Labyrinth

How did the Star Man, the Star Wars Man, and the Muppet Man come together to make the seminal 1986 oddity, Labyrinth? Join Chris and Lizzie as they get lost in the experimental mind of Jim Henson, young Jennifer Connelly's dispassion for acting, and the remarkable juggling of David Bowie's (crystal) balls. *CORRECTION: Terry Jones was Welsh, not English. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Lizzie Bassett?

  And action. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a cautionary tale about what happens when you're a dick to your parents who just want to go out to dinner. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what codpiece do you have for us today?

• 2:21Chris Winterbauer?

  The biggest codpiece ever bestowed upon millennials and Gen Xers. The movie that defined or confused the sexuality of at least one and a half generations. The reason I wake up in a cold sweat every time I hear Starman. This is Labyrinth, Jim Henson's Labyrinth. I'm really excited to talk about this movie. We went pretty deep on this one. It's gonna be very fun.

• 2:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Great, I can't wait.

• 2:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, had you seen Labyrinth before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or rewatching it for the podcast?

• 2:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of course, I've seen Labyrinth before. I've seen Labyrinth many times, although, you know, I don't know that I had focused heavily on it before. It's not really what Labyrinth is for, I don't think. But I saw this probably for the first time in college. I don't know why I didn't watch this growing up.

• 3:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, you didn't watch it as a kid?

• 3:11Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I didn't. And which is weird, because my parents both loved David Bowie. And we love The Muppets, so I don't know. Maybe because this is horrifying is why, but-

• 3:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Never the two show meets.

• 3:22Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 3:49Chris Winterbauer?

  The Fierys. We do have a little section on them, actually.

• 3:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, great, they're the stuff of nightmares. I do not like them at all. This is so interesting, because it's like, they make very clear that it's not a movie for children, I think, pretty early on in this. And then you're like, who is this for?

• 4:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is fine, and I love it and I enjoy it. And I am a big fan of Jim Henson and puppets in general, so this is very much right up my alley. But yeah, the first thing Jennifer Connelly says is she's trying to recite the line, and then she goes, "Damn." And I was like, whoa, bad kid, a movie for adults. The only thing that was unpleasant about this viewing was that the little baby, Toby, looks exactly like- Our daughter Eve.

• 4:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And pretty much all he does over the course of this movie is just scream and cry amidst a sea of the most horrifying puppets you could possibly place around a baby. But yeah, I love it. You know, the music, it's not good. Dance Magic Dance is very fun. That's the only song I can remember in the entire thing. The final song is so bad. It's like, I was laughing watching it because I was just like, David, David, you did not. This was your lowest effort, which is fine. He's allowed to do that. He's David Bowie. But that's all I have to say about this. I absolutely love it. I can't wait to get into it. I expect to hear from you what your favorite character is, and I will tell you upfront that mine is Sir Didymus.

• 5:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Ambrosius.

• 5:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It is Sir Didymus and Ambrosius.

• 5:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 5:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Ambrosius is arguably the hero of this movie, which, you know, we can discuss. But yes, it is the two of them. I absolutely love them so much.

• 5:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Lizzie Bassett?

  So what about you?

• 5:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So I did watch this as a kid quite a bit. There was like a quartet of movies, three in particular, that I watched a lot that feel very thematically similar, tonally similar, and they actually share a lot of creative DNA. The Dark Crystal, which we're going to talk about today. Legend.

• 5:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 5:42Chris Winterbauer?

  1985 Ridley Scott, Tom Cruise, which we'll also talk about today. I think I only actually saw that once when I was very little.

• 5:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not seen that.

• 5:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, Legend, we'll talk about it. Legend is a very weird, bit of a mess, but incredible visually. And Willow was the fourth one. Those were, I mean, I loved them and I love them for the reason you mentioned, Lizzie, which these are movies that do not feel like they're aimed at children. I think that these are very much YA before YA existed, really.

• 6:08Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent.

• 6:09Chris Winterbauer?

  They're like the forerunner to something, you know, from The Hunger Games to various other franchises.

• 6:14Lizzie Bassett?

  This one in particular, because the choice to make Jareth David Bowie is a very interesting one because he is obviously a very sexual creature and continues to be in this world in a creepy and weird way with their like Eyes Wide Shut masquerade party that happens halfway through this thing.

• 6:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So, okay. I love the puppets. I love the creatures. I love the practical effects, the sets, the in-camera trickery. Jim Henson is a genius. And I did not know a ton about him until, you know, we researched this episode and I only fell in love with him more. I think the first half of this movie is a bit of a slog at times. It kind of stops and starts and stops and starts. And I'm not really sure what world we're in. It's a bit confusing.

• 6:57Lizzie Bassett?

  But Chris, that's how it is inside.

• 6:59Chris Winterbauer?

  That's how it is. Yes, you know, what are you doing here? Hoggle? It's confusing, but I do think the movie really hits, for me, it really hits its stride. When Sarah kind of puts the gang together, right? And Ludo especially, when Ludo comes in and then you have Hoggle and you have Serdintimus and Ambrosia and then, oh, great, we've got this, you know, rogue group of misfits that are on this journey to the Goblin Castle. And that's very fun. It's like Hoggle is fun, Ludo is better, and then Serdintimus and Ambrosius steal the movie.

• 7:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Serdintimus is hilarious. I completely understand why a lot of people love David Bowie in this movie. I don't love David Bowie in this movie.

• 7:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't really, like, I love that he's there, but I don't necessarily love him in the movie.

• 7:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, to me, he really distracts me. He bumps me out every time. As you mentioned, Lindsay, I don't love these songs. I think a lot of people love these songs. I think that's great. And I don't love his acting in this movie either. So basically every time Jared comes in, I'm like, get out of here, Jared. Like, let's just go hang out with the puppets some more. But I, again, I was reading a lot of, you know, millennial and Gen X blog posts and articles about the significance of this film, especially from a number of women, but also of men. Bowie, I think, definitely has a very androgynous sexual appeal. And they really say that Bowie captured the seductive allure, but also danger of a grown man, you know, as an icon of sexuality. I know, it's a little interesting. We'll talk about it.

• 8:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm making a face because I agree. I agree. There are complications with that around David Bowie, but yes, and I love David Bowie.

• 8:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But anyway, so I understand that appeal. That element of the movie is not for me. That's not a big deal because there's just so much going on in every frame of this movie with all of the puppeteering, with all of the optical effects, in-camera effects, et cetera. And we're going to dive into all of it. So Labyrinth is a dark fantasy film directed by Jim Henson. It was written By Terry Jones, from a story credited to Dennis Lee and Jim Henson. But as we will get to, those weren't far from the only writers on this project. It was produced by Eric Bratrey with George Lucas and David Laser serving as executive producers on the film, and it stars Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, David Bowie as Jareth.

• 9:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That fucking name.

• 9:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. I mean, it's in The Dark Crystal, the lead character's name is Jen, and it's a guy, and he's just like, Jen! And you're like, what? Let's come up with a better name than Jen. What are we doing?

• 9:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Jareth is like they were trying to make a cool, British-sounding version of Jared. Like, it's just, you can't. You can't.

• 9:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's kind of fun. It sounds like the name, like, you would go to a park in Silver Lake, and the mom would be like, "This is my son, Jareth!" And you'd say, "Oh, I don't think we're gonna be friends."

• 9:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Toby Froude as Toby. Sheri Weiser is the actress who brings Hoggle to life. She is the actress in the suit who is doing all of Hoggle's movements. And Brian Henson is lending Hoggle his voice. More on that later. Frank Oz, and many, many more. It was released on June 27, 1986 by TriStar Pictures, under the Henson Associates and Lucasfilm Limited banners, and the IMDb logline reads, "Teenage Sarah journeys through a maze to save her baby brother from the Goblin King." And that's, you know, the whole movie.

• 10:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I think. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian J. Jones, Jim Henson's Red Book, which is an online curation of Jim's journal entries from the Jim Henson Company archives, Inside the Labyrinth, the 1986 documentary on the making of the movie, Starlog Magazine #109, Alex Agos' 2015 interview of Brian Henson at USC, and many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. All right, Lizzie, it's time for us to dive in and get lost in the labyrinth. And if we were to wind the clock back to December of 1982, and squint our eyes hard enough and think in terms of metaphor, Jim Henson was trapped in a bit of a labyrinth. Maybe

• 10:58Chris Winterbauer?

  we should call it a maze of success, but that didn't change the fact that no matter which corner he turned, he could not escape which of his creations.

• 11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  The Muppets? Sesame Street?

• 11:09Chris Winterbauer?

  The Muppets. That's right.

• 11:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Which came first, by the way? The Muppets or Sesame Street?

• 11:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So technically, The Muppets came before Sesame Street, but The Muppet Show came after.

• 11:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 11:20Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get into that chronology in a few minutes. All right. Well, Lizzie, if there were ever a time to be a puppet in Hollywood, it was the late 70s and early 80s. I mean, I feel like any old puppet was just minting it. So The Muppet Movie-

• 11:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Any old puppet'll do.

• 11:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Any old puppet just hand up the butt puppet, as we learned on one of our other episodes, Butt Puppets.

• 11:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Chris Winterbauer?

  The Muppet Movie grossed nearly $77 million in 1979.

• 11:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 11:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It was nominated for two Oscars. Notably, I will mention, that one was not directed by Henson. James Fraley directed it. Henson produced it. A year later, Yoda, do you want to do your Yoda impression briefly? There we go. That little bastard stole our hearts in The Empire Strikes Back. The Great Muppet Caper of 1981 wasn't quite as successful as The Muppet Movie, but it still made 31 million against a $14 million budget. Henson did direct that one. And in 1982, E.T. phoned his way home to nine Oscar nominations, four wins, and the highest box office gross of all time, beating out Star Wars.

• 12:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Puppets make money.

• 12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Puppets make money. So Jim Henson teams up with the man behind Yoda, Frank Oz, and the man behind George Lucas, producer Gary Kurtz, to try to break away from The Muppets and the idea that puppets are just for children. So together, they made a movie called The Dark Crystal. Lizzie, have you ever seen The Dark Crystal?

• 12:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but I literally can't remember. I've seen it more than once, and it's another one that we watched in college, but it did not stick with me the way The Labyrinth did.

• 12:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, to refresh your memory, the IMDb logline reads, "On another planet in the distant past, the last of the Gelfling race embarks on a quest to find the missing shard of a magical crystal and restore order to his world." And to be fair, I think the tough thing with this movie is it's a lot of lore and not a lot of story. And the lore is not necessarily that original, more on that later. But what is really unique about this movie is that it is only puppets. There are no humans. It is an entirely puppet cast.

• 13:30Lizzie Bassett?

  You gotta have one.

• 13:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he didn't. Henson's very determined. He is going to prove that puppets are serious business. And this movie, by the way, is an enormous technical achievement. If you watch it, these frames, the way that these giant sets with enormous puppets are moving around and everything is practical, you know, for the most part, and in camera, it's really incredible. But I think audiences were generally a bit confused. This is completely original IP, although maybe not that original. We'll talk about that in a moment. And as I mentioned, there were only puppets and the puppets looked very dark and very serious. It is a very dark fantasy and that's because they were based on art by the fantasy illustrator, Brian Froude. Talk more about him in a minute. Henson was known as the Muppet Man, literally.

• 14:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Headlines called him that. And the Muppets are fun. And this movie, Lizzie, is a lot of things, but I don't think it's fun. Critics called it a ripoff of The Lord of the Rings, which I can totally see. The two main characters are called gelflings and like basically hobbits, you know?

• 14:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Halflings, yeah.

• 14:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. They also called it a ripoff of Star Wars. I see that a little less, but I can understand the idea of prophecy and whatnot. They're all just pulling from very broad origin hero stories, you know, Cambellian trajectories. A critic for Time Magazine wrote, "No Kermit, no Bert and Ernie. This movie is serious. Jim Henson's foray into the art, damn it, of puppetry." Now, The Dark Crystal was not a total flop. It did make $40 million or so, and it would develop a cult home video following, but it was very expensive. So the Muppet movie had cost $8 million because the Muppets exist in a real world and there are a lot of humans around them. The Dark Crystal cost $25 million, over three times as expensive. And if you watch the movie, you can see every dollar on the screen. It really is an incredible

• 15:14Chris Winterbauer?

  accomplishment. Serious puppets were seriously expensive. And the thing that I didn't know... Is that Jim Henson hadn't been very serious about puppets at all? So let's go back in time, Lizzie, and listen to a clip from just one of our absolute favorites on this show, Orson Welles.

• 15:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 15:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Interviewing Jim Henson.

• 15:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 15:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Who answers first and Frank Oz.

• 15:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Is Orson Welles drunk? How drunk is Orson Welles?

• 15:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, well, it is about the same time period as that champagne commercial. So.

• 15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God. If anyone has never seen the, it's Pierre Mason. Is that what it is?

• 15:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I can't remember.

• 15:49Lizzie Bassett?

  The French champagne.

• 15:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, the French champagne.

• 15:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. We're in French champagne territory.

• 15:54Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, here we go.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  What was the first puppet show you ever saw?

• 15:58Speaker 03

  I don't recall ever seeing a puppet show when I was a kid.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  You never saw a puppet?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  No, and I never played with puppets. I never had any to play with.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Frank?

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Um, well, I started when I was 12 years old and puppets. And I was a strange kid.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  You were nothing of the kind. Jim was the strange one. At least you admitted to getting started at 12.

• 16:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, could you describe the way Orson Welles is reacting to learning that Jim Henson did not grow up playing with puppets?

• 16:28Lizzie Bassett?

  He's treating it as the gravest, it's like a bomb just dropped and he spikes the camera directly with his like thousand yard stare. God, I love Orson Welles.

• 16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So Jim Henson may not have been into puppets, but throughout his childhood, he was really fascinated with how things worked. So he was born in 1936 in Greenville, Mississippi. He was the second of two sons. And he split time between Mississippi and Washington DC because his dad, Paul, worked as a researcher for the United States Department of Agriculture. And despite his science background, Paul married Betty, who was a Christian scientist, although I heard she was a more relaxed adherent to that faith. Now, Jim's technical background may have come from his father, but his sense of humor seems to have come from his mom and her family. And Jim and his older brother, Paul, liked to take things apart and rebuild them, like radios. And the Hensons didn't have a television growing up, so Jim would listen to radio dramas.

• 17:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And one of them in particular featured a ventriloquist, which is a little odd because you think of ventriloquism as necessitating a visual component, right?

• 17:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Are they just standing there doing different voices? I can do that. Give me that job.

• 17:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, basically, can I play you a clip from it?

• 17:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. It's not a ventriloquist. That's a voice actor.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  I'm afraid you don't know the difference between news and gossip. Oh, yes, I do. If a man bites a dog, that's news. Yes, that's right. And if the dog goes around telling everybody about it, that's gossip.

• 17:58Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's it. You're right. It's a man doing voices. But I think what's important to note about this interest in ventriloquism, even without a visual component, is that one of the things that made Henson's puppeteering unique, especially throughout the 60s and 70s, is that he was on the television side of things. It seems generally kind of unconcerned with revealing the puppeteer to the audience. So it allowed the camera to get a lot closer to the puppets. It allowed for a more dynamic variety of shots and whatnot. And he kind of assumed, well, as long as you can really make the puppet come alive, we'll believe that it's autonomous, even if you can see the people around them. Jim was also really drawn to things that were more complicated than they appeared. One of his favorite comic strips was called Pogo, and it followed this everyman, straightman possum who has these eccentric animal friends.

• 18:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And it looks like it's for kids, but the writing actually included a lot of political satire that was aimed at adults. Hmm. So bear in mind, he painted, he drew comics of his own. And at 13, the Christian Science Monitor published one of his comics. And at this pivotal moment, Jim Henson discovers television. He first watches TV at a friend's house, and he comes home and he goes, Mom, Dad, holy shit, we need a TV. We need it now. I don't know if he said that exactly. They buy him a set, and he falls in love. Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Ernie Kovacs, Mel Brooks, like, very funny, very edgy in a lot of instances, comedians. And so, fresh out of high school, Jim wants to work in television. He wants to be on TV. And he hears that there's a station that's looking for a puppeteer.

• 19:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So he says, well, I could probably do that. So he checks some books out from the library, teaches himself how to manipulate a marionette, and it works. He gets his job as a puppeteer on the junior morning show. And he's got this real talent for it. Everybody's like, Jim, this is your calling. This is what you were meant to do. And he goes, ah, puppets? I don't know. That seems a little weird. So he goes to college. He meets his future wife, Jane Neville, and together they develop a TV show called Sam and Friends. And this features a cast of puppet characters, including Lizzie, who is probably the most famous individual puppet that Jim Henson is responsible for.

• 20:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Kermit.

• 20:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Kermit the Frog. Exactly right. One of our listeners once, I believe affectionately, said that I sound like Kermit the Frog enjoying auto erotic asphyxiation, which is actually something Jim Henson might have been into. Let's get into it. So.

• 20:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 20:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Sam and Friends was a big success, but Jim Henson was not sold that this was his path in life. In fact, he took a year off from the show, Lizzie, to just paint and travel around Europe. Now, it's possible, but we couldn't confirm that Jim's brother, Paul, who died in 1956, may have tied into this sabbatical. So I believe it was Sam and Friends started in 55, his brother died in 56, and then he did the sabbatical in 58. And Frank Oz later said, "When his brother died, he felt like maybe he didn't have enough time." Not like he was feeling his mortality or a premonition that he would die young or anything like that, but he just realized that he just didn't have an infinite amount of time to do all the things he wanted to do. But it was on this journey across Europe

• 20:59Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 21:23Chris Winterbauer?

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• 22:24Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:08Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:52Lizzie Bassett?

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• 24:38Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 24:44Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't think so.

• 24:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Neither had I. I had no idea. They're amazing. So throughout the 1960s, Jim Henson is doing this completely other set of work from his, you know, primary puppeteering work that is existential, absurdist, deals with, you know, very adult themes of what does it mean to be human, to be a man, to live in our society? It's Charlie Kaufman-esque. It's like Louis Bunuel, for example. And so let's just hit some of the hits. So in the 1960s, he made a series of these very artsy short films for IBM. One of them is called The Paperwork Explosion, and the theme was machines should work, people should think. And it feels very modern in the way that it's shot. It's these, you know, kind of straight-faced executives talking to camera about the virtues of eliminating paperwork,

• 25:29Chris Winterbauer?

  but you're smash cutting to papers exploding, to people shredding things, to this random farmer. It feels, Lizzie, like, do you remember that Doctor Strangelove trailer that you played for me?

• 25:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, the very MKUltra subliminal messaging style? That's what this feels like. It also features this older man, who I swear is the inspiration for Statler of, you know, Statler and Waldorf.

• 25:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Statler and Waldorf, yeah.

• 25:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it looks exactly like him. And so this is where he meets executive David Laser, who he would go on to work with as a producer on Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. And then he wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated short film, Timepiece. You should totally watch this. He plays a man who's in a hospital bed. The doctor comes in, he starts listening to his heart, and that sets this rhythm for the story. And the story basically goes through these, like, stream-of-consciousness, absurdist moments of kind of this man's life, but also man's journey across time, and also, like, very ridiculous associations, you know, of seeing a woman and then pulling a chicken out of a bag as if you're choking the chicken. It's very adult, and it's very surreal.

• 26:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It sounds almost Twilight Zone-esque.

• 26:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It's maybe a little Twilight Zone-esque. Again, it felt more like something like Un Cien Andalou by Louis Bunuel, for example. It's very well-made. And again, it's nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Film. He takes out scripts and pitches. He wrote a dark western. He was considering an adaptation of The Lord of the The Rings. He had a TV pitch called Inside My Head that again, sounds very Charlie Kaufman-esque. It's a conversation between a man and a woman, but from the perspective of inside the man's head. And none of the networks want it, but he did write a couple of scripts for NBC's experiments in television that did get made. And the one that we should note is called The Cube. So it's an hour of standalone television directed by Henson is very Twilight Zone-esque, Lizzie.

• 27:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It follows this guy. He looks like a white collar worker. He wakes up inside this, you know, roughly 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot, virtually featureless cube. He has no idea how he got there and he can't seem to leave as other people are coming and going. There's a maintenance man. There's the manager. There's like two Gestapo police officers executing a search warrant. There's this like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney hybrid musician that shows up and plays this extremely existential depressing song. And it really feels like it's both a forerunner to labyrinth, but more from like a middle aged man's perspective. And also David Fincher's The Game and even Severance. And, you know, in reference to The Game, I'm not sure if you've seen that movie.

• 27:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not.

• 27:47Chris Winterbauer?

  This literally ends with the character, I don't want to give too much away, but the ending of this, go watch The Cube, guys. If you like The Game, the ending of The Cube feels like it directly inspired The Game. Basically, what I want to convey is The Cube and Timepiece, to me, emphasize that Henson's strengths are really as a stream of consciousness storyteller. It's not really plot, but more dream logic, consistency of tone, lyrical connections. And they really capture the terrifying lack of control in our lives. So he makes some other serious plans to open an interactive nightclub called Sicklia. Just to show you how eclectic Henson was.

• 28:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't want to interact with anything in a nightclub. I don't know what that means. Well, don't touch me, as Elaine Stritch said about the cats in Cats.

• 28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Let me pitch it to you. It was going to be the entertainment experience of the future. There would be films projected onto the walls, ceiling and floor. And once every hour, a woman, not Lizzie apparently, would stand at the center of the room and a film would be projected onto her white leotard. The films would be divided into five categories: woods, junk, city at night, India and nude. It's very easy to make fun of now, but I think it was very ahead of its time. And it's important to note, Henson was cultivating some incredible talent. Frank Oz said of this project, quote, "I shot thousands of feet of 16 millimeter film. It's where I got the first experience to become a movie director."

• 29:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 29:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Sicilia never actually happened. But Henson was still trying to bring some edge to his projects. He even tried to bring some edge to The Muppets. Back in college, his shows often ended with moments of violence or shock, like, you know, one of the puppets eating another one of the puppets. Henson brought The Muppets to Saturday Night Live, and when he tried to sell The Muppet Show to ABC, he made two pilots, and one was called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.

• 29:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 29:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So this title was definitely tongue in cheek. But the puppets that he brought onto SNL, the Muppets that he brought onto SNL, were more adult. They were actually different characters, who he said were from the, quote, "land of gorge," and they'd really flopped on SNL. So the sense that I really get is at this point in time, Henson and his puppets feel very boxed in. And if anybody could understand what it was like to be fenced in by their own creation, it was George Lucas. So after the American networks passed on The Muppet Show, a British entrepreneur named Lou Grade bought it for a network in England called ATV. This is why The Muppet Show was shot in England at L Street Studios, where George Lucas would wind up shooting The Empire Strikes Back, far away from Hollywood.

• 30:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He asked Jim Henson to help him make Yoda. Now, Henson didn't have time to perform the character and suggested Frank Oz for the job. It's the perfect marriage. Henson's team knows how to do puppets, and Lucas's team knows how to do remote control technology. Yoda's the experiment, the dark crystal is the full execution, and it really seemed like it was primed for success. You've got the producer of the first two Star Wars films, British illustrator Brian Fraud, who had done this illustrated book called Fairies. It's this art book about folklore, and he had done it with Alan Lee, who would go on to work on The Lord of the Rings, if you remember, Lizzie. It was a bestseller. They spent five years creating the world of the dark crystal. And then at the very end, they said, "What should the story be?" And I think that may have been the problem.

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So Brian Fraud worked himself to exhaustion on The Dark Crystal, which we will cover another day. And after a really rough screening in San Francisco, Henson, Fraud, and Wendy Miedner, who'd helped design Yoda and operate his ears and would go on to marry Brian Fraud, were riding in a limo, and it's very quiet. The response had been not so great. And Fraud's thinking, well, that was fun. I'm probably never going to work with Jim again. And then Jim goes, ooh, should we do another one? And looking back, Fraud said, for some bizarre reason, we heard ourselves saying yes. And Henson knew this movie had to be different from The Dark Crystal. So, Lizzie, based on what I've described, could you maybe point out a few differences between Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal? The most obvious ones you could possibly think of.

• 31:51Lizzie Bassett?

  There are people.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 31:53Lizzie Bassett?

  There is a very clear story and objective, even if it is, you know, wandering through a labyrinth.

• 31:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 31:59Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's not exclusively geared towards adults, I would say.

• 32:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a little lighter.

• 32:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a little lighter, yeah.

• 32:05Chris Winterbauer?

  You nailed it. They wanted it to be lighter. They wanted to have at least some human characters. And they wanted to give the characters more personality. Henson pitches Fraud, and Fraud has a vision. Quote, "What I saw immediately was a vision of a baby surrounded by goblins, because in folklore, goblins steal babies, and that's what fairies do as well."

• 32:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I have a suspicion about whose baby that is, and I guess I'm glad, considering how horrifying those shots are.

• 32:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Hold that thought. Despite Henson having created the cube, Fraud was the one who suggested that there should be a labyrinth. Fraud starts sketching characters, and he paints the scene he saw in his mind of a human baby surrounded by goblins. Six months later, his son Toby was conceived. And when Toby was born, he apparently looked just like the baby in the painting. Remember the name of the character in the movie?

• 32:57Lizzie Bassett?

  It's Toby, and I already know his name is Toby Fraud.

• 32:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, Fraud had also learned from his mistakes on The Dark Crystal. He now knew how to design for puppeteering, so...

• 33:08Lizzie Bassett?

  He now knew how to farm his own child out into the middle of a bunch of horrible Muppets.

• 33:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. It's a family business, Lizzie. Brian Henson's working on this.

• 33:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Get in early.

• 33:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Toby Fraud's working on this. Who cares if Brian Henson's 21? Toby Fraud's in the movie. The kid stays in the picture.

• 33:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. So Fraud's designing for puppeteering. Basically, he knows the ways in which puppets need to be manipulated so he can design it in a way that the puppeteer can actually manipulate these characters. And as the drawings are finished, a somewhat episodic story starts to form. And at first, Fraud and Henson had decided that the whole story would take place in a fantasy world. There's gonna be a king and a queen, and the king would, quote, "rescue his baby from an enchantment." They were juiced. They said, "This is it. The dark crystal, eh, didn't quite work. This is gonna be the one. This is gonna be the breakthrough." And Fraud goes to his friend, Alan Lee. And if you guys are unfamiliar, listen to our episode on Lord of the Rings. Alan Lee was one of the main concept artists, you know, designers on Lord of the Rings. Lee had just started working as a concept artist for movies.

• 34:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And according to Henson, Alan Lee says, "Gee, that sounds an awful lot like the movie I'm working on." Lizzie, any guesses as to which 1985 fantasy film starring a young Thomas Cruise?

• 34:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Legend?

• 34:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Legend, directed by Ridley Scott. Now, I watched Legend last night. I hadn't seen it in 30 years. I don't know. Here's what I'll say. Borderline incomprehensible story for me. Maybe I'm an idiot. One of the most incredible visual masterpieces I've ever seen. Maybe the best production design, costume design, hair and makeup. The design work by Alan Lee, put this on and you'll say, "Oh, my God, this is Lord of the Rings." Like, they, like, Lord of the Rings used this, obviously the same designer, you know, Alan Lee. I think in some ways it looks better than Lord of the Rings. Like, it is a visual feast, and I actually think Legend steals more from the dark crystal, in a weird way, than the version of Labyrinth they're describing were to steal from Legend. But who knows? I didn't see, you know, early copies of the story. And it's more of a Garden of Eden story, anyway.

• 35:06Chris Winterbauer?

  But the point is, Henson and Fraud decided, "We do not want to be stepping on the toes of Legend or Ridley Scott, so let's change it up. Instead of having a man as our lead, let's have a young girl as our lead." Henson had daughters. Initially, she was going to be a fairy tale princess in a fantasy world, and then she was gonna be from the Victorian era. And finally, they said, "Let's just make her a regular girl living in the US present." To which I'd say, "Or maybe a really weird girl living in the US present."

• 35:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Look, she's a Renaissance girl. You're gonna be a Renaissance girl.

• 35:35Chris Winterbauer?

  She's a Ren Faire kid.

• 35:36Lizzie Bassett?

  You're gonna be a horse girl. You're gonna be,

• 35:38Chris Winterbauer?

  She's a horse girl.

• 35:38Lizzie Bassett?

  You might be a bug kid. You might be, you just don't know.

• 35:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I was a bug kid.

• 35:41Lizzie Bassett?

  You were a bug kid?

• 35:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I was, oh my god, I was a bug kid.

• 35:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I was a bug kid. Yeah. She was a horse girl. They said, what if she, you know, she comes in and she pretends she runs on a horse.

• 35:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Kid, and that's fine. I get it. I went to the Celtic Games every year, cuz it was cool. I think.

• 36:00Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. So they worked on the story for about a year, and then they bring in Dennis Lee. Now, Lee had done some dialogue and narration polishing, uncredited on The Dark Crystal, and he's currently working in the music department of Henson's TV show Fraggle Rock. So Lee goes off and turns the story into a coming-of-age story set in a fraudian, not Freudian, although kind of, world of goblins, hairy beasts, and animated masonry. This time, the humans were central to the story. That's the key distinction. He finishes writing in December of 1983, but it's a novella. So Henson says, okay, well, now I need a screenwriter to turn it into a screenplay. Switches, saying, why didn't we start with the screenplay? But that's fine. Regardless, according to one Henson biographer, Henson briefly considered writer Melissa Matheson, who was best known for writing E.T., the Extraterrestrial.

• 36:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Should make a lot of sense. But he ultimately decided he needed a comedian, and he chose Terry Jones. Lizzie, are you familiar with Terry Jones of?

• 36:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Monty.

• 36:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Monty Python.

• 36:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Monty Python. Okay, that's what I thought. Yes.

• 36:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Writer, director, actor, best known for his work as a member of the world-famous British comedy troupe Monty Python. So Jones takes the job, sits at his desk with Brian Fraud's drawings. He said he basically discarded Lee's novella, which, quote, "wasn't even a complete thing." Rude. But he did keep the scene where Hoggle squirts the fairies, which is a very funny scene, where Hoggle's like counting the fairies that he's killing as he's spraying them with bug spray.

• 37:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Every time he hit a wall, he just looked through Brian's drawings, find a new character, and sparked something new. And this is kind of how we get a very meandering story as a result. But he said it was wonderful. It's a strange way of collaborating. Although Brian and I never sat down and worked together, it felt like that's what we were doing the whole time. And Fraud felt the same way. I think because Jones was English, he caught references in Fraud's work that Henson, an American, missed. And so Jones was really referencing and Fraud, Alice in Wonderland, obviously, a hefty dose of whimsy, but, quote, "underpinning a profound story about a teenage girl coming into maturity." It's kind of the weird part of this movie I don't, I don't love.

• 38:00Lizzie Bassett?

  You could also read it as a teenage girl just not being as much of a dick as she had been. And maybe that's a more wholesome viewing of it, which is maturing in some capacity.

• 38:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I like the idea of the maturity more as leaving the childhood behind, which is why I really love the last scene of the movie where they kind of, all the monsters like, we'll still be here for you. You know, when you need us, less so the David Bowie element of it.

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I don't actually think that there, it's like, it's there. I don't think it's the main focus of it. I think it's more that she's understanding the importance of family and her brother and those things outside of herself. And then that's how she's maturing.

• 38:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. So one of Jones's early ideas, we should mention, was to write sort of an environmentalist parable, and he wanted to keep the Goblin King off screen until the very end, like the Wizard of Oz, which could have been interesting. Now, only three writers are credited on this movie, Henson, Lee and Jones, as I mentioned, but writing the script would take nearly two and a half years with more than 20 rewrites and revisions. Now, the details are hazy, but at least three additional writers are involved. First, Laura Phillips, who was a TV writer on Fraggle Rock. So Henson gave her one of Jones's early drafts, and she either wrote another script or treatment while Henson was also tinkering in parallel. So her draft was more focused on Sarah and the relationships of the story. And according to Henson's son, Brian, it also improved the structure of the story, but quote, "unraveled all of the dialogue, and it wasn't as funny as Jones's past."

• 39:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So according to some sources, Jones then took another pass to add back the comedy. He says, quote, "He basically pulled it back to my second draft. I was actually thinking at one point of taking my name off of it, but then Jim rang me up and said he'd like to give me sole screenplay credit, and I just couldn't for the life of me think of how to refuse." Now, according to another source, Jim liked both of their drafts, and he wanted to combine them. So he basically just asked them both to keep writing. Now, the early eighties, as I mentioned, Lizzie, were really good for puppets, but they were rough for Lou Gray, the man who'd taken a chance on The Muppet Show. He was slowly losing his media empire with a couple of flops that we're going to have to cover at some point. So in 1980, AFD, which was the film division under his company ITC,

• 40:02Chris Winterbauer?

  released two movies within six weeks that were not well received. Can't Stop the Music, a showcase for the village people, made $2 million against a $20 million budget.

• 40:13Lizzie Bassett?

  $20 million on The Village People?

• 40:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, this was the peak of disco. This makes sense on paper, less so in execution. And six weeks later, Raise the Titanic, based on Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novel of the same name, which I read when I was in middle school, was the nail in the coffin. It made $7 million against a $35 million budget. So ITC has to sell AFD and its Library of Films to Universal Pictures, which includes the then in-production, The Dark Crystal, which is why you see Universal. So what's kind of tragic is that one of the movies that was in production that gets sold off to Universal was On Golden Pond, which made over $100 million against its $15 million budget and won three Oscars.

• 40:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Because you know that somebody was like, old people on a pond, sell it, get it out of here.

• 41:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, and it would have actually totally reversed the fortunes of this company. If you think about how much they lost on the last two, they would have made that and more. But basically, Henson couldn't go to Lou Gread for financing on Labyrinth because Lou Gread had sold off his film division. But he knew another outsider who would back something as crazy as Labyrinth. So sometime in the first half of 1984, Henson flies to California to meet with who, Lizzie?

• 41:28Lizzie Bassett?

  George Lucas.

• 41:30Chris Winterbauer?

  George Lucas, yeah, the man who has kind of the same voice as Jim Henson. In many ways, I think George Lucas probably needed something new in his life. He literally needed new material for his company, for Lucasfilm, because Star Wars had wrapped in May of 1983 with the release of Return of the Jedi. And I think he may have needed something a little new emotionally as well, because as you remember, Lizzie, he had gotten divorced about a year earlier from Marcia Lucas, his wife and creative collaborator of nearly 15 years. And so in August of 1954, George Lucas signs on to executive produce Labyrinth, but Jim Henson still needs his Sarah. So let's talk about casting Sarah, Lizzie, because this is a really fun, sliding doors, what ifs, sort of casting scenario.

• 42:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So in April of 84, Henson starts holding monthly auditions in London, and he was focused on actresses who were either over 18 or would be over 18 by the time filming began. To avoid child labor law limitations, which I think makes a lot of sense.

• 42:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Candidly, I also think it softens some of the awkwardness of the Bowie component as well, or it would have. So three months in, he had a top choice. I'll give you a couple of hints, Lizzie, and you can take a guess.

• 42:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 42:39Chris Winterbauer?

  She's a British actress, and she would break out in 1985's A Room With A View.

• 42:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Helen and Bonham Carter.

• 42:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good. She would have been a really interesting choice, but Henson wasn't sold.

• 42:51Lizzie Bassett?

  She's spicier, for sure.

• 42:52Chris Winterbauer?

  She's super spicy. She feels like she could have actually been, if they had had a female character who was already part of the world of Labyrinth.

• 42:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 43:07Lizzie Bassett?

  She was up for literally everything in the mid 80s.

• 43:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, she had done this CBS sitcom I never saw called Square Pegs. I think it only ran a season. She would have been roughly 18 or 19. Laura Dern.

• 43:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 43:20Chris Winterbauer?

  16, 17. I think she'd done Foxes with Jodie Foster. Mia Sarah, who had done All My Children and who was doing Legend, right? Like, she would have probably been shooting Legend.

• 43:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And then, of course, goes on to do Ferris Bueller.

• 43:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. And Mary Stuart Masterson. Very, very interesting. She makes less sense to me than the others. So Henson decides at this point, I actually want Sarah to be played by an American, and maybe she could be younger than 18. So he broadens his search, and by late December, he has a new top five. And this includes Jane Krakowski.

• 43:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 43:52Chris Winterbauer?

  She had just done Vacation. She would have been 15 or 16. And Ally Sheedy.

• 43:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 43:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Who, it's interesting, Sheedy looks, she doesn't look 14, but she looks relatively young, but she was actually one of the oldest considered. Like, I think she would have been around 21 or 22. So Henson reviews their tapes one more time. He decides to start over, and a few weeks later, 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly walks in. She's been acting for a couple of years, and Henson knows she is exactly right.

• 44:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Connolly felt about acting much the same way Henson had about puppeteering. There's this quote where she says, like, I had no interest in acting. I was interested in being a vet or a carpenter or something. Basically, a friend of her parents asked if she wanted to try modeling. She started modeling.

• 44:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Because she's gorgeous.

• 44:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. She then goes on to do commercial work. Then she gets a film audition for Once Upon a Time in America. And then she gets music video work. And then she's in Dario Argento's Phenomena, which I don't know if you've seen. It's an Italian set supernatural horror film. It's very good. And then with all of that under her belt, like literally, you know, two features, kind of one lead role, she gets one of the biggest co-stars in the world. So two weeks after Jennifer Connelly signs on, David Bowie is officially cast as Jareth.

• 45:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be so scary as a 14 year old that you're going to be starring opposite David Bowie. Like, this is the height of Bowie's stardom at this point, pretty much.

• 45:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. What's funny is that Connolly has said that she didn't really grasp it at the time. And I wonder if that's because.

• 45:25Lizzie Bassett?

  She could be too young.

• 45:26Chris Winterbauer?

  She what? Yeah, I think Bowie was actually kind of in his second act. And we'll get into kind of where he was in his career in just a moment. Perhaps we should briefly mention, there were allegations that David Bowie had a sexual relationship with an underage girl. Laurie Maddox has accused him of this when she was 14 or 15 as part of, she was like a underage groupie with his, I don't know how to say this.

• 45:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, look, my understanding about this, and I think it's important to mention just because we are going to discuss that there are elements of this movie that teeter on vaguely sexual between Bowie's character and Jennifer Connelly. We are aware of the fact that these allegations exist. Laurie Maddox, unfortunately, sounds like she had quite a few sexual encounters with many rock stars. She seems to say that they were all consensual. But of course, if you're 14 and the person you're sleeping with is in their 20s, that's not consensual. So that's, I think, all there is to say about that, is that we are aware of those allegations. They exist. She said it happened, and it very well may have.

• 46:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you, Lizzie. Let's talk a little bit about where Bowie is in his career at this point in time, when he's cast as Jareth. So in some ways, Bowie was a bit like. Henson, he's this experimental oddity. He's obviously enormously talented. And so 1969, Space Odyssey is his first top five hit in UK. Then you have the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the spiders from Mars in 1972. Worldwide popularity. I know he was technically acting in the 60s in a few things, short films, stage productions. But I feel like he really starts being noticed as an actor with The Man Who Fell to Earth.

• 46:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 46:55Chris Winterbauer?

  In the 1970s. My understanding is he has a somewhat shaky late 70s musically, but then he reestablishes himself in the early 80s with Ashes to Ashes.

• 47:04Lizzie Bassett?

  One of my favorite Bowie songs, yes.

• 47:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Under Pressure and then Let's Dance in 1983.

• 47:10Lizzie Bassett?

  The whole Let's Dance album, yeah, has a ton of stuff on it.

• 47:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly, yeah. Jim Henson, though, had not originally pictured Bowie for the part. So for one thing, he was human, kind of. And Jareth was originally going to be another creature, which is, I think, interesting. But let's talk about that in a second. Now, once Henson decided to make him human, he was actually considering actors. So British actor Simon McCorkendale, who I did not know, but I guess he was known at the time for playing Simon Doyle in the 78 adaptation of Death on the Nile. He was also in Jaws 3D in 1983. And Kevin Kline.

• 47:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I love Kevin Kline. I might be Team Kevin Kline.

• 47:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, he's very funny. I think of something like A Fish Called Wanda. I think very less sexual.

• 47:56Lizzie Bassett?

  He's less sinister.

• 47:58Chris Winterbauer?

  He's less sinister.

• 47:59Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 48:09Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a very good actor.

• 48:10Lizzie Bassett?

  This is not that, but that's fine. But he's, you know, he's always dabbled with the idea that he's not entirely human, that he's something alien, you know, he's very androgynous, he.

• 48:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The man who fell to earth, yeah.

• 48:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly, he feels very other, whether it's his eyes, one of which the pupil is always dilated. It's not heterochromia, in case anyone's wondering. But yeah, I think, I totally get it. But when you are dealing with children, which they are in this movie with both the baby, although I love David Bowie throwing that baby around, but with the baby and also a 14 year old girl. I think someone like Kevin Kline may have been a little bit more palatable, but I don't know that he would have brought the attention that they needed to this movie that David Bowie did.

• 48:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's interesting you mention that because I think the attention is important. So Kevin Kline was a big, you know, stage actor at the time. And Henson decides to scrap this idea when he realizes, you know, let's make Jareth a music person, someone who could change the film's whole musical style. And so he decides to go after a musician and some sources say his top choice was Sting.

• 49:11Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm bored.

• 49:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Henson has said he considered Sting, but he was not his top choice. Either way, he goes to his kids. He says, you're young. Who should headline this movie? And Brian Henson, who's 21 at the time, says, Michael Jackson and David Bowie are the two biggest names in my generation. But he specifically suggests Bowie, Lizzie's face. Yes.

• 49:31Lizzie Bassett?

  A plus choice.

• 49:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, what's interesting is yes, obviously off screen allegations slash confirmed instances of Michael Jackson being wildly inappropriate with children aside. I completely understand creatively, like this is what shortly before Thriller. Like Jackson's the better dancer of the two. I think you could argue Jackson's the better singer.

• 49:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think David Bowie's offbeat nature fits Henson's style better. But I understand considering Jackson.

• 49:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not actually saying that Michael Jackson would have been bad in this at all.

• 50:00Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 50:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Michael Jackson is, was an incredible performer. Why do these people all have to be? God damn it. Anyway, keep going. They're all very talented. Yeah, I don't think Michael Jackson would have been right for this just because like the world of this, he doesn't quite make sense in. Michael Jackson makes sense in Thriller. Michael Jackson doesn't necessarily make sense in fantasy, the way that David Bowie does.

• 50:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, the whiz, but yes.

• 50:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but the whiz is not, I'm sorry, guys, the whiz is not great.

• 50:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't know if that's his fault.

• 50:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No, no, I don't know if it is either, but I'm just saying I don't know that it works super well.

• 50:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Henson decides Bowie's the way to go. So he meets with Bowie in New York. He's got Fraude's drawings, the most recent draft of the script by Terry Jones. He's got a copy of The Dark Crystal on video and Bowie really likes The Dark Crystal. He thinks it's really interesting. And he says, okay, this could be cool to make this movie, but with humans. And at the end of the meeting, Jim has three questions. Will you do this movie? Will you sing in it? And will you write songs in it? And according to Henson, Bowie said, yes, yes, and yes. And according to Lizzie, he said, but only for 10 minutes.

• 50:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I stand by that.

• 51:00Chris Winterbauer?

  But what he actually did say is, "Only if I like the script." Now, I cannot figure out if that means that Henson gave him the copy he had, or said, "Well, hold on a beat, because we're still rewriting this thing." Because the script continued to change a lot. So when Labyrinth was released, Henson was very open about the fact that George Lucas had come in towards the end of the writing process and worked a great deal on the script. What he was not as open about was the involvement of another big-name writer, Lizzie, which female comedy icon turned infamous director of a flop of a movie that we actually kind of liked.

• 51:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Elaine May.

• 51:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Worked uncredited, Elaine May, worked uncredited on Labyrinth.

• 51:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 51:35Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Brian Henson, she was, quote, "not meant to be there." And she flew in in the dark of the night, stayed in our house, and worked in an upper room. To which I say, like, did she have leprosy? What is going on here?

• 51:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Why?

• 51:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. It's unclear. We couldn't find a reason, some guesses. Maybe he didn't want to freak out the other writers, or let Terry Jones, who was getting credit, you know, that Elaine May, who would have been intimidating to, you know, they're both comedy giants. Maybe there's like a guild issue, maybe he was doing it without telling the producers. Regardless of the reason, Brian says that Elaine worked with Jim for roughly two to three days to try to bring back the comedy and better retain the structure. And all this was happening when we were not far out from shooting. We were real close to shooting, and we were able to confirm this. According to Henson's notebook, he met with May at the end of February 1985, and they worked together in April. And the final script was dated April 11, 1985, just four days before principal photography. So we don't know what emergency surgery Elaine May did on this movie. It may have been very little, it might have been a lot.

• 52:30Chris Winterbauer?

  But that draft is credited to Laura Phillips and Terry Jones. Elaine May's name is not on it. So Henson's team, meanwhile, had spent 18 months creating Labyrinth's creatures. So The Dark Crystal had kind of been a $25 million R&D project for the show Fraggle Rock. And then everything they did on Fraggle Rock was now informing what they were doing on Labyrinth. So on Fraggle Rock, they did little radio-controlled characters, the doozers. They had these big walk-around gorgs with remote-controlled mouths. And they had really refined the integration of remote-control technology and puppetry. And so now they have motor control that can be operated from 10 feet away. There are fewer wires, but there's still a lot of challenges, including making these creatures lightweight enough that they can be operated by a human inside of them.

• 53:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 53:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So Lizzie, which creature is particularly large and looks like maybe requires a person to be inside of him?

• 53:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Ludo.

• 53:20Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 53:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, yeah, that's amazing.

• 53:27Chris Winterbauer?

  But the rest of the suit is inhabited by a performer. Halfway through the build, Jim Henson is getting nervous. He's going, how much is this gonna weigh? They do some calculations and they say, well, it looks like it's gonna be 100 and some odd pounds. And Jim Henson says, that is too much. I need this performer to be able to move around in this thing. So they start over. They go back to the drawing board. The final product, they get down to roughly 75 pounds.

• 53:50Lizzie Bassett?

  That's still really heavy.

• 53:52Chris Winterbauer?

  The suit is very heavy.

• 53:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It was too heavy for one actor. He hired two actors, Ron Meck and Rob Mills. They're close enough in size that they can switch off. So basically, they would like, you know, do a certain number of takes until one was exhausted. And then it's, put me on the bench, coach, and tap me in to the other one. There was a giant automaton guard robot. He's called Humongous, Lizzie. You remember him when you get to the Goblin City.

• 54:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:16Chris Winterbauer?

  This was not a man puppet, but at 15 feet tall, it was the biggest creature Henson's team had ever built.

• 54:21Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing.

• 54:22Chris Winterbauer?

  They made the first version entirely out of fiberglass, but it wouldn't flex properly when it moved. So again, they scrapped it and started over. They used polyurethane foam. But if you had to guess, Lizzie, which creature was the most complicated to bring to life? The hint I'll give you is screen time.

• 54:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, yeah, I was gonna guess Hoggle, maybe.

• 54:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Hoggle was the most complex. He had a motor-controlled face, like Ludo, and there was a performer inside, but they had to jam a lot more into a much smaller package.

• 54:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 54:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So Brian Henson, who's credited as the puppeteer coordinator on the movie, said that at first, Jim wanted to use a hand puppet for the close-ups of Hoggle's face. And there's a lot of amazing hand puppetry in this movie. The knockers, if you remember that scene, Lizzie, where she gets to the door.

• 55:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I love those.

• 55:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, my God, they're made to look like brass.

• 55:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's so effective, the way that they're talking to her. It looks seamless. It's, I mean, you could not CGI that better than the way that it looks in the scene.

• 55:14Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 55:14Chris Winterbauer?

  But when they did these close-ups of Hoggle's face with a hand puppet, they looked too different from the wide shots. So they decided everything had to be done by motor control, which required 18 motors inside of Hoggle's face, which were remote-controlled by four different people. Brian provided the character. Voice in addition to being one of the people who was doing the motor controls in the face. But Hoggle was moved by an actual actress, Sherry Weiser. And it wasn't easy. She had to wear these huge mechanical hands that were basically ornamental. So basically, her hands were small enough that they fit inside the palm of Hoggle's mechanical hands. And they were designed that so when she moved her fingers, Hoggle's fingers moved. But she didn't have any gripping power. She couldn't pick anything up.

• 55:55Chris Winterbauer?

  So anytime she had to hold something, catch something, they had to swap in another hand in a fixed position to hold the problem.

• 56:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 56:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But Lizzie, if you had to guess what the real problem was, knowing that she's wearing this giant, remote-controlled mechanical head. What do you think would be very difficult for her to do inside of this costume? Besides go to the bathroom?

• 56:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Breathe? I don't know.

• 56:16Chris Winterbauer?

  See.

• 56:16Lizzie Bassett?

  See.

• 56:17Chris Winterbauer?

  She couldn't see while she was in the costume. So the original plan was to do what they had done with Ludo. Something they'd done on Fraggle Rock, which is they would put a camera inside the stomach of the costume and a viewfinder up inside its head.

• 56:30Lizzie Bassett?

  My god, that's so disorienting. But at least you'd be able to see something.

• 56:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It caused her extreme motion sickness.

• 56:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So they had to ditch the camera. And I would like to play a clip, Lizzie, of Brian Henson explaining how they solved this problem.

• 56:44Speaker 06

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

• 56:50Speaker 06

  He can't shut up. I just love that. And I was like, yeah, because that was the only way Sherry could see. Because the way we would shoot, Hoggle would be walking along and he wouldn't have any dialogue, you know. It would be Jennifer who would be speaking, but Hoggle would be heading right for a tree. So he'd have to go.

• 57:12Speaker 06

  So he had to like make ridiculous noises all the time where he'd walk on off of cliffs and into trees.

• 57:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So basically, the only way she could see was through the open mouth hole.

• 57:23Lizzie Bassett?

  He opened his mouth.

• 57:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Of Hoggle. And so they had to just make him. The whole movie so she could see. It's very funny. It's a very clever solve.

• 57:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Just before production begins, Brian and Kevin Clash, the assistant puppeteer coordinator, realize we have too many. Puppets and not enough puppeteers. So they bring in and train 40 more people and they would not be the last hires on Labyrinth. So cameras roll on April 15th, 1985 at L Street Studios. Henson and his team are spread across all nine sound stages. The set pieces are massive. I mean, Lizzie, you just watched this movie.

• 57:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 57:59Chris Winterbauer?

  You can attest to how big some of these scenes actually feel as built. I mean, it's really remarkable.

• 58:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing.

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  $25 million budget, same as The Dark Crystal, but Jennifer Connelly said it felt like a playground. And maybe a dangerous playground because there were a lot of holes in the ground.

• 58:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 58:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Because they had to be able to operate the puppets to them. When doing the dance magic scene, Brian said, when you get all the puppets out of there, it looks like Swiss cheese. There's no set left. There's holes everywhere. People were walking around saying, any minute, the set's going to fall down. Jim Henson, for his part, said he didn't realize how risky the shoot was going to be until they started shooting. And there was a near tragic accident. I don't want to overstate it. When they were shooting in the bog of eternal stench.

• 58:42Lizzie Bassett?

  The fart bog, yeah.

• 58:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. The butthole fart bog.

• 58:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It was very hot, very slippery and apparently very stinky. It really did stink in that set. And the first assistant cameraman, this is the person who was responsible for pulling focus, manipulating the focus of the lens to keep the desired action of the scene in focus. They're carrying this big Panavision camera worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because of that quote, I assume it has a lens mounted on it because the lenses are really what's expensive. And he basically slips and falls into the bog. It's the tank section where the rocks form under the bridge, Lizzie, if you remember. He grabs a nearby chain as he's falling, but it's covered in bog goop. So he slides all the way down and he just lifts the camera up with one hand. The other AC pulls it out just in time, but that first AC was lost forever. I'm just kidding, the first AC was fine, but he was very stinky for the rest of the shoot.

• 59:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Another very challenging set piece, Lizzie, if you had to guess which set piece that involves Jennifer Connelly falling, would be very challenging, which would you guess?

• 59:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Falling, is that when she falls into the like dump zone with all the critters?

• 59:41Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I love that scene, but this is the tunnel of hands.

• 59:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:46Chris Winterbauer?

  The Shaft of Hands.

• 59:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 59:48Chris Winterbauer?

  So that is a 40-foot-tall set. And guys, go on YouTube and look at how they built this. It's amazing. There's a 40-foot-tall set, and they started with 24 performers. So Brian Froud had initially thought, oh, it could be fun if the hands kind of, you put lipstick on one, you know, your top finger and on the bottom, and the hands talk. And then Jim Henson expands it to like, well, what if multiple hands make a single face? So they start with 24 performers, and it's not nearly enough. Henson said, when we got everybody in there, I looked at it and said to George Gibbs, who had been preparing these hands, there aren't enough hands. Can you give me another 150 hands without people in them? So they brought in another 75 performers. And then in the foreground, they have all of these like rubber hands that are attached to these giant poles that they're moving up and down to create, you know, foreground action on it, too.

• 1:00:32Chris Winterbauer?

  He basically went in and he said, what are these hands for ants? And he said, give me 75 more. So it compounded another issue, which is that it was impossible for Jim to direct the scene. He'd say like, OK, let me see the hands move up there. And they go, which ones? Because they're all behind these boards, and they can't see what they're doing. So they had to create a graph that mapped out the different sections of hands and know which ones would create faces and which ones would grab. Because again, it's like, one person's doing the right side of the face, the other person's doing the left side of the face.

• 1:00:58Lizzie Bassett?

  But they can't see anything.

• 1:00:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And they can't see anything. So impressive. Now, the creatures weren't the only practical trickery going on in this movie. I'm sure you noticed some really great in-camera effects. Lizzie, there are walls that are actually openings.

• 1:01:11Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my favorite, at the very beginning, with the worm.

• 1:01:14Chris Winterbauer?

  The one where she walks through the wall?

• 1:01:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I love the worm.

• 1:01:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I also love the worm.

• 1:01:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, come and meet the missus.

• 1:01:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So good, so cute.

• 1:01:21Lizzie Bassett?

  If she'd gone that way, she could have gone straight to the castle.

• 1:01:24Chris Winterbauer?

  To the castle.

• 1:01:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Worm would have made this movie 10 minutes long.

• 1:01:27Chris Winterbauer?

  How the Worm Turns. It's great. I love the doors that when Hoggle's opening the doors, and each time he opens it in a different direction, it reveals a different set behind it.

• 1:01:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:37Chris Winterbauer?

  They used a lot of forced perspective, too. So they would use forced perspective to make the Goblin Village appear a lot bigger than it was. And that's actually how they make the maids look like it goes on forever, which I think is very effective throughout this movie.

• 1:01:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Chris Winterbauer?

  So Jim Henson actually called the Goblin Town one of the prettiest sets he ever worked on, and credit to- Production designer Elliot Scott and his team. Elliot Scott, who framed Roger Rabbit, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, like prolific production designer. Now, Industrial Light and Magic did provide some special effects supervised by George Gibbs, including, Lizzie, your favorite scene. Which monsters did you hate?

• 1:02:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I hate those demon bird things. I hate them. I always have.

• 1:02:13Chris Winterbauer?

  The Fierys, or the Fire Gang, which were composited. So basically-

• 1:02:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, which you can tell.

• 1:02:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, it doesn't match the seamlessness of all the in-camera stuff of the rest of the film, but this is early in compositing. So this is basically, you know, the Fierys are operated, each of them is operated by two to three performers. They're wearing black behind them. They then cut them out and they composite them onto the background. Now, there wasn't a lot of drama about the execution of the Fierys, but there was about their name. So sometime in late 1985, Henson's longtime friend, Maurice Sendak, either read the script or saw a rough cut of the movie. And, Lizzie, what's his most famous children's book?

• 1:02:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Where the Wild Things Are.

• 1:02:50Chris Winterbauer?

  The Fierys were originally called The Wild Things.

• 1:02:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and they look a little bit like Maurice Sendak creations, too.

• 1:02:57Chris Winterbauer?

  He was, he was pretty upset. He thought this was way too close to his book. And it turns out that the whole plot of Labyrinth sounded a lot like one of his other books. I had not read this book, but let me describe the plot. A young girl is watching her baby sibling while her father is at sea and her mother at the harbor. She focuses more on the music than her baby sister. So goblins come and steal the baby sister, swapping in a changeling made of ice. She flies out of the house in her mother's cloak. She flies around town. She finds her sister. All the goblins are disguised as babies. She uses music to get the goblins to heed her instructions and identify which one's her real baby sister, and she returns home. Not exactly the same, but-

• 1:03:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's pretty close.

• 1:03:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Decently similar.

• 1:03:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it does sound very similar. The only thing I will say, however, is that the idea of goblins taking a baby or changelings taking a baby, fairies taking a baby, and replacing it with something, that is a very common folk tale from, you know, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, like-

• 1:03:52Chris Winterbauer?

  For the last 400 years.

• 1:03:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yeah, yeah. So I will, I will just caveat it with that.

• 1:03:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's a great point. Let me present you a different piece of evidence-

• 1:04:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:04:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That would perhaps be in Sendak's favor, and then I will counter it. At some point while making Labyrinth, Henson toyed with other titles. I'll read them. Magic Maze, Into the Labyrinth, Sarah's Maze, Lost in the Maze, Trapped in the Mind Maze, Inside-Out, Inside-Outside, Outside-Inside, Turning Inside-Outside, and Outside-In.

• 1:04:18Lizzie Bassett?

  You're losing the thread, Jim.

• 1:04:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Sendak's book was called Outside Over There. Sendak's lawyers sent a note to Jim, who was apparently very hurt at the assertion that he'd plagiarized Sendak.

• 1:04:36Speaker 07

  You've worked hard since you arrived in the city, gained loads of experience, developed your skills. Everywhere you look, you see something you helped build. But now, you're looking to the future. And maybe you're thinking about where you come from. In Ireland, we need planners, carpenters, plumbers, roofers, engineers, architects, site managers, and more. We need you, with all your skills and knowledge, to help us build thousands of homes. You've built the world. Now come back and build the home that built you. For more information, visit gov.ie/buildingireland. Brought to you by the Government of Ireland.

• 1:05:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And now, in Henson's defense, if you go back and watch "The Cube" from 1969, which he wrote and directed for NBC, there is a scene where a Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan kind of guitar player comes in and sings a song for the protagonist. And Lizzie, because I just can't resist, I gotta play it for you.

• 1:05:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. Oh, he's physically gonna play it. He's getting his guitar out. Wow.

• 1:05:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's see if I can do this. Just listen to the lyrics.

• 1:05:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:05:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. There are places that contain you. There are corners in your soul. Plastic laminations in your life. But when you're on the inside of the outside of your thoughts, do they restrain? Or do you stay the self? But when you're on the inside of the outside of your thoughts, Henson had written that in 1969.

• 1:06:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:06:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So I don't think he plagiarized Maurice Sendak. That's my evidence.

• 1:06:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think so either. First of all, very good, very good. Round of applause for Chris. Thank you. He can play guitar, he can sing.

• 1:06:32Chris Winterbauer?

  There's gonna be a callback.

• 1:06:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, uh-oh. No, I don't think he did. The idea of the changeling, the idea of goblins taking a baby, the idea of, like, so much of this is archetypes that I do not think that this is plagiarized.

• 1:06:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. But Henson did rename The Wild Things to The Fierys, and he even added a credit to the end of the movie. Jim Henson acknowledges his debt to the works of Maurice Sendak.

• 1:06:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Very nice.

• 1:06:57Chris Winterbauer?

  They also changed the name of one of Bowie's songs from Wild Things to Chili Down. Doesn't matter, I didn't remember it anyway.

• 1:07:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Chili Down, okay.

• 1:07:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's talk a little bit about David Bowie on set. So according to Brian Henson, David Bowie's first scene was when Jareth reveals himself in the tunnel to Sarah and Hoggle. If you remember this, Lizzie, he's disguised as a beggar. He rips his hood off, he stands up tall. The dailies go into the studio, and the calls start coming in. Lizzie, what do you think the studio's concern is?

• 1:07:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Where are his eyebrows? What's in his pants? Uh, what's the deal with his hair? What are we doing here?

• 1:07:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It was just the pants. It was the codpiece.

• 1:07:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Chris Winterbauer?

  They said, "You're absolutely nuts if you think David Bowie's going to keep wearing that thing."

• 1:07:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, they're wrong about that. He probably requested it.

• 1:07:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think he did, so let's talk about this.

• 1:07:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:07:44Chris Winterbauer?

  They didn't reshoot the scene. Jim was very against reshooting scenes. He says it's a failure if we have to reshoot something. But they did make the codpiece smaller for all the scenes after that, which is the opposite of what Brian Fraud had intended when he created Jareth originally. So according to Brian Henson, Fraud's designs intended for the codpiece to get bigger across the movie. And Jim loved it. This is great. It's terrifying to a teenage girl. This is great.

• 1:08:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct.

• 1:08:12Chris Winterbauer?

  This is what the movie's about. She's like 15. She wants to be treated like an adult, but like, whoa. That thing's scary. What do you think, Lizzie?

• 1:08:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't like that.

• 1:08:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It was my least favorite quote in the research of this episode.

• 1:08:30Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes me unhappy. She doesn't need to be scared by your giant dick in her face.

• 1:08:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not the only thing that scares teenage girl about being an adult. All right, whatever.

• 1:08:45Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, I do think in a weird way, what this quote reveals to me a little bit is that when I watch Henson's early experimental work, what's so clear, and if you watch his Muppet stuff, but especially the experimental work where he's dealing with more adult themes, he is so clued in on, you know, a lot of masculine fears or contemporary fears about living as a man, specifically a 30, 40 year old man in America, blah, blah, blah. It feels like he and Fraud are kind of grasping at straws a little bit and trying to conceptualize.

• 1:09:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Understand a teenage girl?

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Understand a teenage girl. And I think Connolly, like to her credit, brings the innocence that's needed to the part.

• 1:09:18Lizzie Bassett?

  She does, although I will say even the very beginning, she is portrayed as like almost nonsensical.

• 1:09:25Chris Winterbauer?

  She seems like she's nine.

• 1:09:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. She's like, it's weird. I was like, oh, is she 11? You know, is she 15?

• 1:09:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it felt very much like just sort of a heightened idea of what a teenage girl's tantrum might be versus something that is more realistic. And believe me, the real reality can be terrifying as we're going to find out.

• 1:09:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Having lived through it with both of my sisters, who I love dearly, I am well aware. Jennifer Connelly, I don't think, thought anything of David Bowie's codpiece, but there was somebody on set who had to stand behind Bowie and juggle his balls, so to speak, because David Bowie didn't juggle the crystal balls that his character is juggling in the movie. So.

• 1:10:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Hit a fake arm.

• 1:10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a juggler standing behind him, performing the trick blind. This man is Michael Moshin, and he has been credited by some as inventing this style of juggling called contact juggling. He had to crouch behind Bowie, lean into him, make everything look proportional, and then juggle without being able to see his hands.

• 1:10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy.

• 1:10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  If you watched the documentary on the film, you can get a sense of how hard this was. He was practicing it with a double. And then when he's shooting with Bowie, you can see a bunch of takes where he accidentally drops one of the balls. He looks really tired. He looks really frustrated. Bowie says he thought the thing was like just agonizing for Mosh. And he's basically like shoved up into his ass trying to do this juggling blind. And then you can hear Jim Henson say, when we shot that scene with David, he was incredibly patient and nothing about Michael Moshin. But I think Henson and. Pretty much everybody was very infatuated with Bowie on set. I mean, Henson has said multiple times, he didn't come with an entourage. He seemed very normal. He was very down to earth. He just kind of came and did his job and that was it.

• 1:10:59Lizzie Bassett?

  That does match up with most of the accounts I have heard of people who worked with David Bowie or encountered him is that he was not a typical superstar celebrity and did generally seem to be pretty pleasant to work with.

• 1:11:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, there were a number of instances where it seems like they just like couldn't even get through a take because Bowie was just, he couldn't get Hoggle's name right. Like, so I think a number of the instances where he calls him something else were actually not intentional in the movie. He's like, calls him Hogbutt and stuff and she's like, Hoggle! And he's, ah, yeah, yeah. And they just couldn't get it. Now, let's talk about the baby because according to Henson, the real diva on set, Lizzie, was the baby.

• 1:11:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Toby Fraud.

• 1:11:37Chris Winterbauer?

  People say that you shouldn't work with babies, puppets, or animals, but this is the first time I ever worked with a baby. So now I understand why people say that, according to Henson. And this baby, Lizzie, as you guessed, is a nepo baby because Toby was played by the boy who arguably inspired or was inspired by Brian Fraud's drawings of the baby that started it all, which is Fraud's son, Toby Fraud. His mom was on set. Sherry Weiser was also a very calming presence for him.

• 1:12:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:12:00Chris Winterbauer?

  They got him to cry in his crib at the beginning of the movie.

• 1:12:02Lizzie Bassett?

  For a really long time, which is sad.

• 1:12:04Chris Winterbauer?

  By putting him there outside of his regular nap time. So it was just that he was tired more than he was upset, although it is jarring. I know, my son's a little older than him and it's very jarring. The scenes where he's getting tossed around or a doll, obviously, but there was apparently one dodgy part of the shoot, which is when they were doing dance magic, they'd start the music at a really high volume and that would startle Toby. And so that was the dodgiest part, according to some. Toby was asked if he remembers shooting the movie and he said, "The truth is, no, but I do have visions of goblins surrounding me and being a part of my life. I grew up with goblins and fairies surrounding me my whole life. Labyrinth feels normal to me. The rest of the world is weird." That could just be his dad's drawings. We don't know. Overall, it sounds like the cast had a good time working with Henson. He was upfront about the difficulties

• 1:12:48Chris Winterbauer?

  of working with puppets. He'd say, "Look, we're gonna hit these scenes 15 times. The mechanics are gonna be falling apart on you. You just have to be patient." And years later, Connolly said that Henson was extremely patient with her on set. David Bowie said he was the most unflappable guy he'd ever worked with, and he had an incredible work ethic. He would fly to New York, work on a new production TV series over the weekend, and then be back in London Sunday night to resume filming on Monday. Principal Photography wrapped on September 6, 1985, and that same month, New York Times runs an article about the movie, "Star Wars and Muppet Wizards Team Up in Labyrinth." And Jim Henson takes the opportunity to really emphasize how different Labyrinth is going to be from The Dark Crystal. He doesn't want to repeat that experience. Labyrinth is going to be more accessible. Jennifer Connelly's in the lead.

• 1:13:31Chris Winterbauer?

  It's playful. We've got David Bowie. He wrote the music. Henson, George Lucas, and John Grover edit the movie. And it seems like, basically, the relationship is Henson takes a pass, then Lucas takes a pass. Lucas is cutting for action, tightening dialogue, and Henson is, quote, "looser, more lyrical" with his approach. He says, "I loosen up his tightness, and he tightens up my looseness." I imagine just both of their buttholes in that situation. Even though they've been planning on replacing Brian Henson's voice as Hoggle, they ended up kind of falling in love with it, and they decided to keep it. So that is, in the end, Brian Henson. They run it through a harmonizer, they drop it down a pitch, and that gave it the quality that matched the size of the character. But Lizzie, we got to talk about the very, very beginning of the movie, because it features not a puppet, but a what?

• 1:14:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Owl. It features the owl theory from the staircase. In practice, the owl did it.

• 1:14:21Chris Winterbauer?

  But what did you notice about it? How was it made?

• 1:14:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 1:14:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not real.

• 1:14:26Lizzie Bassett?

  No, yeah, it's animated, right?

• 1:14:28Chris Winterbauer?

  CGI.

• 1:14:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, yes.

• 1:14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It's 3D animation. So it might look hokey now, but this was a big deal.

• 1:14:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It actually doesn't look that hokey.

• 1:14:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. It was the first time a realistic, real-world animal had been created and animated in the computer. Now, I assumed this was George Lucas's idea, and that ILM was responsible for it. And that's what a lot of people have said online. But according to our research, we're all wrong on both counts. It sounds like this was Henson's idea, and it was executed by a company called Digital Productions. So back in 1984, Henson had wanted to hire that company to work on a series called Star Boppers. It never made it past development, but he had some really cool James Cameron-esque ideas. Quote, "He envisioned 3D fleece-and-foam puppets appearing for the first time in a digitally rendered set." On blue screen, the Star Boppers would move about in a virtual spaceship and the images would be married on screen.

• 1:15:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So it was kind of like, you know, digital volume, stage environment for puppets 20 years before that would be done. So the 3D owl was a natural extension of this. Henson thought you could move puppeteering into the realm of CGI, which is really cool, Lizzie, because you remember, Phil Tippett would basically do this in a lot of ways with Jurassic Park.

• 1:15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:15:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So a couple of other fun facts, during the publicity tour, the airline lost one of their two Hoggle suits. And years later, they opened an unclaimed baggage museum and they opened up one of the bags and there was Hoggle.

• 1:15:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 1:15:47Chris Winterbauer?

  As Henson promoted the film, he was inevitably asked about the dark crystal. But he was really careful to emphasize this is a very different movie. And it seems like he had really high hopes for this movie and he had good reason to have high hopes. He had George Lucas, the producer of the most successful trilogy of all time. He had David Bowie, one of the most successful musicians of the last 20 years. He had a great new star in Jennifer Connelly, who would go on to win an Oscar two decades later. He had incredible designs, a great budget. He had a story that although original was pretty recognizable, it was, this is a, you know, Alice in Wonderland style story. And we all know goblins and we know fairies, as you mentioned, Lizzie. A lot of people know the changeling history.

• 1:16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And the reception for Labyrinth was very different than the dark crystal, but it was worse. So Labyrinth was released on July 27th, 1986. And according to the best sources we could find, it was a pretty big flop. It grossed roughly $12 million domestically against its $25 million budget. I do want to mention, if you guys look on Wikipedia, you will see a $34 million box office number. This seems to reference overseas box office returns that we could not verify. Further evidence that it flopped, Tristar pulled it from theaters after just three weeks.

• 1:17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 1:17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  In an era when movies stayed in theaters if they were doing well for, you know, six months or more.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Regardless of which number you trust, Labyrinth brought in significantly less at the box office than The Dark Crystal, and the critics' reviews were also pretty mixed. Gene Siskel's headline read, "Jim Henson's Wizardry Lost in Labyrinth." He said Jim knows what he's doing with his Muppet characters on TV and in the movies, but he's completely at sea when he tries to create more mature entertainment. He also took issue with Toby's character. "The sight of a baby in peril is one of the sleaziest gimmicks a film can employ to gain our attention, but Henson does it, and that's almost unimaginable considering the enormous amount of good he has contributed through Sesame Street." Years later, Brian Henson confirmed there was a lot of backlash about the baby. He gave one interview where the journalist claimed the movie was actually about child abuse.

• 1:17:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The New York Times was more measured. They said it was an impressive collaboration between Lucas and Henson, and they said, "In many ways, it's a remarkable achievement." But they criticized Connolly's acting, and they suggested that Henson was too focused on the puppets, not enough on the human actors. "I do think there is such tonal consistency with the puppets, and you don't have that tonal consistency with Bowie and Connolly."

• 1:18:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I kinda don't care, but yes.

• 1:18:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. It doesn't bother me ultimately, but I can understand the criticism.

• 1:18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Variety said, "An array of bizarre creatures and David Bowie can't save Labyrinth from being a crashing bore. Characters created by Jim Henson and his team become annoying rather than endearing." And Jim Henson was crushed. He said, "I was stunned and dazed for several months trying to figure out what went wrong, where I went wrong." His son, Brian, offered theories in later years. He said, "Maybe fans of Bowie's were confused because it wasn't what they expected from him. Fans of the Muppets were confused because it wasn't what they expected of Jim." A couple of legacy notes. Kevin Clash, as I mentioned, was the assistant puppeteer coordinator on this. He would, of course, go on to operate and voice who, Lizzie, on Sesame Street?

• 1:19:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Elmo?

• 1:19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Elmo, yes. I believe he was the fifth man to take up that mantle.

• 1:19:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:19:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Jennifer Connelly blossomed into my first on-screen crush. I don't know if you've ever seen Career Opportunities, but I will never unsee the outfit that she wears in that movie. She was my David Bowie in Labyrinth, is all I'm saying.

• 1:19:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, great.

• 1:19:19Chris Winterbauer?

  She would achieve Oscar glory in 2000. David Bowie continued to act on occasion. David Lynch, Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, The Prestige.

• 1:19:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Zoolander.

• 1:19:28Chris Winterbauer?

  His Zoolander cameo, very good.

• 1:19:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he's good in The Prestige.

• 1:19:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He is, yeah. Nikola Tesla. He passed away in 2016. George Lucas, for his part, probably didn't feel the pain of the bad press about Labyrinth because, Lizzie, what animatronically puppeteered misfire of a movie did George Lucas release in August of 1986 that involves a duck condom?

• 1:19:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, ah, Howard the Duck.

• 1:19:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it was released about five weeks after Labyrinth.

• 1:19:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:19:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think Lucas was probably dealing with the fallout of that. Now, just after Labyrinth was released, Starlog Magazine proclaimed, "With Labyrinth, Jim Henson ushers in a new stage in his career. The era of Henson as a feature film director is here." And then it wasn't. Jim Henson died four years after Labyrinth was released, on May 16, 1990, from pneumonia. He was only 53 years old.

• 1:20:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Labyrinth was the last movie he ever directed. Brian Henson later said that he feels that both Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal are better on the second watch. "I think the first time you watch it, when it's just the story compelling you through, it's not as strong as when you're watching it for the filmmaking and for the characters and for specific moments. I think it's stronger that way." And I think he was right. Labyrinth was released on VHS in 1987. It slowly developed a cult following. We were unable to figure out exactly why. It may be that the darkness that had alienated audiences originally found kind of eager eyes in the 1990s with millennials, especially who were being raised on somewhat darker material, even on television.

• 1:20:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's the home video of it. I think it's millennials watching this and maybe already being familiar with Fraggle Rock. And I don't know, I also just feel like there's something very campy about this that lends itself to being a cult classic that, you know, you're gonna watch when you're stoned with your friends in your college apartment. Like, that's, my guess is that that's where this took off more.

• 1:21:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, some people have also suggested that it took on a mythical status because it was Henson's final film. So when Henson passed, and he was so beloved by so many of us, a lot of us turned to, oh, well, what was the last thing he did? And then that became a discovery. Of Labyrinth. We don't know exactly why, but in the long run, Henson was somewhat proved right. Puppets could be serious. I think you can see his influences across, especially the work of someone like Guillermo del Toro, for example.

• 1:21:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And The Dark Crystal was rebooted with a prequel by Netflix in 2019. I'm not sure if you saw it, Lizzie, but I mean, oh, my God, it looks good. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Brian Froud served as the primary conceptual designer for that series. It did only last one season, but we got a season.

• 1:21:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Baby Toby Froud also worked on it.

• 1:22:01Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. That's right. And in 2025, it was announced that Robert Eggers, director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and Nosferatu, My Version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was set to direct a Labyrinth sequel for Tristar.

• 1:22:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:22:15Chris Winterbauer?

  David Bowie passed away in 2016, so he will not be reprising his role, but I'm excited to see what Robert Eggers does with it. Lizzie, that brings us to the end of our coverage of Labyrinth.

• 1:22:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That was so fun.

• 1:22:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:22:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Gosh, so much. I mean, the creature design, I, I just think it's so ambitious. It's so fun and funny. And of course, I care more about the puppets than I care about any of the people in this movie. And that's just a testament to the people that made these and the choice to operate them the way that they did. The choice to put real people in the suits is so smart because then you see them moving and engaging with the space, you know, without them being butt puppets, as we learned the term was on Gremlins, I believe. Yeah, I love Jim Henson. I love the Muppets. I do love Labyrinth. And this was a joy. Thanks, Chris.

• 1:23:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course. I'm going to give mine to Brian Froud and kind of tangentially to Alan Lee, because when I watched Legend, I just couldn't believe how good it looked. And I think we often overlook the concept artists behind these films, who really do craft the visuals that will end up being executed by these production teams and are able to create entire worlds in their minds. And it's a remarkable ability to create that kind of vision from scratch. And I know, obviously, what's really fun about, if you look at Brian Froud's books, if you look at, you know, fairies, for example, and then you watch The Dark Crystal, you can really see how it's Froud and Henson harmonizing to make something really unique. So I'll give mine to Brian Froud.

• 1:23:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, I'm very, very glad that you have opened the portal to The Muppet Labyrinth.

• 1:23:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:23:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Because there is another Muppet movie that I have long wanted to cover.

• 1:23:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Which one?

• 1:23:55Lizzie Bassett?

  That we will cover. Well, you're gonna have to wait, Chris, until the clock tolls one.

• 1:24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this show, how can they support it?

• 1:24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you can tell a friend or family member about this show. You could post about it on social media. You can also follow us there at WhatWentWrongPod on Instagram or TikTok. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to us on. You can subscribe in either Apple or Spotify. And if you do that, you will get at least one extra bonus episode per month, sometimes more, but that's the bare minimum. And if you would like to go the extra mile, you can subscribe for $5 on Patreon. And for $5 only, just $5, you get, of course, one, at least one bonus episode every month. And you also get an ad-free feed. You'll get some newsletters. You'll get access to posts, community, all that jazz. But if you wanna take it just one step further into Jareth's

• 1:24:49Lizzie Bassett?

  castle, you can get for $5 a personal shout out from the Goblin King himself, just like one of these.

• 1:25:53Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:26:38Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:28:01Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of Labyrinth. I can't wait to cover The Dark Crystal. Can't wait to cover Legend. Can't wait to cover Willow. I can't wait to cover so many of these movies of the 1980s that just really formed the warped personality that I have today. Lizzie, what can folks expect when they tune in next Monday?

• 1:28:19Lizzie Bassett?

  We are headed to a very different, but arguably also labyrinthian movie and historical figure. We are covering Lawrence of Arabia.

• 1:28:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 1:28:31Lizzie Bassett?

  And, Chris, it's long as hell, so get started now.

• 1:28:34Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, as I slotted in between episodes of Love is Blind, I just cannot wait. The joke, I will never let you lose.

• 1:28:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Lawrence of Arabia.

• 1:28:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Lawrence of Arabia is great. I'm very excited.

• 1:28:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I bought it on BlueK. BlueK, 4K, BlueK. I'm so tired.

• 1:28:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I just bought The Seven Samurai on BlueK, guys.

• 1:28:54Lizzie Bassett?

  That's enough.

• 1:28:56Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys.

• 1:28:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Get out of here.

• 1:28:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Go buy Larry of Abu Dhabi on BlueK, and we will see you next week. Thanks, everybody.

• 1:29:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:29:11Lizzie Bassett?

  To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS

• 1:29:20Speaker 07

  feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.