I first watched The Dark Crystal not long after it came out, on already grainy VHS. I was just a kid, and I thought it was the most beautiful, magical thing ever.
Decades on, I found myself wanting to share that magic with my kids, but couldn’t locate a copy.
After some searching, I finally found it on Blu-Ray at a rental store and eagerly took it home to show my kids.
Now I’m sure some of you are thinking, “why dousen’t this doofus use Netflix?”
But this isn’t about my Luddite ways or the lingering popularity of rental stores in Japan. No, this is about the betrayal of memory, or the rose-tinted glasses of youth or something like that.
Anyhoo, watching it for the second time in many years, this time in crisp high definition, I was kind of disappointed, although my daughter seemed to enjoy it.
I still love the movie and think the puppetry is amazing, but this time it didn’t have the same hazy beauty I remembered, and the puppetry itself seemed much more obvious.
I think there were a number of factors affecting my memory and subsequent disappointment.
Beautification through blurrification (such as with a pre-cleaning Sistine chapel ceiling or a post-stevia instagram)
Fuzzy memory
Kid vision (perhaps the biggest factor, as the story and dialog also seemed too simple in the second viewing)
Simpler times and lower expectations
(On that last point, my kids do still enjoy watching some old pre-CG movies with me and appreciate that the practical effects are pretty cool.)
Still, a great movie, just not perfect like I remembered it.
Anyone else had a favorite movie or story ruined by the passage of time or the march of progress?
I suspect y’wooda felt that way even if you’d watched it on VHS. I liked it when it came out, although I thought the “gelflings” coulda used a little work.
When I saw it again, it seemed kinda Sesame Street-y… which I guess would seem to indicate “obvious puppetry.”
I haven’t bothered with hi-def. I suppose when I finally do, I’ll wonder how I ever did without, but for now, I feel no urge to count the pores on Peter Dinklage’s nose.
I bought the DVD collections of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and, while I enjoyed them, they didn’t have the same sparkle they had way back in the sixties.
The DVD collection of F-Troop was so painful, I couldn’t even finish watching it. I adored that show as a kid…but as an adult, I see only the forced comedy, the desperate over-acting, the repetition, and the weakness.
(Blogger Mark Evanier, with many years experience writing for TV, says that F-Troop held up very well, in his opinion, and he found no loss of pleasure in watching it. So it’s definitely a matter of individual tastes.)
The movie “Forbidden Planet” has been ruined for me…by Leslie Nielsen’s comedy success! I keep waiting for him to break out in a big hammy grin and deliver a “Police Squad” style joke! I associate him, now, so closely with over-the-top humor that his serious acting seems terribly wrong!
Back in the early 1980s one of my favourite UK shows was The Professionals. The show focussed on a couple of slightly mis-matched male crime fighters - For an American perspective they had a similar dynamic to Starsky and Hutch. I loved The Professionals.
Still in the 1980s, just a little while later, they repeated the most recently broadcast season. There were few channels back then and although this was repeats I was looking forward to reliving the excitement.
But although it was only weeks later something had changed. I could ignore the shallow plotting where a crime boss / terrorist / madman was neatly dealt with by the end of the episode. I could ignore the homo-erotic, exaggerated camaraderie with all the looking into each others eyes, the smiling and hugging even though that would later be parodied mercilessly in UK comedy shows.
However I guess I was growing up. I stared blankly at the crushingly insensitive way, every episode, the middle aged, macho lotharios would take a break from mourning a death, fighting a murderer or tracking down a terrorist (before hundreds would be slaughtered) whenever they spotted an attractive young woman. At which point they would leer, ogle, make jeering “compliments”…
I had previously considered Bodie (the Starsky equivalent) and Doyle (the Hutch equivalent) cool, sophisticated and so aspirational. Yet now I saw them as pathetic losers who couldn’t handle a real woman if she was in a medically induced coma.
And note I was then (and still am) a fan of Benny Hill’s breast obsessed humour. The key difference, for me, being Benny Hill was a comedian and deliberately portraying himself as a loser. The Professionals were supposedly portraying themselves as heroic archetypes. But they were the biggest losers of all.
The key to Leslie Nielsen’s comedy was that he NEVER broke out in a grin. He delivered his lines as seriously and deadpan as possible - which is what made them so funny.
When I watched it with my kids I was keen to their body language to see if they were enjoying it. I don’t think it had the wow factor for them. I blame Avatar.
Well, actually… He did the grin thing often. It wasn’t part of the punch-line delivery, I agree, but… In Police Squad, for instance, it was often part of the closing “freeze” frame (that wasn’t really frozen.) Or when the character was trying to be diplomatic, but just came off as syrupy or leering.
Another thing he did was the goggle-eyed “oops!” expression, as when he was messing around with the fish tank in Ricardo Montalban’s office. Beautiful “mugging” comedy.
So, yes, he certainly did a lot of his best work deadpan…but he also really did make use of his big rubbery face!
I was a great fan of The Dark Crystal as well and was one of the few people I knew who saw it in the theater. The movie itself was great, but the VHS release was horrible. It was a blurry, muddy, low-contrast, pan-and-scan version that cropped out large parts of the frame to make it fit (VHS vs streaming comparison). If that is the only way you saw the film, then you really did not see the film. Your “beautification through blurrification” hypothesis probably holds true.
Although the DVD releases were not without their faults, they were much better than the VHS. The Sony Blu-ray release added not only additional detail, but slightly corrected color and better contrast (DVD vs Blu-ray comparison).
Sorry for the sidetrack, but as much as the OP has a nostalgic love for the craptastic VHS release, that version always grated on me because it was a pale comparison to the actual movie.
Actually, I’m sure if I had seen the film on the big screen as a kid I would have loved it too.
And if I were to view it on VHS now, I’d probably still be disappointed, although I suspect the grainier image would go some way to hiding the faults.
Despite the title I gave this OP, I really suspect that factors 2) through 4) played a bigger part in my disappointment.
That is, when I first saw the film it was a long time ago, I was an impressionable kid, and it was a hallmark of its time.
But as **Gothic **said, we’ve been spoiled on visual technology like Avatar, and what once seemed so new and cool now seems old and cheesy.
Like **Trinopus **and TCMF-2L, I’ve also experienced the disappointment of revisiting a once favourite old TV series only to discover that I can no longer enjoy it.
For me it was Quark. In my memory it was a bizarre, fresh, witty comedy, but on second viewing, it was just corny and contrived. And yet, if I hadn’t gone back to re-watch it, it would have remained a perfect comedy in my memory.
I do think, though, that The Dark Crystal still holds up pretty well, all things considered.
At least, in terms of its visual design. (Story, not so much.)
