Watch the even weirder version of The Dark Crystal that could’ve been

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The Dark Crystal is an outlier in the filmographies of Jim Henson and Frank Oz, its surreal visual palette and ambitious world-building more in line with Henson’s dabblings in experimental filmmaking than anything starring the Muppets. But it could’ve been weirder: Test audiences balked at the fantasy epic’s original cut, an intentionally impressionistic work that did no handholding when it came to introducing the strange world inhabited by Gelflings, Skeksis, and Mystics. (The villainous Skeksis, for example, spoke largely in unintelligible grunts and snarls.) The film was subsequently edited and re-sequenced, its more puzzling elements illuminated through narration and re-recorded dialogue.