149: The Dark Crystal with Josh Winning

Author Josh Winning joins us to talk about Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s most challenging creation, The Dark Crystal. Josh’s novel The Shadow Glass has been described as a love letter to Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal so we had a lot to talk about such as The Dark Crystal ‘s let-the-audience-figure-it-out approach to worldbuilding, the depth of that worldbuilding once you get a handle on it, the moments of humour in an otherwise pretty serious film, Jim Henson’s reading habits, the groundbreaking puppeteering, as well as some general thoughts on the Muppets and why The Henson Company seems to have avoided anything on the scale of The Dark Crystal in recent decades. It was a fascinating conversation.

Note: Thanks to some Zoom weirdness, we had to use a single-track backup of this episode which means that Alan’s plan to remove some interruptions from his dog in post couldn’t happen. So apologies for any sub-par audio and dog noises.

Josh is @JoshWinning. His novel The Shadow Glass is out now from Titan Books.

Alan is @alan_maguire. Juvenalia is his main thing right now.

Sarah is @griffski. Her books are in all good bookshops.

Thank you to Dee McDonnell for our artwork.

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This episode was edited and produced by Alan

Juvenalia is a Tall Tales podcast. Thank you Cassie.