The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance

Some neat promotional stills for the upcoming Netflix miniseries over at BloodyDisgusting.com.

Click the critter below...

The Skeksis

Originally the Skeksis spoke an alien language based on ancient Greek and Egyptian, specially created for them by linguist Alan Garner. Jim Henson stated, "My whole approach to this film is visual. I wanted as little dialogue as possible because I believe the story is stronger that way. Dialogue becomes a crutch. If you have all these alien-looking creatures, why should they be talking in English? An early concept was to have the Skeksis just making noises, but in a way you knew what they were saying." Gary Kurtz responded to the non-English version stating, "The audience thought that they were missing something. Actually, they didn't need to understand the Skeksis' dialogue at those points. The translation of what was being said is really quite banal. The strength of those scenes was instinctively knowing what's going on...But the Skeksis scenes were quite long. You had to concentrate. The audience wasn't prepared to do that." The response of the test audiences led to the replacement of the Skeksis language with English dialogue.

From MuppetWiki

Extreme Cosplay

The Dark Crystal played a major creative role in my childhood. Falling in love with the Skeksis creatures kinda sealed the deal back then. My brother and I would often talk about building a Skeksis costume when we were kids, but we never followed through. I think we built the head though.

It was wonderful to come across this costume by dmringer on deviantart:

I bet he won the contest...

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More photos here.

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And click here for a really neat video regarding the restoration of the original Skeksis prop costumes.