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