The Dark Crystal

Then, to pile onto his thriving teenage insecurities, his adoptive caretaker, leader of the wise old Mystics - a race of stringy-haired, burn-out turtle-hippies with an uncanny resemblance to David Crosby circa now - goes and dies on him. The Mystic's passing words are something muddled about "the prophesy" and a crystal shard and Jen can't tell if he's just spouting death-bed nonsense. Either way, he's out of a home. So vision quest it is.

He sets off alone. (To his credit, despite the stress of existential alienation and the cosmetic ravages of roughing it in the wild, his hair never loses its lush, Panteen luster. Clearly this Gelfling is no stranger to conditioner.) Immediately Jen meets Aughra, an earthy, Whoopi Goldberg type and an amalgam of Mother-Africa and wise-hag cliches. One eye? Check. Hobble around muttering choppy Yoda-speak? Check - she even throws a little Cockney into the mix for a bit of that Dicksonian hooker-mother-figure flavor. Coincidentally, Aughra is the keeper of the crystal shard Jen's been looking for and a resident expert on the prophesy. And, as it turns out, it's all about Jen. She explains that the shard must be reunited with the Dark Crystal, currently in the possession of the evil Skeksis, in order to restore peace to the galaxy - an event she calls the Great Conjunction. But before she can explain further, her shack is ransacked by the Skeksi's minions and Jen flees.

The next morning he's having a private Gelfling moment, playing a little pan flute by the riverside, when he comes face to face with another Gelfling. A female Gelfling. Of straight white hair and Scandinavian allure, name of Kira. They stare at each other for a minute with blank-faced Muppet desire and, if you've seen Team America and had your view of puppet-innocence forever destroyed by the marionette porn of its explicit Karma Sutra-on-strings sex scene, the carnal implications of their situation doesn't escape you. You can see Jen's virginity practically bursting underneath the Botaxed calm of his poker face. And that's when they take each other's hand and, just when you expect them to disrobe and start rubbing felt, engage in some kind of Gelfling custom where they share each other's memories. "What was that?" Jen blurts. "Dreamfasting," Kira replies innocently. It's clearly not what Jen had in mind and he looks crushed. After all, his confidence is already hanging by a thread. And now he has this on his shoulders: last male Gelfling on the planet meets last female and still can't get laid. But as vexing as his initial failure is, over the next few days of their journey it will only get worse, with Jen not managing to even land a kiss on Kira's pure cheek, and The Dark Crystal develops into the story of a young Gelfling's sexual frustration and the fair-haired cock tease who torments him. When they accidentally wake up in each other's arms one morning and Kira rolls away from him, nowhere nearer to putting out, you can see Jen start unraveling. He begins to hate the shard, coming to look at the seven inches of rock in his hand as a cruel reminder of his own penis - his useless, useless Gelfling penis - finally throwing it in the bushes. (Thankfully Kira recovers it.)

Later they stumble on some ancient ruins with a poem about the prophesy and Jen, delirious with sexual deprivation, goes dark, his eyes distant as he mumbles something about his destiny. "I've got to put it in..." he trails off, clutching the shard, convinced that sticking his rock in the Dark Crystal will save the world. By the end of the film, Jen is just randomly stabbing everything with his shard. Everything, that is, except Kira.

The story climaxes when Jen and Kira find the Dark Crystal, glowing purple, hovering over a smoking pit. The details aren't worth recounting, but suffice it to say that at the conjunction of the three suns, Jen penetrates the shard. The mystics and Skeksis unite into a white light and erupt upward out of a hole in the ceiling, returning the Crystal to its original white coloring and healing the world.

The story behind the Dark Crystal is as shrouded in mystery as the film's mythical subject itself. Henson had been chaffing for years, first under the conservative tyranny of the squares at PBS, who had neutered Sesame Street of its true counter-culture origins, and later the British television network that financed The Muppet Show. He saw The Dark Crystal as a welcome opportunity to inject more adult themes back into the fertile medium of fantasy puppetry. The tale of the fey, hormonal Jen, and his frustrated quest toward a "great conjunction" seemed custom-made for that end. But there are darker rumors, rumors of a "lost year" where Henson and his band of merry puppet masters succumbed to the drug-fueled temptations of the era, spending much of the preproduction tanked on coke and peyote. There's even an anecdote about Henson selling the merchandising rights to George Lucas during one particularly debaucherous evening for a tab of acid and a bowl of soup. It shows in the set designs, which are ornate, brightly colored and pure Tolkien madness by way of hallucinogenics. Everything's a little bulbous, a little furry, a little... well, 'shroomy.

With plans underway for a sequel to begin production in 2008, there's a lot to be curious about. After all, the standards have changed. What, if any, need is there for subversive puppet films in a post-Team America world? What will become of Jen's quest for copulation? Will the story pick up where it left off, with Kira as the object of his desire, or will we join them years later, weighed down under the burden of re-populating the planet with Gelflings, a mess of marital tensions and domestic angst? One can only guess, but until then we can still marvel at the true childlike weirdness of the original which, as the first live-action film to feature no humans, both prefigured a trend that never happened and certified Henson's legacy as a playful genius without peer.