Speaker 1: Travel to another world, another time in the age of
Speaker 1: London The Crystal. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with another movie
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I'm so excited
Speaker 1: about this. When Robert, what are we talking about today?
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking about The Dark Crystal. Last month
Speaker 1: it was Highlander two. Uh, you know, I think a
Speaker 1: pretty objectively terrible film. But this time we're talking about
Speaker 1: a film that that, in my personal opinion, is is
Speaker 1: a indeed a great film, if not a perfect film.
Speaker 1: In the words of a good friend of mine who's
Speaker 1: it is his favorite movie of all time, he posits
Speaker 1: it is the most magical movie ever made. And I
Speaker 1: think I agree. There is no more magical film. There's
Speaker 1: also no film I can think of that is a
Speaker 1: more pure fantasy than The Dark Crystal. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of fantasy movies, but The Dark Crystal is is
Speaker 1: the most fully committed to a fantasy vision. It's a
Speaker 1: movie with no human beings in it. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a It's just a wonderful alien experience. But yet one
Speaker 1: that you know is it shadows the natural world that
Speaker 1: we we know. It's shadows human mythologies and storytelling traditions. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it really leads to just an overall eloquent work.
Speaker 1: Um to remind anyone who hasn't seen it or did
Speaker 1: just sort of introduce you to it, because I've spoken
Speaker 1: to people who have not seen The Dark Crystal, uh,
Speaker 1: and I have to tell them about it. I have
Speaker 1: to serve as an ambassador for this film. Uh. It
Speaker 1: came out in two directed by Jim Hinson and Frank
Speaker 1: Oz written Kermit and Yoda yea Kermit Yoda written by
Speaker 1: David O'Dell and Jim Hinson, and the world and creature
Speaker 1: designs were created by the artist Brian Froud and then
Speaker 1: and then brought to life through a Hinston's Creature Shop
Speaker 1: and just the vast effort of just an entire industry
Speaker 1: of people. Uh. There's a wonderful making of documentary that
Speaker 1: is generally included on most Stevs and blue rays uh
Speaker 1: that you'll find of of the Dark Crystal. Highly recommend
Speaker 1: everyone watched that. In short, though, The Dark Crystal is
Speaker 1: a story of prophecy and reunification in a divided fantasy world,
Speaker 1: in a world that, like you said, is almost entirely
Speaker 1: rendered via puppets. I mean you'll see rocks and maybe
Speaker 1: a few you know, you know, see some grass, etcetera,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But sometimes the grass is a puppet.
Speaker 1: That's right. Sometimes the you know, the faun of the flora. Uh,
Speaker 1: all of it is is realized with puppetry, at least
Speaker 1: at some point in the film. The various creatures were
Speaker 1: designed through a superb fusion of that imaginative design from
Speaker 1: Brian Fraud, inventive puppeteering and puppet design from Jim Hinson's
Speaker 1: creature shop, and also the various professional physical performers such
Speaker 1: as dancers and still walkers. And you really can't over
Speaker 1: emphasize the importance of these three things coming together, because
Speaker 1: it's it's not enough. That's like, the creature looks real,
Speaker 1: but does it move in a way that feels real?
Speaker 1: And then does it move in a way that doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like a human in a suit? Yeah? So it is.
Speaker 1: It is a beautifully designed film, and it's the kind
Speaker 1: of design that I love. You know. It's back before
Speaker 1: everything with c g I, it's puppets, it's models, it
Speaker 1: sets its painted backgrounds. God, I love painted backgrounds and these.
Speaker 1: I would love to go back to that more often. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a film that that that really could have only
Speaker 1: occurred in two It came in at the perfect time
Speaker 1: because on one hand, like you said, I would come
Speaker 1: out a little later, you would have had the early
Speaker 1: c G I coming coming into play. You imagine that
Speaker 1: like Mortal Kombat Level c G I, the Dark Crystal,
Speaker 1: or or likewise, if it had been earlier, you might
Speaker 1: not have had the degree of a technical know how.
Speaker 1: Certainly the puppetry technology might not have been quite where
Speaker 1: it needed to be. I would also say a thing
Speaker 1: that's remarkable about The Dark Crystal is the way that
Speaker 1: it seems to be a product of true collaborative evolution,
Speaker 1: because it seems like it's something that was originally kind
Speaker 1: of a rough concept and mythology dreamt up by Jim Henson,
Speaker 1: who joined forces with Brian Froud and Brian Froud's type
Speaker 1: of creature designs. Brian Froud illustrated like giants and fairies
Speaker 1: and things like that, and so his designs for creatures
Speaker 1: sort of fed back into Henson's ideas about the story
Speaker 1: and the mythology, and then all this came together and
Speaker 1: got more definition when the performers came on board. It
Speaker 1: seems like a real ensemble, creative project that was formed
Speaker 1: by gradual accretion of mutations over many generations. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: a big part of that was that, like, there was
Speaker 1: money for this to happen, and I you know, it's
Speaker 1: not a given that that would have been the case.
Speaker 1: It's Muppet money, and Muppet it is Muppet money. Like
Speaker 1: I believe part of the deal was, like, you know,
Speaker 1: when it was financed, it was like, all right, you
Speaker 1: can make The Dark Crystal. You gotta make some Muppet
Speaker 1: movies as well. We need them, you know that we
Speaker 1: need to have the definite cash cows as well as
Speaker 1: this this sort of long gamble at trying to cash
Speaker 1: in on the sort of you know, franchise um uh
Speaker 1: dominance that you saw just a few years earlier with
Speaker 1: Star Wars. Yes, and also I think it was pretty
Speaker 1: clear through the Empire Strikes Back that people were looking
Speaker 1: at The Dark Crystal and saying, hey, you know, Yoda
Speaker 1: the puppet, he's very popular in the Empire strikes Back.
Speaker 1: We can we can make some puppet money with this
Speaker 1: Dark Crystal thing. Now, arguably it may not have reached
Speaker 1: the degree of financial achievement that they were that everyone
Speaker 1: was hoping for at the time, I'm but it has
Speaker 1: certainly become a beloved film, certainly one with a very
Speaker 1: strong occult following. Um and uh and and today generally,
Speaker 1: if you find if you ask somebody about The Dark Crystal,
Speaker 1: sometimes you may get some people are like, oh, I
Speaker 1: remember seeing that as a kid. It was a little dark, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And it does have some darker serious themes. Um. But
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever met anybody who who disliked
Speaker 1: The Dark Crystal. Nor do I want to meet something
Speaker 1: to dislike The Dark Crystal, because that's it's probably gonna
Speaker 1: be a pretty big red flag for me that maybe
Speaker 1: we don't have a lot in common. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: don't like it, don't even bother right and end to
Speaker 1: tell us no, no, you can you can tell us.
Speaker 1: I'd be interested to hear your reasons. Okay, but why
Speaker 1: are we talking about The Dark Crystal today? For well,
Speaker 1: for starters, we do like to chat about films on
Speaker 1: the show here and there, and they often give us
Speaker 1: a means to discuss various scientific, philosophical, or psychological concepts
Speaker 1: that in some cases we might not otherwise cover. And
Speaker 1: with The Dark Crystal, I think I think there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot to be said about how it reflects aspects
Speaker 1: of our world and what we can see of Planet
Speaker 1: Earth and human culture in the world of Thraw Thraw.
Speaker 1: So that's the planet they're on in The Dark Crystal
Speaker 1: or I don't know if they say, yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: it's a planet, it's their world. Yeah, it gets kind
Speaker 1: of tricky when you start trying to apply that, like
Speaker 1: the scientific lens to a world that is, uh to
Speaker 1: a to a pretty large degree realize through mythology, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's we will get into some astronomical concepts, but
Speaker 1: for the most part, the world of The Dark Crystal
Speaker 1: is a world of of myth and magic. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: also I will say, though I love The Dark Crystal
Speaker 1: and I'm a partisan of science, I will say it
Speaker 1: is not I don't know if it is a strongly
Speaker 1: pro science narrative, because you notice in the film basically
Speaker 1: science and technology seems to only exist among the bad
Speaker 1: guys and the well, no, that's not quite true. There's Augura. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm overstepping and in the say, the Skexy have a scientist,
Speaker 1: but the good mystics are more mystical in nature. Yes,
Speaker 1: but then we have to consider where they came from.
Speaker 1: And well we'll get back to that in a bit.
Speaker 1: But but those are those are aliens, those are that
Speaker 1: come to the world of Thraw. We should talk for
Speaker 1: a little bit about the the native inhabitants of this world. Okay,
Speaker 1: So first and foremost, The Dark Crystal is the story
Speaker 1: of gelf links. Yeah, it's it's a sort of hero's
Speaker 1: journey type narrative, basic classic adventure narrative with a with
Speaker 1: a young Gelfling at the core of it. Yeah, to
Speaker 1: two of them, actually we have. We start off with
Speaker 1: the male gelfling Jin and then we meet a female
Speaker 1: Gelfling later on named Kira, and they are the last
Speaker 1: two are seemingly the last two members of their species.
Speaker 1: And we we come to learn that that they were
Speaker 1: that their people were hunted to extinction by the ske
Speaker 1: Skexias in in ages past. And I guess we'll have
Speaker 1: to explain the we'll explain this ex he's in a bit.
Speaker 1: But basically, their species is all but extinct. If we're
Speaker 1: to apply you know, scientific understanding, I think we can
Speaker 1: safely say that they're extinct in the wild, like the
Speaker 1: gene pool would be too shallow for them to repopulate
Speaker 1: the world. Though in a mythological sense, like the sort
Speaker 1: of Adam and Eve logic applies, and they could conceivably
Speaker 1: bring everything back. But but then also more to the point,
Speaker 1: their culture is uh is extinct, like the only thing
Speaker 1: we see of original Gelfling culture we see in ruins,
Speaker 1: because Gin and Kira have each been raised by a
Speaker 1: different people. Jin has been raised by the mystics, the Uru,
Speaker 1: and then Kira is raised by the podlings. These sort
Speaker 1: of uh potato people. Yeah, that they live in huts
Speaker 1: and uh and the dance about and have a good time.
Speaker 1: They do quite literally appear to have potatoes for heads. Yes,
Speaker 1: they and we're modeled on potatoes. Yeah, so they live
Speaker 1: sort of underground. It makes sense. They're they're potato potato humans,
Speaker 1: basically little potato people. Now. Biologically, one thing that is
Speaker 1: interesting about the gelflings uh is that the males are
Speaker 1: wingless and the females have wings. Otherwise they're sort of
Speaker 1: basic they're they're the most human characters in the film.
Speaker 1: They're kind of elf like, thus the word gelfling, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of you know, elf like humanoids. But the wings
Speaker 1: are interesting because ultimately this would be an example of
Speaker 1: sexual dimorphism, and we see this kind of sexual dimorphism
Speaker 1: a lot. Say in the insect world. You'll find examples
Speaker 1: of winged females and wingless males. Uh, you know, bees, wasps, ants,
Speaker 1: soft flies, different types of beetles, all boasting morphological gender differences,
Speaker 1: and the reasoning generally comes down to pure sexual economics.
Speaker 1: You know, for all intents and purposes, Females are these
Speaker 1: species itself in most cases, in all cases, and males
Speaker 1: exist as a biological variant necessary for sexual reproduction. They basically,
Speaker 1: in a lot of these insects species, the male are
Speaker 1: just kind of there to mate and then don't do
Speaker 1: much else. I mean, for an extreme example, just consider
Speaker 1: there's a particular type of fairy fly um called uh
Speaker 1: dico Pomorpha egg mc tergis. And not only are they
Speaker 1: wingless compared to the winged females, but they're also blind
Speaker 1: and non feeding. Oh, they don't even have a working
Speaker 1: digestive system. Yeah, now we don't see that in the
Speaker 1: guelf links. But but any rate, it's an interesting case
Speaker 1: where you can you can look at this fantasy example
Speaker 1: and see how it matches up with the real world biology.
Speaker 1: But in in these insect examples, the males exist only
Speaker 1: to breed, and that breeding takes place close to where
Speaker 1: they hatched, often with nest mates, so there's no need
Speaker 1: for them to disperse um. However, if we were, you know,
Speaker 1: apply this to the gelf wings, we might assume that
Speaker 1: male gelf links exist primarily to breed close to home.
Speaker 1: One of the females would have migrated to find new mates,
Speaker 1: produced new young, find new communities of gelf links, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. I don't know if we get much
Speaker 1: sense of that in the movie, because it seems like
Speaker 1: they're both long lived at least that the jin Jin,
Speaker 1: the boy gelf Lin ventures out. Yeah, that's right, we
Speaker 1: do see that. It's a reversal that jin is the
Speaker 1: one who ventures and and Kira is the one that
Speaker 1: is still remaining close to home. So so you know,
Speaker 1: maybe that doesn't match up all that. Well, Oh, I
Speaker 1: didn't mean to say it doesn't match it all. I
Speaker 1: mean I just that I would say that the gelf
Speaker 1: wings perhaps are not insects showing insects. Well, another possibility
Speaker 1: would be that perhaps Kira still has wings but there,
Speaker 1: and we see her sort of glide with them, but
Speaker 1: not really fly with them. Perhaps they have more of
Speaker 1: a pure like mating display purpose, you know, like they're
Speaker 1: a show of fitness, reproductive fitness. Well, in that case,
Speaker 1: I would think you'd be more likely to see them
Speaker 1: on the males. That's true. This would be an inversion
Speaker 1: of the sexual dimorphism we typically see where the mail
Speaker 1: is the one with the with the fancy peacock feathers
Speaker 1: as opposed to the pea hen. Another bit of sexual
Speaker 1: dimorphism with the gelflings is that the jin is a
Speaker 1: little bit taller. So I mean that could be maybe
Speaker 1: Gen's a little older than Kira. But also it could
Speaker 1: just be like the sexual dimorphism of more of a
Speaker 1: sort of a warrior cast within the species. So we
Speaker 1: can consider that as well. But basically the big difference
Speaker 1: is the wings. Uh and and uh. And that kind
Speaker 1: of spoils a key moment in the film for people
Speaker 1: who haven't seen it, uh, because it comes as a
Speaker 1: surprise to gin as well. I mean, I would say
Speaker 1: the experience of The Dark Crystal is not really about
Speaker 1: learning what's going to happen. You can probably kind of
Speaker 1: predict to the plot. It's more about the experience of
Speaker 1: the world, the texture of it. But we are going
Speaker 1: to continue to talk about the plot of the film today.
Speaker 1: So if you can't stand to have this, uh, this
Speaker 1: rather straightforward hero's journey kind of story spoiled, I guess
Speaker 1: you should stop here and then come back after you've
Speaker 1: seen it. Alright. Well, another native species that plays a
Speaker 1: pretty important role in the film are the land striders.
Speaker 1: And this is this is my this is my son's
Speaker 1: favorite creature from the movie, and he's always drawing these things.
Speaker 1: These are long legged, striding herbivores that are sometimes used
Speaker 1: by gelf Links as mounts, and they're ferocious fighters when
Speaker 1: they have to be. They're kind of sweet looking, but
Speaker 1: they can really put up a fight. They've got like
Speaker 1: pussycat whiskers, funny looking eyes. They're great. Like most of
Speaker 1: the creatures in The Dark Crystal designed by fraud. Here,
Speaker 1: it is kind of difficult to put a real firm
Speaker 1: line on the on the hybridity that's going that's taking place.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not just a case where oh, it's
Speaker 1: a tiger with a rabbit's head. No, it's more like
Speaker 1: there's a sense of a rabbit to it, but also
Speaker 1: the sense of an insect or a moth, and also
Speaker 1: a giraffe. And it's all swirled around in a way
Speaker 1: that feels familiar but also just distinctly alien. But we
Speaker 1: do see some some some key real world animals reflected
Speaker 1: in it, most notably probably the giraffe. So the giraffe
Speaker 1: are real world land striders. They can actually reach top
Speaker 1: speeds of thirty seven miles per hour, but they can't
Speaker 1: really maintain it for long. But their kicks are are
Speaker 1: no joke, just as the kicks of the land strider
Speaker 1: are seen to be pretty devastating against their their enemies.
Speaker 1: Um an adult giraffe can kill a human or a
Speaker 1: lion if threatened, and they've also been pretty effective slinging
Speaker 1: their necks, certainly in fights against other giraffes. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: long limb gives you a lot of leverage. You can
Speaker 1: you can really whack with that thing. There's also again
Speaker 1: a hint of the rabbit and the land strider. Anatomy
Speaker 1: and I've also read that fraud considered jumping spiders and
Speaker 1: designing them, so that kind of makes sense. They've got
Speaker 1: a kind of so they've got very long legs below,
Speaker 1: but then they've got this hunched upper body that looks
Speaker 1: almost kind of like the the bunched up tiny body
Speaker 1: of Assualta said spider. Yeah, Now I was thinking about
Speaker 1: like animals like this. When you consider really long legged
Speaker 1: animal body forms, you can think of quite a few
Speaker 1: reasons for animals to have long legs compared to the
Speaker 1: rest of their body. Might be a defensive thing, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe they want like big legs for you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of average and kicking. Maybe they want to be
Speaker 1: able to move faster across short distances, longer stride, longer legs.
Speaker 1: Of course, the long legs also come with downsides to
Speaker 1: fast movement. But another thing would be to reach farther
Speaker 1: or taller. This fairly simple one, but one really interesting
Speaker 1: example I came across of animals with long legged body
Speaker 1: ratios is for a totally different reason. Uh, the I
Speaker 1: want to look at the black winged stilt or heman
Speaker 1: optus human optus. This is a type of bird that's
Speaker 1: a very land strider. To my eye, it's got these long,
Speaker 1: narrow legs with these kind of knobby joints. Uh, and
Speaker 1: it walks around in the water. Heman optus is found
Speaker 1: all over the world and they walk around in the
Speaker 1: water pecking around for food. According to the British zoologist
Speaker 1: Mark Carwardine, the black wing stilt has the longest legged
Speaker 1: to body ratio of any bird on Earth, with an
Speaker 1: average body length of thirty five to forty centimeters and
Speaker 1: an average leg length of seventeen to twenty four cinameter. Uh.
Speaker 1: The legs are usually about six or more of total
Speaker 1: body length. I'm looking at a picture of one right now,
Speaker 1: and these are some long legs. Yeah, it's it's a
Speaker 1: bit ridiculous looking. But the question would be why, like
Speaker 1: do they need to reach up in the trees, And
Speaker 1: the answer here is interesting. Instead, they're reaching down. The
Speaker 1: human optics bird is a waiting forager like wades around
Speaker 1: in water or mud, pecking down below to catch its prey.
Speaker 1: And the long legs allowed the bird to walk around
Speaker 1: in water pecking at prey, keeping their body up above
Speaker 1: the water and dry. And I guess if you want
Speaker 1: to do that longer legs allow you do wag deeper.
Speaker 1: Interesting and you know, in the Dark Crystal, the land
Speaker 1: Strider does seem to be more of a like a
Speaker 1: purely terrestrial animal, and it kind of there are some
Speaker 1: swamps in there are a lot of swamps, so, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if anybody's ever really drawn a fine
Speaker 1: line on why they have long legs. I always kind
Speaker 1: of imagine that it was more like a draft they
Speaker 1: needed to reach like high um fruit or flowers or
Speaker 1: something to chew on. But you can easily imagine one
Speaker 1: trooping through the swamp as well. All right, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about the wise woman of thraw Agra. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: Uh So, everybody's gotta have a favorite character in the
Speaker 1: Dark Crystal. It's kind of hard for your favorite character
Speaker 1: not to be agraa Ogre is pretty great. Like she's
Speaker 1: she's commanding, she's powerful, she's wise, she grunts a lot,
Speaker 1: She like every They are great scenes where she like
Speaker 1: sits down and releases this powerful groan of discomfort as
Speaker 1: she does. So. Yeah, I have seen interviews, old interviews
Speaker 1: where Frank Oz describes her as being you know, she's
Speaker 1: she's so ugly, she's beautiful that she's there's this there's
Speaker 1: this grotesque, gorgeous quality to her. She she can detach
Speaker 1: her eye and hold it in her hand to see
Speaker 1: around with it. Yeah, she has uh belly, she has
Speaker 1: like sort of goat curl curled goat horns um coming
Speaker 1: out of her head. And she has what looks like
Speaker 1: parietal eye where a third eye would be um. You know,
Speaker 1: kind of like you see and say lizards and in
Speaker 1: various species. So she too, is this kind of thing
Speaker 1: that seems like a hybrid of all these different forms,
Speaker 1: though she's largely humanoid. Uh. We we only learned so
Speaker 1: much about her in the actual film. But there's a
Speaker 1: wonderful book that came out um by Brian Fraud, titled
Speaker 1: The World of the Dark Crystal. It's magical. This is
Speaker 1: one of the best illustrated books ever and it's so
Speaker 1: it's um. It is presented as if it is a
Speaker 1: like an academic translation and gloss on an ancient text
Speaker 1: that's been discovered, and that ancient text is the Book
Speaker 1: of Augura. So it takes as like a fact, as
Speaker 1: if you know, the stuff that happened in the Dark
Speaker 1: Crystal is like a mythology from a long ago existing culture,
Speaker 1: and Augura is the author of this mythology. And then
Speaker 1: it's been translated by a by a fictional sky all
Speaker 1: learned I think named lue Ellen. Right with the various
Speaker 1: academic asides of uh dismantling what's happening there, But but
Speaker 1: we learned it's it's really a wonderful book, not only
Speaker 1: because it's filled with Froud's production art and designs, but
Speaker 1: it is it's just so weird too, because it could
Speaker 1: have just been that, right, it could have just been Hey,
Speaker 1: my name is Brian Froud, and I worked on this
Speaker 1: movie called The Dark Crystal. Here, here's some of the pictures. No,
Speaker 1: it's this this this utterly weird and magical and one
Speaker 1: of a kind of book. But but in it, yeah,
Speaker 1: we hear a lot more about Augura, where she came from.
Speaker 1: We get more of a sense of the backstory on
Speaker 1: the world of Thraw. But we learned that she's something
Speaker 1: like an earth elemental, that she's like a being that
Speaker 1: rises up out of the stones and the roots of
Speaker 1: the world so that the world can have voice, in
Speaker 1: that the world can witness what's happening, and uh, and
Speaker 1: then she loses one of her eyes when the great
Speaker 1: conjunction occurs, but we'll get more into that later on. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the cool things about all gress that she's
Speaker 1: sort of an astronomer astrologer type, right. She has in
Speaker 1: her laboratory. She has like a big observatory on the
Speaker 1: top of a mountain, and within it there is an
Speaker 1: oor y, and I love a good oorory. So an
Speaker 1: oory is basically a mechanical model of the movement of
Speaker 1: celestial objects, usually of the planets in the Solar System,
Speaker 1: and these have been constructed based on various astronomical models
Speaker 1: throughout history. They became very popular in the early modern
Speaker 1: period to represent the heliocentric model of the Solar System.
Speaker 1: A standard or y would operate by orbiting physical objects
Speaker 1: around based on a clockwork mechanism timed to simulate a
Speaker 1: ratio of the actual orbital periods. And of course, because
Speaker 1: the mechanisms that generate the movements were approximate, the known
Speaker 1: oories are basically all to some degree inaccurate. You might
Speaker 1: have heard though, of like classic examples of these things
Speaker 1: that are very head of their time, like the ancient
Speaker 1: Greek astronomical computer from the second century BC, known as
Speaker 1: the anti Kithera mechanism. This was discovered in a shipwreck
Speaker 1: around the turn of the twentieth century, but it was
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand years old, and it's essentially an
Speaker 1: analog computer that computed the future positions of celestial objects
Speaker 1: by way of differently sized gears that would spin at
Speaker 1: different rates and show you where the objects would be
Speaker 1: at different points in the future. And this kind of
Speaker 1: thing showed up again in the early modern period, where
Speaker 1: you'd have these oories that were generally clockwork. You'd you know,
Speaker 1: have like a somebody would work out all the details
Speaker 1: of how to put it together, and you'd have a
Speaker 1: clockwork solar system spinning around. Now we have highly accurate
Speaker 1: digital or oories based on software, so I guess that's
Speaker 1: actually a little bit less fun, even if it's more accurate.
Speaker 1: But one interesting thing when constructing an accurate or ory
Speaker 1: is that Augura faces a problem. We don't we have
Speaker 1: a solar system that is by comparison, very easy to
Speaker 1: predict the future positions of all gross solar system has
Speaker 1: three sons and will return to this later. That's right,
Speaker 1: it's key to the plot because when these three sons
Speaker 1: aligne it creates the Great Conjunction, which has tremendous, uh
Speaker 1: mystical properties in this film. You know, I've never wondered
Speaker 1: this before, but is Pitch Black sort of a takeoff
Speaker 1: on the Dark Crystal? Is there a great conjunction? So
Speaker 1: long as I've seen it, it's on this hot planet
Speaker 1: where the suns are always shining, but there's there's like
Speaker 1: a predicted a prophet side conjunction when like all the
Speaker 1: suns will suddenly be hidden. This almost never happens because
Speaker 1: there are multiple sons, and then the planet will go
Speaker 1: dark and then all the monsters can come out because
Speaker 1: they can't they can't tolerate the sunlight. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: I thought you were up on your Rittick movies. I'm
Speaker 1: more of a Chronicles of Riddeck guy. I've seen that
Speaker 1: one like a couple of times. I've only seen the original.
Speaker 1: I only watched Pitch Black because you've told me to.
Speaker 1: Did you move on to Chronicles a riddic to? I haven't. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's the only reason to watch Chronicle. The only reason
Speaker 1: to watch a Pitch Black is so you can watch
Speaker 1: Chronicles of Reddit. Pitch Black was kind of trash, but
Speaker 1: I sort of liked it. No, it's it has cool
Speaker 1: monsters in it, and uh, it has some some I
Speaker 1: don't want to trash it because it does have again,
Speaker 1: really cool monsters, and I think it it did some
Speaker 1: stuff really well. But then Chronicles are Riddic came along
Speaker 1: and it's just even more over the top. It's like
Speaker 1: more of like a flash Gordon. Okay, well i'll see it.
Speaker 1: I'll see it this time. Okay, alright, But back to
Speaker 1: the Dark Crystals. So one of the things that we're
Speaker 1: just talking about the mystical nature of the of the
Speaker 1: Great conjunction in this world. So this is how we
Speaker 1: end up getting the Earth Sky. Now the Earth Skx
Speaker 1: are being that we don't encounter in the film to
Speaker 1: the very end. But then and there's a lot more
Speaker 1: information about what they were and where they came from.
Speaker 1: In the world of the Dark Crystal the book, it
Speaker 1: looked kind of a bit like creepy pagan ghosts with
Speaker 1: like like wicker crowns, or they look kind of like
Speaker 1: when you see the images of the Nine Kings in
Speaker 1: the Lord of the Rings movies, like as ghosts in
Speaker 1: the shadow realm that you can only see when you
Speaker 1: put the ring on there there like that. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: all the things and all the other things in the film,
Speaker 1: there's this wonderful synthesis right of all these these things
Speaker 1: coming together so that it feels familiar and yet alien
Speaker 1: at the same time. So it does feel like an
Speaker 1: extra resturant, or like an angel or or some sort
Speaker 1: of pagan spirit being, but it is also unique. And
Speaker 1: so we learned that these are the Earth SKX, or
Speaker 1: more specifically the Fallen Earth SKX, who came to the
Speaker 1: planet to Thraw to exploit the properties of the Great
Speaker 1: Crystal there and um in the World of the Dark
Speaker 1: Crystal was written that they arrived during a past great conjunction,
Speaker 1: and the great conjunctions occur every one thousand trine, which
Speaker 1: we assume is something like a year, so about thousand
Speaker 1: trines a thousand years roughly. But when the great conjunction occurred,
Speaker 1: it allowed for them to open a door through the crystal,
Speaker 1: some sort of a stargate, kind of like in two
Speaker 1: thousand one Space Odyssey. I assume their home world had
Speaker 1: a crystal as well, but it was unsuitable for the
Speaker 1: work that they wished to pursue, and so, against the
Speaker 1: advice of their fellow or Skets, they traveled to the
Speaker 1: world of Thraw and they set up their operations there
Speaker 1: where the crystal serves as kind of a meta crystal.
Speaker 1: And so you had eighteen ear skets and they constructed
Speaker 1: this great castle around the crystal and Thraw and they
Speaker 1: began manipulating its power. So there are users of high
Speaker 1: technology and UH, and they're you know, seemingly um at
Speaker 1: least benign, if not benevolent species. They seem to get
Speaker 1: along well with the existing species. They form a relationship
Speaker 1: with the gelf links, they form a relationship with Agra Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, they teach agraa a bit about technology and
Speaker 1: the and their use of crystals. But despite being the
Speaker 1: splendid angelic beings full of in some possibility, they also
Speaker 1: recognize that that inside themselves there was this duality, There
Speaker 1: was this disharmony in their souls of darkness and light.
Speaker 1: And so what they decided to do, what they set
Speaker 1: out to do with the crystal was to purify themselves,
Speaker 1: to expunge their darker natures. And as they tried this
Speaker 1: during a great conjunction UH, they managed to sever themselves.
Speaker 1: They divided themselves into two beings, and then subsequently the
Speaker 1: crystal was cracked. So that's where you are in the movie,
Speaker 1: or actually the movie is like a thousand trying or
Speaker 1: a thousand years after this, right when you these two
Speaker 1: beings are now completely separate, and you have the the
Speaker 1: Uru also known as the mystics in the movie. Who
Speaker 1: are these very very sweet, gentle you know, gentle dinosaur,
Speaker 1: gentle friendly brontosaurus uh type creatures. I don't want to
Speaker 1: knock them. I mean, the mystics are great, but oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they're wonderful. They're there's certainly a dinosaur sense too of them.
Speaker 1: There's kind of a Galapagos turtle sense to them, a
Speaker 1: slow calmness. They also have a sense I think of
Speaker 1: there's like an equine quality to their heads, so you
Speaker 1: get this this herbivore vibe to them as well. But
Speaker 1: they're yeah, they're very zen like. They're they're they're they're
Speaker 1: they're drawn to prophecies and spirals and uh and they're
Speaker 1: connected with the natural world. And these are the ones
Speaker 1: that raise the hero of the film, the young gelf
Speaker 1: link gen. Now, but then you've also got the villains
Speaker 1: of the movie, the bad halves of of what there Skex,
Speaker 1: and these are the skex eas a s. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: these are vile, ruthless, greedy, also six limbed creatures. We
Speaker 1: often uh, it's easy to not pick up on this,
Speaker 1: but we see later that they do have an extra
Speaker 1: pair of arms that have atrophied. But anyway, they are.
Speaker 1: They're completely awful. They squander and pervert the science of
Speaker 1: the Earth Skex for their own personal gain their technologists,
Speaker 1: but they're also exploiters, so uh, you know, they end
Speaker 1: up working with the Gelflings for a while, but then
Speaker 1: eventually they're uh, they're they're capturing the gelflings, they're enslaving
Speaker 1: the gelf wings, they enslaved the pod people. So they're
Speaker 1: just nasty to the core. They all they hate everything,
Speaker 1: they hate each other, they hate themselves and uh, I
Speaker 1: guess in appearance, they mostly resemble humanoid birds, especially raptors,
Speaker 1: and also crocodilians. One of the things we read preparing
Speaker 1: for this was in a book You Let Me Robert
Speaker 1: called uh well not the book was called, but the
Speaker 1: essay in it was by Katriona Makara called a Natural
Speaker 1: History of the Dark Crystal the conceptual design of Brian Froud,
Speaker 1: And in this essay it's mentioned that the Skexies, in
Speaker 1: addition to being inspired by reptilian features and predatory bird
Speaker 1: features and classic attributes of the dragon, they may also
Speaker 1: be based in part on angler fish. Interesting but clearly
Speaker 1: the predatory bird like the vulture aspect and the crocodile
Speaker 1: aspect are there. And Hinson was reportedly inspired in dreaming
Speaker 1: up the world of Dark Crystal. When he was first
Speaker 1: thinking about the idea of the Skexies, he was inspired
Speaker 1: by an illustration he saw in the nineteen seventies. Think
Speaker 1: it was in nineteen seventy five of crocodiles like being
Speaker 1: posh in a fancy Victorian washroom. And this illustration was
Speaker 1: by a an artist named Leonard Lubin, and it was
Speaker 1: accompanying a some printings of Lewis Carroll poem. But in
Speaker 1: this illustration I found a copy of it, and it's
Speaker 1: like one crocodile is in a fancy bathtub with its
Speaker 1: tail sticking out with a rubber ducky, and another one
Speaker 1: is like being being toweled off in a graceful way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a you know, again, it probably doesn't. It's not,
Speaker 1: you know, super helpful exercise to apply too much of
Speaker 1: the natural world to the skexies, especially since they're not
Speaker 1: even presented as a naturally evolved species. They're born out
Speaker 1: of a mystical division. And yet if you try to
Speaker 1: if when you try to imagine, like, what would a
Speaker 1: culture be like if it was if it consist of
Speaker 1: more solitary creatures, they're more you know, and they are
Speaker 1: they are more competitive and less cooperative. What might that
Speaker 1: be like? Uh? You know, it's interesting to wonder to
Speaker 1: what extent the skexies are a realization of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you can see some kind of social ish
Speaker 1: looking behaviors in in some birds and reptiles. But if
Speaker 1: I was thinking about a more selfish kind of creature,
Speaker 1: a less social kind of creature, yeah, I wouldn't think
Speaker 1: like mammalian features. But again with with the mystics and
Speaker 1: the skexies, they both represent one side of the same being,
Speaker 1: and ultimately they're supposed to represent, uh, you know, two
Speaker 1: sides of human nature. The idea of being that the
Speaker 1: earth skex represent balance. Uh the uru are you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's the noble human, the human that is, you know,
Speaker 1: at one with the natural environment and peaceful, whereas the
Speaker 1: Skexies are awful and exploitive and petty. The disgustingness of
Speaker 1: the Skexies absolutely comes through in the design of the puppets,
Speaker 1: and it actually even came through for the people working
Speaker 1: with them, because Makara points out in in her essay
Speaker 1: that the costumes and the puppets of the Skexies became
Speaker 1: more and more genuinely disgusting as work for the film
Speaker 1: went on, like as production went over time. She quotes
Speaker 1: one person who worked on the production who said that
Speaker 1: the Uh the Skexies puppets came more and more to
Speaker 1: consist of quote, rotten rubber permeated with cold k y
Speaker 1: jelly and putrefying noodles. Yeah, it's it's something that's easy
Speaker 1: to to to uh to to overlook in when you
Speaker 1: consider the costumes like this and puppets like this, is
Speaker 1: that they were never they weren't built to last. And
Speaker 1: that's why when you go somewhere like Atlanta's own Center
Speaker 1: for Puppetry Arts and you see the the examples of
Speaker 1: Skexies and UH and Ruru and various other creatures from
Speaker 1: the film that are in it there and and on display.
Speaker 1: Like everything had to be restored before it was suitable
Speaker 1: for a public display. Again. And by the way, uh,
Speaker 1: if you haven't been to the Center for Pupetory Arts
Speaker 1: in Atlanta, I have the recommended to anyone visiting our city.
Speaker 1: Here you can find out more about it at puppet
Speaker 1: dot org. And through September one, two thousand and nineteen. Uh,
Speaker 1: Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal World of Myth and Magic
Speaker 1: is going on. It is a fabulous presentation of the
Speaker 1: various props and designs that you see in the film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have like some full puppets from the movie. They've
Speaker 1: got an Augura. When I was there, at least they
Speaker 1: had Augura. They had one of the Skexias, they had
Speaker 1: one of the Mystics, they have a bunch of other
Speaker 1: stuff land Strider puppets, and it was wonderful. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: even if you don't make it by September one, they
Speaker 1: have a lot of Dark Crystal stuff in the permanent
Speaker 1: Hinson exhibit as well. Oh. In fact, one of the
Speaker 1: things they have I believe in the permanent exhibit is Robert,
Speaker 1: do you hear a scuttling What is that scuttling sound?
Speaker 1: It's the garth Yes, so the Gartham are podcasters killed
Speaker 1: by Gartham. I hadn't thought about that. We're kind of
Speaker 1: we're kind of pod people, aren't we? Um in some sense? So, yes,
Speaker 1: the Gartham are those fabulous scuttling, giant crab like monstrosities.
Speaker 1: And uh. And they're essentially an engineered weapons species of
Speaker 1: the Skexies. The Skexies are, you know, decrepit, cowardly, nasty creatures.
Speaker 1: They don't fight their own battles. They're not going to
Speaker 1: fight their own battles there. They need to make something
Speaker 1: to go out there and wage their wars against the
Speaker 1: gelflings and the pod people and too and and so forth,
Speaker 1: and so they make these things. Um. Yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: massive guardians and soldiers and there they look like a
Speaker 1: mixture of beetle and crab anatomies, though closer inspection reveals
Speaker 1: than to be kind of like bipeds with supporting tentacle
Speaker 1: like appendages. Uh. And part of that is kind of
Speaker 1: like the illusion of the puppetry. But the thing about
Speaker 1: the between the dark Crystal is like, even when you
Speaker 1: see how something works, like the facade is still so perfect. Um.
Speaker 1: One arm at the garthen terminates in a vicious crab pincher,
Speaker 1: and the other has like a fingered claw for snatching
Speaker 1: up prisoners. Yeah. So, in his introduction to the world
Speaker 1: of The Dark Crystal, I thought this was so funny
Speaker 1: and so interesting. Brian Froud was talking about the process
Speaker 1: of coming up with the concepts and the designs for
Speaker 1: the movie, and Froud mentions that he often drew inspiration
Speaker 1: before the movie from walking in nature. When he designed creatures.
Speaker 1: You know, he would do illustrations and he'd go out
Speaker 1: and walk in nature and look at trees and rocks
Speaker 1: and animals. But he was working on The Dark Crystal
Speaker 1: in New York City and didn't have much access to
Speaker 1: unspoiled countryside to go look at trees and rocks and animals.
Speaker 1: So he said, you know, maybe you could sort of
Speaker 1: go to Central Park, but it wasn't quite the same.
Speaker 1: So instead, he said he would end up taking inspiration
Speaker 1: from wherever he could find it, including by the natural
Speaker 1: forms he found in his food. So he said he
Speaker 1: he and others went out to a dinner where they
Speaker 1: ate lobster, and then Froud was inspired to take all
Speaker 1: the lobster shells home with them and this became partial
Speaker 1: inspiration for the shells and the exoskeleton of the Gartham
Speaker 1: and also for the carapace of the Skexies. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they have these elaborate costumes that make them look grander
Speaker 1: than they actually are. Yeah, but you can kind of
Speaker 1: see it there, like in the in the carapace of
Speaker 1: the Skexies, you can kind of see like a a
Speaker 1: plated overlapping, plated lobster tail kind of thing, except it's
Speaker 1: really craggy and nasty, and you can definitely see the
Speaker 1: lobster shells as they came through in the Gartham. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so you know, a couple of things to sort of
Speaker 1: take apart with the Gartham here. I believe it's mentioned
Speaker 1: in the World of the Dark Crystal that they're they're
Speaker 1: sort of a symbol out of the memory of ancient
Speaker 1: sea creatures, which is something we'll get get back to
Speaker 1: in a minute. And then um mccara, who again wrote
Speaker 1: a natural Tree of the Dark Crystal conceptual design of
Speaker 1: Brian Froud. Uh. She speculated the Gartha may actually exist
Speaker 1: as the thought projection of the Skexies because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because when they're when when the Skexies power is broken,
Speaker 1: the Gartham kind of vanished, or at least they their
Speaker 1: internal um biology vanishes in the shell plating just falls
Speaker 1: like empty armor. But you know, I was looking looking
Speaker 1: reading a little bit about just like shells and claws
Speaker 1: and weaponry, and I came back to an excellent book
Speaker 1: by Douglas j Imlind titled Animal Weapons, The Evolution of Battle.
Speaker 1: And one of the key things in this is that he's,
Speaker 1: you know, he's comparing the evolution of various biological weapons
Speaker 1: to actual you know, man made weapons and and and
Speaker 1: tools of war and humans create. And he points out that,
Speaker 1: you know, muscles are expensive to maintain even when they're resting,
Speaker 1: and males with big claws require the most muscle. And
Speaker 1: of course he's just talking about natural world fiddler crabs here.
Speaker 1: But when we look at something like the Garthen, like
Speaker 1: that's an enormous creature. You know, it would have to
Speaker 1: if we're depending on a on an actual diet, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't just sustained through like vile Skexies thoughts or
Speaker 1: some sort of mystical crystal powers. It would have to
Speaker 1: eat a lot. It would be expensive to maintain. Now,
Speaker 1: you do see the Skexies feasting in the movie quite disgustingly.
Speaker 1: There's a great feasting scene where they've got stuff hanging
Speaker 1: out of their mouths. Yeah. I don't recall ever seeing
Speaker 1: the Garthen eat. Yeah, but and the and and maybe
Speaker 1: they don't. You know, it's it's hard to be hard
Speaker 1: to be sure. But one thing you can think of,
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, if they are expensive to maintain, uh,
Speaker 1: just you know, through crystal power or feeding them a
Speaker 1: bunch of meat, garbage or whatever the Skexies are doing,
Speaker 1: you could easily compare that to the sort of weapons
Speaker 1: programs that humans have. So and this is you know,
Speaker 1: one of the key things that that he gets the
Speaker 1: author gets into an animal weapons that Emelyand discusses. For instance,
Speaker 1: you could compare the Gartham to UH the U. S
Speaker 1: Air Force B two stealth bomber, built at a reported
Speaker 1: cost of two point one billion per plane and requiring
Speaker 1: fifty to sixty hours of ground maintenance for every one
Speaker 1: hour in the air and uh, and that's not even
Speaker 1: taking into account upgrade efforts. So contractors Northrop Grumman current
Speaker 1: UH at least previously held a nine point nine billion
Speaker 1: dollar contract to complete maintenance and modernization of the twenty
Speaker 1: plane feet fleet. That was from a few years back.
Speaker 1: But it just gives you an idea of just like
Speaker 1: the colossal cost of not only creating some sort of
Speaker 1: a weapon but also maintaining it, and that would be
Speaker 1: part of having an army of Gartham as well. But
Speaker 1: clearly it's a price that the Skexis were willing to pay,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, it almost works for them. They're
Speaker 1: able to use the Gartham to uh, you know, wage
Speaker 1: this war of extinction against the guelf Links and rid
Speaker 1: the world of at all but at least two of them.
Speaker 1: Now is the reason they do that, because is there
Speaker 1: is a prophecy that the Skexies will be undone by
Speaker 1: Guelfling hand or else by none. Exactly. That's their whole reason.
Speaker 1: This is a great you know, mythic storytelling trope. Right,
Speaker 1: there's this prophecy, and therefore they're going to act on
Speaker 1: this prophecy and try and rid the world of those
Speaker 1: that will undo them. But then perhaps it's a self
Speaker 1: fulfilling prophecy like they have, they have set things in
Speaker 1: motion for their own downfall. Well, it's also a great
Speaker 1: example of the destructive power of an unquestioned religious dogma. Exactly.
Speaker 1: All right, let's take one more break, and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: Gartham and crystal organisms. Before we were, we return to
Speaker 1: the problem of a world with three sons. Thank alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So the Dark Crystal, as we mentioned a
Speaker 1: minute ago, has a couple of organisms that seem to
Speaker 1: have at least partially crystalloid biology, at least they have
Speaker 1: crystals for eyes, or use crystals to see. It's mentioned
Speaker 1: in a couple of sources that the Gartham have crystals
Speaker 1: for eyes, and you can see this in some up
Speaker 1: close representations of them. It seems that their eyes have
Speaker 1: sort of uh uh, you know, polygon type surfaces on
Speaker 1: them that they might be actual, I don't know, pieces
Speaker 1: of dark crystal or something like that in there. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Like we're it's explained, especially in the world of the
Speaker 1: Dark Crystal, that the Skexies, you know, they're not only
Speaker 1: continuing to experiment with the dark crystal itself, uh, the
Speaker 1: the the imperfect great crystal. But they're also creating like
Speaker 1: their own knockoff crystals and doing other things with crystals,
Speaker 1: and so seemingly also incorporating them into their weapons species.
Speaker 1: They're doing all kinds of nasty crystal technology, and some
Speaker 1: of this is nasty crystal biotechnology. So the Gartham have
Speaker 1: crystals fries, and they're also these spy beasts in the
Speaker 1: movie called the crystal bats who fly around doing aerial
Speaker 1: surveillance and looking with their crystals that appears to be
Speaker 1: their video recorder lens or their eyes. Now, obviously this
Speaker 1: seems far fetched. She wouldn't expect, well, maybe there are
Speaker 1: actually organisms that have crystals for eyes. But as we
Speaker 1: discover pretty much every time, reality is weirder than fiction.
Speaker 1: There are creatures on this very world with minerals and
Speaker 1: crystals for eyes. And I had to talk about this
Speaker 1: for a few minutes. Yeah, this floored me that you
Speaker 1: were able to get so much out of the crystal bats.
Speaker 1: I figured, the crystal bats are like the least biological
Speaker 1: creatures in the whole movie. And yet here we go.
Speaker 1: Let's have a look at a creature called A kitan
Speaker 1: now a keiton, is a form of a marine mollusk.
Speaker 1: They're generally small. They're flat. They're oval shaped, kind of
Speaker 1: like a flat slug or snail, with a protruding foot
Speaker 1: on the underside for attaching to surfaces on the sea
Speaker 1: floor and moving along those surfaces while they scrape up
Speaker 1: food in the form of algae or other clinging biomatter.
Speaker 1: But on its back, the kiton wears a suit of armor.
Speaker 1: It has a shell made out of tough plates which
Speaker 1: face up towards the sea as it crawls along a
Speaker 1: raw clapping up delicious slime with its ragula. Now, you
Speaker 1: might suspect that a small algae scraping, rock crawling sea
Speaker 1: dweller like the kitan is maybe simply blind, right, What
Speaker 1: does it need eyes for to look down at the
Speaker 1: rocks below it as it scrapes up stuff to eat.
Speaker 1: But they do appear to have eyes on their backs.
Speaker 1: On those protective shells. The armor part, they've got hundreds
Speaker 1: of little beady, light sensitive organs spaced about on their
Speaker 1: dorsal armor, called ocelly. Now, scientists have known about these
Speaker 1: ocellly for years. They've known about these organs for sensing light,
Speaker 1: but they didn't know much about them, what they were
Speaker 1: made of, how they worked. Essentially, what we knew for
Speaker 1: a long time was that the kitans had these organs
Speaker 1: with underlying light sensitive cells like a retina, in some
Speaker 1: form of lens material. Now, a few years back, a
Speaker 1: marine biologist named Dan Spicer conducted research on a kitan
Speaker 1: known as the West Indian Fuzzy Kitan, which is the
Speaker 1: cuddliest to all kitan's. It sounds kind of like an
Speaker 1: off brand Muppet, I have to say, it sounds kind
Speaker 1: of like a fizz gig. So Spicer was studying the
Speaker 1: lenses on the ocelli of these animals that the little
Speaker 1: light sensing organs on their backs, and in an attempt
Speaker 1: to clean these ocelli these lenses off for observation in
Speaker 1: an acidic solution. The lenses suddenly dissolved and this was
Speaker 1: a tip tip off that the lenses were not protein
Speaker 1: based like you would find in pretty much all other organisms. Instead,
Speaker 1: these lenses were made of a mineral called aragonite. The
Speaker 1: Kitans had mineral crystals for eyes. Aragonite is a form
Speaker 1: of calcium carbonate. It's the material that forms the shells
Speaker 1: of most molluscs, so it had lenses for its eyes
Speaker 1: that were made out of the same stuff that it's
Speaker 1: armor is made out of the shell is made out of,
Speaker 1: and Spicer, along with Earness and Johnson, published uh paper
Speaker 1: about kitan and aragonite lenses in Current Biology in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. So the kitan uses these eyes to detect
Speaker 1: when shadows pass overhead. That would be a signal that
Speaker 1: there's like a predator near And when this happens, the
Speaker 1: kitans flatten out their bodies and clamp their armored shells
Speaker 1: down over their soft parts. The crystallized don't appear to
Speaker 1: see in great detail, but they can apparently distinguish dark
Speaker 1: moving shapes from a mirror dimming of raw light levels. Now,
Speaker 1: when you've got rocks for eyes, of course, they can
Speaker 1: be eroded by water over the time. But I was
Speaker 1: over time, but I was reading about how apparently one
Speaker 1: benefit of having rocks for eyes is that they are
Speaker 1: less vulnerable to the you know, the the violent washing
Speaker 1: of the tide or intertidal areas. It's like they their
Speaker 1: eyes have armor. Yeah, but what do you do when
Speaker 1: your eyes erode? Yeah? Well you so as if you
Speaker 1: have rocks for eyes, what you do is you gradually
Speaker 1: replace them with more crystals. So the kitans would grow
Speaker 1: new crystal lenses to replace the old ones that would
Speaker 1: get eroded over time. And it seems that organisms with
Speaker 1: crystals for eyes are pretty rare in today's biosphere, but
Speaker 1: there are other example. There are other examples. So crystals
Speaker 1: appear in various forms suspended within otherwise protein based eyes
Speaker 1: of other creatures. Right, so there are other creatures that
Speaker 1: might not quite have crystals four eyes like rocks as
Speaker 1: the lenses of their eyes, but might have some kind
Speaker 1: of crystal somewhere in there. One example I was reading
Speaker 1: about in a book called Animal Eyes from Oxford University
Speaker 1: Press by Michael f. Land and Dan Eric Nielson is
Speaker 1: about spiders. Specifically, these would be like acids or wolf spiders.
Speaker 1: Wolf spiders have some crystal structures inside their eyes. These
Speaker 1: are specialized eyes, usually the lateral eyes, used for locating
Speaker 1: prey in low light and to since in low light
Speaker 1: they have a wide aperture so they let a lot
Speaker 1: of light in. But they also have reflecting tap at um,
Speaker 1: kind of like you see in a cat when its
Speaker 1: eyes shine back at you in the dark. The wolf
Speaker 1: spider has something similar. Now, what does the TapIt um
Speaker 1: actually do. Apparently it serves to increase the sensitivity of
Speaker 1: the retina in low light conditions by sitting behind the
Speaker 1: retina and reflecting light back in the direction of the
Speaker 1: source through the retina, again maintaining the visual features of
Speaker 1: the image while increasing the amount of light available to
Speaker 1: the light sensitive cells. Some makes sense, like, so there's
Speaker 1: low light, so you put a mirror behind the area
Speaker 1: that's sensing the light, and by reflecting it back through
Speaker 1: that area, you sort of get You get a couple
Speaker 1: of tries, you get extra ways of sensing the low
Speaker 1: amounts of light. But in like I said's these tapita
Speaker 1: that behind the eyes consist of quote, many layers of
Speaker 1: very thin crystals, probably guanine crystals, which form a long
Speaker 1: ribbon beneath the receptors. So that's pretty interesting on its own,
Speaker 1: But it's not even the only organism that uses guanine
Speaker 1: crystals in order to see with To look at another mollusk,
Speaker 1: reflective guantine crystals are also important in the light sensitive
Speaker 1: organs of scallops. Scalops like the kind you eat. Research
Speaker 1: shows that scalops use a reflective mirror made of guantine
Speaker 1: crystals instead of a transparent lens to focus light onto
Speaker 1: their retinas. And I've attached a little picture of what
Speaker 1: these crystals look like. They formed these layers of plates.
Speaker 1: Almost yeah, it looks like like plate mail, kind of
Speaker 1: like dinosaur scales. Yeah yeah, yeah, I guess more actuli
Speaker 1: scale mail. If I was going to use the morefeitting
Speaker 1: um the term there, but to get even weirder and
Speaker 1: to connect to the dark crystal in a weirder way,
Speaker 1: I want to go into the deep past, because if
Speaker 1: you go into the deep past, you can find even
Speaker 1: more crazy examples of crystallize. The TRIALO bytes, the trial
Speaker 1: A bytes of the Cambrian period, which you know began
Speaker 1: roughly five million years ago. The TRIALO byte of this
Speaker 1: period had lenses on their eyes that were literally made
Speaker 1: of calcite crystals. The triobites had rocks for eyes and
Speaker 1: this uh, of course, the calcite crystals that form these
Speaker 1: lenses were this is another form of calcium carbonate stone eyes.
Speaker 1: And the lenses that were amazingly powerful by the protein
Speaker 1: based standards were familiar with today. They were they were
Speaker 1: seeing the world through crystal prisms. As described in a
Speaker 1: feature by the American Museum of Natural History. Quote, this
Speaker 1: provided these ancient creatures with virtually unparalleled vision that we
Speaker 1: can assume thanks to recent experiments conducted with calcite crystals,
Speaker 1: was filled with streams of light and bursts of color.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So like the Cambrian seas were just a uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a psychedelic fire show for these these creatures
Speaker 1: on some level. Yeah, if only we could see the
Speaker 1: world like these ancient bugs that had crystals for eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again this is this is fitting because it is
Speaker 1: mentioned the world of the Dark Crystal that the sketch
Speaker 1: the Skexies kind of summon the form of the Gartham
Speaker 1: out of the memories of long dead sea life. Yes,
Speaker 1: I love that. That's exactly what I was thinking about.
Speaker 1: So the trial bytes. The inhabitants of this ancient unseen
Speaker 1: world are are known to us only through fossils from
Speaker 1: about five million to about two fifty million years ago,
Speaker 1: And like the lost prehistoric world quality of the Dark
Speaker 1: Crystal mythology. Yeah, in fact, I wanted to take this
Speaker 1: connection even further. Tell you tell me if I'm getting
Speaker 1: too wild here. But you can't get too wild, not crystal.
Speaker 1: So one idea is thing I was thinking about is
Speaker 1: that the trial bytes mineral eyes are the first complex
Speaker 1: eyes we really find in the fossil record. They were
Speaker 1: part of the Cambrian explosion, which is when animal bodies
Speaker 1: suddenly showed this massive diversity and uh at least fascinating
Speaker 1: and complex and fast moving forms. These eyes are a
Speaker 1: wonder of evolution, but they might also be a signal
Speaker 1: of something important changing in the himal world. Why did
Speaker 1: animals suddenly need powerful calcite eyes crystal eyes? Well, one
Speaker 1: theory about this is that it's because of the explosion
Speaker 1: of predation. We live in a world in which predation evolved,
Speaker 1: in which animals kill and eat each other, which plenty
Speaker 1: of mythological traditions see as a key indicator of some
Speaker 1: kind of fallen or corrupted state of the world, kind
Speaker 1: of like the shattering of the crystal and the dark
Speaker 1: crystal and the sundering of the earth skex, which which
Speaker 1: in the mythology gives rise to the Gartham and the
Speaker 1: crystal bats. Interesting. Yeah, so crystal vision on both counts
Speaker 1: emerging out of an age of conflict. How about it
Speaker 1: look up those those trial. Bye eyes, it's amazing. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's return to the bigger picture here. Let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about the three suns system, the three star system
Speaker 1: that we see with the world of Thraw. Okay, so Thraw,
Speaker 1: the planet depicted in the Crystal in the Dark Crystal
Speaker 1: uh is a three star system. It's it's it's key
Speaker 1: to the whole narrative about the great conjunction occurring. And
Speaker 1: the three sons are described as the Great Son, of
Speaker 1: the Dying Son and the Rose Sun, and we see
Speaker 1: these images of these suns moving through the sky. Um
Speaker 1: it's difficult, you know, and perhaps kind of a fool's air,
Speaker 1: and to try and work out exactly what stage each
Speaker 1: of these sons happens to be in. I've seen it
Speaker 1: speculated that the Great Sun is a giant son, and
Speaker 1: the Dying Sun is a gas giant or a protostar,
Speaker 1: and then the Rose Sun is a red dwarf. But
Speaker 1: really you could you could kind of go a number
Speaker 1: of different directions and interpreting like what stage each star
Speaker 1: is in that might make sense in the light of
Speaker 1: something I'll get back to in just a minute here. Now. Likewise,
Speaker 1: it might ultimately be a bit silly to to really
Speaker 1: get two worked over up over the exact celestial mechanics
Speaker 1: of all of this. I mean, for instance, given the
Speaker 1: mythological nature of many themes in the movie, we might
Speaker 1: be dealing with more of a uh potlemaic universe here
Speaker 1: with the three sons orbiting thraw. You know, there's no
Speaker 1: reason that wouldn't be the case. It's a mythological world. Um. However,
Speaker 1: when we look to the world of the dark Crystal
Speaker 1: that the Book of Brian frauds, uh, there is this, uh,
Speaker 1: this fabulous a little bit of commentary that is supposedly
Speaker 1: from the the anthropologists or the academic that is commenting
Speaker 1: on everything, and this is what they say of the
Speaker 1: three stars of Thraw. Quote. In a system with three sons,
Speaker 1: astronomical calculations would be intolerably complex. Newtonian or Einsteinian physics
Speaker 1: can deal exactly with two bodies Earth and Sun or
Speaker 1: Earth and Moon, but more complex cases can be solved
Speaker 1: only by successive approximations. With three sons. Even the elementary
Speaker 1: calculations needed to begin our studies of the skies are
Speaker 1: beyond our scope. Augura's astronomy, therefore, is devised chiefly through
Speaker 1: intuition and empirical models. So this is a reference to
Speaker 1: a very real problem in the study of celestial mechanics
Speaker 1: that I think we've discussed and stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind before, at least in passing the three body problem right.
Speaker 1: If so, if you're dealing with uh, say, velocity, your momentum,
Speaker 1: and gravity, you can easily predict the future states of
Speaker 1: two objects orbiting each other. Once you throw another object
Speaker 1: into the mix there, especially if it's you know, of
Speaker 1: a similar mass, the interactions become increasingly chaotic and sensitive
Speaker 1: to tiny to like tiny variations, and it becomes harder
Speaker 1: and harder to predict a future state from the current state. Now.
Speaker 1: I was looking into this because I was like, well,
Speaker 1: are there really triple star systems? Like does that exist
Speaker 1: in reality? What would that look like? And triple star
Speaker 1: systems do exist, though they can in some cases become
Speaker 1: dynamically unstable, meaning that they might eject one of the
Speaker 1: stars from the system through their interactions. But a common
Speaker 1: form of a more stable triple star system is that
Speaker 1: there is essentially a core binary star system, which means
Speaker 1: two stars more closely orbiting a shared center of gravity
Speaker 1: and then you'd have a third star much farther away
Speaker 1: orbiting that center of gravity. And this even almost sort
Speaker 1: of goes with the Great Sun Dying Sun Rose Sun thing, Like,
Speaker 1: I wonder if maybe your great son and your dying
Speaker 1: stunt son, the bigger, closer ones are orbiting each other.
Speaker 1: That's a binary star system, and then you've got a
Speaker 1: little little red dwarf for Rose Sun that's way farther out,
Speaker 1: that's orbiting the whole system. Yeah, I think that would
Speaker 1: make sense. Now would be another question entirely whether in
Speaker 1: reality a planet like Thraw could exist, I mean, not
Speaker 1: necessarily like Thraw, but a planet of any kind could
Speaker 1: exist in a triple star system. Or would it just
Speaker 1: be automatically, you know, pretty quickly ejected or destroyed due
Speaker 1: to the chaotic influences of gravity from a three star system.
Speaker 1: Would there be enough stability there at all, certainly for
Speaker 1: life to emerge. I just assumed the answer was no.
Speaker 1: That I was like, that's probably not going to happen.
Speaker 1: But I was actually surprised what I found here. I
Speaker 1: was reading an article about this on astronomy dot com
Speaker 1: by Amber Jorgensen, which was about the work of a
Speaker 1: few scholars of Franco Bissetti of the School of Computer
Speaker 1: Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Wits in
Speaker 1: South Africa. Also Cherice Harley of Wits and uh are
Speaker 1: a Boost at University of Grenoble Alps in France. So
Speaker 1: Bussetti and colleagues here conducted simulations which found that planets
Speaker 1: could survive in appreciable numbers in systems like this. So
Speaker 1: Bussetti says, quote because of the complex dynamics between these
Speaker 1: stars and planets, it was previously thought improbable that many
Speaker 1: planets would have stable orbits in these regions, but they
Speaker 1: found evidence to the contrary quote. We ran the simulations
Speaker 1: for periods ranging from one million to ten million years
Speaker 1: in order to see if the systems are stable over
Speaker 1: very long periods. If a planet is ejected from that
Speaker 1: system during that time, it is not stable. The analysis
Speaker 1: showed that most configurations had large enough stable regions for
Speaker 1: planets to exist. Many of these areas are actually very
Speaker 1: habitable for planets, and they even mapped out areas of
Speaker 1: the galaxy where double and triple star exoplanets are likely
Speaker 1: to be found in stable orbits, so it is actually
Speaker 1: possible there might be really bad places to be within
Speaker 1: the orbit of a of a three star system, but
Speaker 1: there could be types of triple star systems that could
Speaker 1: have stable planetary orbits within them, where at least presumably
Speaker 1: life could thrive. So there might be a thraw out.
Speaker 1: There's what you're saying. There could be a world. Scientists
Speaker 1: have discovered thraw. It really exists, and we're sending a
Speaker 1: mission there right now. Um, in terms of things that
Speaker 1: really exists, it is worth noting that there is a
Speaker 1: real great conjunction, so the the the the the conjunction
Speaker 1: of Jupiter and Saturn is sometimes referred to as the
Speaker 1: Great Conjunction, and it takes place every eighteen to twenty years,
Speaker 1: and there's a there's a fair amount of astrological uh
Speaker 1: speculation about them, shall we say, especially concerning political assassinations
Speaker 1: and how they seem to line up selectively. Of course,
Speaker 1: with great conjunctions throughout history. The last one took place
Speaker 1: in May thirty one, two thousand, while the next one
Speaker 1: will take place in late December. Now, as usual, we
Speaker 1: don't put a lot of stock, we don't put any
Speaker 1: stock in astrological predictions like this. Ultimately, whatever the astrological
Speaker 1: pattern is if you if you cherry pick enough, you
Speaker 1: can find some sequence of events on Earth that match
Speaker 1: up with it. The planets don't influence your dating life, folks,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, all right, So there you have it. This
Speaker 1: has been fun, Robert. Yeah, the Dark Crystal. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to discuss there, and I was legitimately surprised by
Speaker 1: some of the places that it took us. Um But
Speaker 1: but hopefully we have you know, maybe even enhanced everyone's
Speaker 1: enjoyment of the Dark Crystal a little bit, or if
Speaker 1: nothing else, giving you a good reason to go out
Speaker 1: and watch a great film one more time and to
Speaker 1: wish you had crystal eyes. That's right. Anytime when you
Speaker 1: hear one of those rock songs or pop songs about
Speaker 1: touching eyes, think think like spiky crystals for eyes clinking
Speaker 1: against each other. Um, well cool. Obviously, I know we
Speaker 1: have a lot of listeners out there who have thoughts
Speaker 1: about the Dark Crystal and are Dark Crystal fans. Some
Speaker 1: of you may be very steeped in the Dark Crystal
Speaker 1: and have read like the novelizations and the comic books
Speaker 1: and the sort of the extended universe of the thing,
Speaker 1: and perhaps you have additional insight you'd like to share.
Speaker 1: Perhaps some of the questions we have presented have been
Speaker 1: answered in other bits of literature or other Brian Froud interviews, etcetera.
Speaker 1: We would love to hear from you about that. Oh no, Well,
Speaker 1: as we're closing out here, I do want to give
Speaker 1: a quick shout out as well to The bizarre Cast.
Speaker 1: That's b A Z A A R. The Bizarre Cast
Speaker 1: with Richard and Robert. Uh They're like a horror pop
Speaker 1: culture podcast. They recently had me on the show to
Speaker 1: talk about podcast staying about Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: invention and the upcoming Transgenesis. Uh So, just to shout
Speaker 1: out to those guys. If you want to check out
Speaker 1: their show, it's The bizarre Cast dot pod bean dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can find them on Twitter, the bizarre Cast
Speaker 1: at the bizarre Cast, Huge Things. As always to our
Speaker 1: wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us directly if
Speaker 1: you give us feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello.
Speaker 1: You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how stuff works, dot com,
Speaker 1: batutory proper FA