that his character is juggling in the movie. So it's a fake arm. There's a juggling standing behind him, performing the trick blind. This man is Michael Morschen and he has been credited by some as inventing the style of juggling called contact juggling. He had to crouch behind Bowie, lean into him, make everything look proportional, and then juggle without being able to see his hands. That's crazy. If you watch the documentary on the film,

you can get a sense of how hard this was. He was practicing it with a double. And then when he's shooting with Bowie, you can see a bunch of takes reactionally drops one of the balls. He looks really tired. He looks really frustrated. Bowie says he thought the thing was just agonizing for

motion. He's basically shoved up into his ass trying to do the struggling line. And then you can

“hear Jim Henson say, when we shot that scene with David, he was incredibly patient. No, I think”

about Michael Morschen. But I think Henson and pretty much everybody was very infatuated with Bowie on set. I mean, Henson has said multiple times. He didn't come with an entourage. He seemed very normal. He was very down to Earth. He just kind of came and did his job. And that was it. That does match up with most of the accounts I have heard of people who worked with David Bowie or encountered him is that he was not a typical superstar celebrity and did generally seem to be

pretty pleasant to work with. Yeah. There were a number of instances where it seems like they just couldn't even get through a take because Bowie was just he couldn't get hoggles to name, right? Like, so I think a number of the instances where he calls something else were actually not intentional in the movie. He's a call some hogbuck and stuff. And she's like, "Haggle." And he's, "ah, yeah." And they just couldn't get it. Now, let's talk about the baby. Because according to Henson,

the real diva on set Lizzy was the baby. Toby Fraud. People say that you shouldn't work with

babies' puppets or animals. But this is the first time I ever worked with the baby. So now I understand

why people say that. According to Henson. And this baby Lizzy, as you guessed, is a Nepo baby. Because Toby was played by the boy who arguably inspired or wasn't inspired by Brian Fraud's drawings of the baby that started it all, which is Fraud's son, Toby Fraud. His mom was on set. Sherry Wiser was also a very calming presence for him. Now, they got him to cry and his crib at the beginning of the movie for a really long time, which is said. By

putting him there, outside of his regular nap time. So it's just that he was tired more than he was upset, although it is jarring. Yeah, my son's a little older than him. And it's very jarring. The scenes where he's getting tossed around are a doll, obviously. Yes, but there was apparently one dodgy part of the shoot, which is when they were doing dance magic. They'd start the music at a really high volume. And that would start all Toby. And so that was the dodgyest part,

according to some. Toby was asked if you remember shooting the movie. And he said,

“"The truth is, now, but I do have visions of goblins surrounding me and being a part of my life.”

I grew up with goblins and ferries surrounding me my whole life. Labyrinth feels normal to me. The rest of the world is weird. That could just be his dad's drawings. We don't know." Overall, it sounds like the cast had a good time working with Hanson. He was up front about the difficulty of working with puppets. He'd say, "Look, we're going to hit these scenes 15 times. The mechanics are going to be falling apart on you just half to be patient." And years later,

Connelly said that Hanson was extremely patient with her onset. David Bowie said he was the most

unflapable guy he'd ever worked with. And he had an incredible work ethic. He would fly to New York,

work on a new production TV series over the weekend, and then be back in London Sunday night to his resume filming on Monday. Principal photography wrapped on September 6, 1985, and that same month New York Times runs an article about the movie Star Wars and Muppet Wizards team up in Labyrinth. And Jim Hanson takes the opportunity to really emphasize how different Labyrinth is going to be from the dark crystal. He doesn't want to repeat that experience.

Labyrinth is going to be more accessible. Jennifer Connelly is in the lead. It's playful. We've got David Bowie. He wrote the music. Hanson George Lucas and John Grover edit the movie. And it seems like basically the relationship is Hanson takes a pass, then Lucas takes a pass. Lucas is cutting for action, tightening dialogue, and Hanson is, quote, "looser, more lyrical" with his approach. He says, "I loosen up his tightness, and he tightens up my looseness." I imagine just both of their

buttholes in that situation. Even though they've been planning on replacing Brian Hanson's voice as hoggle, they ended up kind of falling in love with it and they decided to keep it. So that is in the end Brian Hanson. They run it through a harmonizer, they drop it down a pitch, and that gave it the quality that matched the size of the character. But Lizzy, we got to talk about the very, very beginning of the movie, because it features not a puppet, but a what?

But what did you notice about it? How was it made? I don't. It's not real. No, yeah, it's animated, right? CGR. Okay, yes. It's 3D animation. So it might look hokey now, but this was a big deal. It actually doesn't look that hokey. I agree. It was the first time a realistic real-world animal had been created and animated in the computer. Now I assumed this was George Lucas's idea, and then ILM was responsible

“for it, and that's what a lot of people have said online, but according to our research,”

we're all wrong on both counts. It sounds like this was Hanson's idea, and it was executed by a company called Digital Productions. So back in 1984, Hanson had wanted to hire that company to work

on a series called Starboppers. It never made a past development, but he had some really cool

James Cameron asked ideas. Quote, he envisioned 3D fleece and foam puppets appearing for the first time in a digitally rendered set. Performing on blue screen, the Starboppers would move about in a virtual spaceship, and images would be married on screen. So it was kind of like a, you know, digital volume stage environment for puppets 20 years before that would be done. So the 3D owl was a natural extension of this. Hanson thought you could move puppeteering into the realm of

CGI, which is really cool, is he? Because you remember, Phil Tippet would basically do this in a lot of ways with Jurassic Park. Yes. So a couple other fun facts during the publicity tour, the airline lost one of their two haggle suits, and years later, they opened an unclaimed

“baggage museum, and they opened up one of the bags, and there was haggle. Wow. As Hanson promoted”

the film, he was inevitably asked about the dark crystal, but he was really careful to emphasize this is a very different movie, and it seems like he had really high hopes for this movie, and he had good reason to have high hopes. He had George Lucas, the producer of the most successful trilogy of all time. He had David Bowie, one of the most successful musicians of the last 20 years. He had a great new star in Jennifer Connelly, who would go on to win an Oscar two decades later.

He had incredible designs, a great budget. He had a story that although original was pretty

recognizable, it was, this is, you know, Allison Wonderland style story, and we all know goblins, and we know Faris, as you mentioned Lizzy, a lot of people know the changeling history, and the reception for Labyrinth was very different than the dark crystal, but it was worse. So Labyrinth was released on July 27th, 1986, and according to the best sources we could find, it was a pretty big flop. It grossed roughly $12 million domestically,

against its $25 million dollar budget. I do want to mention, if you guys look on Wikipedia, you will see a $34 million box office number. This seems to reference overseas box office returns that we could not verify. Further evidence that it flopped, TriStar pulled it from theaters after just three weeks. Well, in an era when movie-stated theaters, if they were doing well for six months or more, regardless of which number you trust, Labyrinth brought in significantly

less at the box office than the dark crystal, and the critics reviews were also pretty mixed. Gene Cisco's headline read, Jim Henson's wizardry lost in Labyrinth. He said Jim knows what he's doing with his puppet characters on TV and in the movies, but he's completely at sea when he tries to create more mature entertainment. He also took issue with Toby's character. The site of a baby in peril is one of the sleepless gimmicks a film can employ to gain our attention, but Henson does it,

and that's almost unimaginable considering the enormous amount of good he has contributed through Sesame Street. Years later, Brian Henson confirmed there was a lot of backlash about the baby. He gave one interview where the journalist claimed the movie was actually about child abuse. The New York Times was more measured. They said it was an impressive collaboration between Lucas and Henson, and they said in many ways it's a remarkable achievement, but they criticized Connelly's

acting, and they suggested that Henson was too focused on the puppets, not enough on the human actors. I do think there is such tonal consistency with the puppets, and you don't have that tonal consistency with Bowie and Connelly. Yeah, I kind of don't care, but yes. I agree. It doesn't bother me ultimately, but I can understand the criticism. Sure. Variety said, an array of bizarre creatures and David Bowie can't save labyrinths from being a crashing bore, characters created by

Jim Henson and his team become annoying rather than endearing. And Jim Henson was crushed. He said I was stunned and dazed for several months trying to figure out what went wrong, where I went wrong. His son, Ryan, offered theories in later years. He said, maybe fans of Bowies were confused, because it wasn't what they expected from him. Fans of the Muppets were confused, because it wasn't what they expected of Jim. A couple of legacy notes. Kevin Clash, as I mentioned, was the assistant

puppeteer coordinator on this. He would of course go on to operate in Voice Who Lizzy on Sesame

“Street. Elmo? Elmo. Yes, I believe it was the fifth man to take up that mantle. Okay.”

Jennifer Connelly blossomed into my first on-screen crush. I don't know if you've ever seen

career opportunities, but I will never unsee the outfit that she wears in that movie.

She was my David Bowie in labyrinths, it's all I'm saying. Okay, great. She would achieve Oscar glory

The Prestige? The Zoolander? His Zoolander cameo. Very good. Yes, he's good in the Prestige.

Yes, yeah, Nicola Tesla, best of way in 2016. George Lucas for his part probably didn't feel the pain of the bad press about labyrinths, because Lizzy, what animatronicly puppeteered

“misfire of a movie did George Lucas release in August of 1986 that involves a duck condom?”

Oh, howard the duck? Yeah, it was released about five weeks after labyrinths, I think. This was probably dealing with the fallout of that. Now, just after labyrinths was released, Starlog Magazine proclaimed, with labyrinths, Jim Henson usher's in a new stage in his career. The era of Henson as a feature film director is here. And then it wasn't. Jim Henson died four years after labyrinths was released on May 16th, 1990 from pneumonia. He was only 53 years old.

Yeah, labyrinths was the last movie he ever directed. Brian Henson later said that he

feels that both labyrinths and the dark crystal are better on the second watch. I think the first time

you watch it when it's just the story compelling you through, it's not as strong as when you're watching it for the film making and for the characters in for specific moments. I think it's stronger that way. And I think he was right. Labyrinths was released on VHS in 1987. It's slowly developed a cult following. We were unable to figure out exactly why. It may be that the darkness that had alienated audiences originally found kind of eager eyes in the 1990s with millennials, especially

“who were being raised on somewhat darker material, even on television. I think it's the home video”

of it. I think it's millennials watching this and maybe already being familiar with Fragile Rock. And I don't know. I also just feel like there's something very campy about this that lends

itself to being a cult classic that you know, you're going to watch when you're stoned with your

friends and your college apartment. Like that's my guess is that that's where this took off more. Yeah, some people have also suggested that it took on a mythical status because it was Henson's final film. So when Henson passed and he was so beloved by so many of us, a lot of us turned to, oh well, what was the last thing he did and then that became a discovery of Labyrinths. We don't know exactly why, but in the long run, Henson was somewhat proved right. Puppets could be serious.

I think you can see his influences across especially the work of someone like Guillermo del Toro, for example. Yeah. And the dark crystal was rebooted with a prequel by Netflix in 2019. I'm sure if you saw it Lizzy, but I mean, oh my god, it looks good. The dark crystal is your persistence. Brian Fraud served as the primary conceptual designer for that series. It did only last one season, but we got a season. Maybe Toby Fraud also worked on it. That's right. That's right. And in

2025, it was announced that Robert Eger's director of the Witch the Lighthouse, the Northman and Nostrato, my version of the Lion the Witch in the Wardrobe, was set to direct a Labyrinth sequel for TriStar. Great. David Bowie passed away in 2016, so he will not be reprising his role, but I'm excited to see what Robert Eger starts with it. Lizzy, that brings us to the end of our coverage of Labyrinths. That was so fun. And I have to ask you what went right. Gosh, so much.

I mean, the creature design, I just think it's so ambitious. It's so fun and funny. And of course, I care more about the puppets than I care about any of the people in this movie. And that's just a testament to the people that made these. And the choice to operate them the way that they did. The choice to put real people in the suits is so smart, because then you see them moving and engaging

“with the space without them being butt puppets as we learn the term was on Gremlins, I believe.”

Yeah, I love Jim Henson. I love the Muppets. I do love Labyrinth. And this was a joy. Thanks, Chris. Of course. I'm going to give mine to Bryan Fraud and kind of tangentially to Alan Lee, because when I watched Legend, I just couldn't believe how good it looked. And I think we often overlook the concept artists behind these films who really do craft the visuals that will end up being executed by these production teams and are able to create entire worlds in their minds.

And it's a remarkable ability to create that kind of vision from scratch. And I know obviously what's really fun about if you look at Bryan Fraud's books, if you look at Ferry's for example, and then you watch it art crystal, you can really see how it's fraud and Henson harmonizing to make something really unique. So I'll get mine to Bryan Fraud. Well, Chris, I'm very, very glad that you have opened the portal to the Muppet Labyrinth.

Yes. Because there is another Muppet movie that I have long wanted to cover. Which one? We will cover. Well, you're going to have to wait, Chris, until the clock tells one. Well, is it folks are enjoying the show? How can they support it? Well, you can tell a friend or family member about this show. You could post about it on social media. You can also follow us there at what went wrong pod on Instagram or TikTok.

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“But if you want to take it just one step further into Jericho Castle, you can get for $50.”

A personal shout out from the Goblin King himself, just like one of these. I just want to be on TV. I tried all through a distant land, found myself falling for what this could be. How don't call me the mama band. I'll show you the puppets can. They can do much more than you've

been told. They never get tired and they never grow old. Don't call me the mama band.

Oh, this game is lava, right? I will show the world with these hands can do. I'll make it for a don't say a child or a toe. Pidrian Pancria, Angeline Renee Cook, Beatrix Earhart, Ben Schindelman,

“please Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Rudy Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C-Grace B,”

Chris Leighle, Chris Zaka, David Friscoanti, Darren and Dale Carcling, Don Shibel, Am Soradia, Evan Downey, Felicia G, Filming herself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, the Castle crew of Winner Crypt to Ground Town, Grace Potter, Half Grey Hound, James Macoboy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rabbedo, Jory Helper, Jose Mellano Saltil till George here, Kerenic and Abba, K-Delrington,

Kathleen Olson, Amy Olkish-Laker McCoy, Lazy Freddy, Leda, LJ, Lydia Houses, Mark Bertha, Mary Poses Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Fykel McGrath, Nathan Knife, Rosemary Salford, Rural Gerr, Sany, Just Sadie, Scott O'Shida, Soma and Chaynani, Susan Johnson, Steve Winterbauer, and the Provost family, where the O sound like O's. Oh, don't forget there is no spoon.

Thanks back, Jason, that old Steve needs you. On me, agents, and cable TV, I'll find my audience and they will say. Come on, another man, with our best, you know we can, you burn the dark, find the light, slow, what's wrong, and explore what's wrong. All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of Labyrinth.

I can't wait to cover the dark crystal. Can't wait to cover the legend. Can't wait to cover the willow. I can't wait to cover so many of these movies of the 1980s that just really formed the

“worked personality that I have today. Lizzie, what can folks expect when they tune in next Monday?”

We are headed to a very different but arguably also Labyrinthian movie and historical figure. We are covering Lawrence of Arabia. That's right. And Chris, it's long as hell, so get started now. You know, as I slotted in between episodes of Love Is Fine,

I just cannot wait. Did you okay? We'll never let you learn.

I love Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia is great. I'm very excited. I bought it on Blu-K. Blu-K, 4K Blu-K. So tired. I just bought the 7th Samurai on Blu-K, guys. That's enough. All right, guys. Get out of here. Go buy an area of Abu Dhabi on Blu-K and we will see you next week.

Thank you everybody.

The other day, just your nine.