The First Trailer For Netflix’s ‘Dark Crystal’ Series Is Staggeringly Beautiful

Forget Lord of The Rings, The Wheels of Time series or Rowan of Rin: for an entire generation of fantasy lovers, Dark Crystal was the gateway drug into a lifelong obsession with distant worlds, mythic beasts, and quests of adventure and derring-do.

Though only modestly received when it was first released back in 1982 (it scored $41 million at the box office over a production cost of $25 million), the Jim Henson and Frank Oz-directed film took on a second life on home video. Indeed, that’s where so many Dark Crystal fans first watched it — sitting there wide-eyed and cross-legged, half a metre away from a tiny television at a sleepover, VHS box gripped in hand.

However, despite its fervent fan base, the film has always been something of a cult object, making news that it was to get a big-budget sequel from Netflix something of a surprise.

Well, the first trailer for said sequel is here — portentously, it’s called The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance — and ho boy, when they said big-budget, they meant big-budget.

Feast your eyes on the thing and we’ll reconvene below.

The first thing worth noting is the abundance of practical effects. It wouldn’t be a Henson property without a bunch of puppets and, all credit to them, it looks like the folks at Netflix have decided to stick firm to the ethos of the original film.

Secondly, the trailer doesn’t make a particularly big deal of the voice cast, but it’s bloody stacked. Taron “Rocketman” Edgerton and Anya “The Witch” Taylor-Joy are the leads, but rounding out the rest of the project are a who’s who of character actors, including but not limited to Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, Keegan-Michael Key, Jason Isaacs, Toby Jones, Helena Bonham Carter and Andy Samberg.

Whether the series lives up to all of that promise remains to be seen. Guess we’ll find out when the first season drops in full this August 30.