RTM 333 - Labyrinth (1986)

The thing is, I had always heard that when Jim Henson was developing this movie, one of the things he wanted to do was to have a big pop or rock star to play Jareth and to write music for the movie.

The thing is, is that Bowie was not the one in his mind when he was first developing it.

He was thinking more somebody like Michael Jackson, who was at the height of his fame, really, around that time.

And he would have worked with a lot of people who worked on this film doing various music videos as well as Captain EO for Disneyland.

Yeah.

But it turns out that the reason that they ended up on Bowie was that Jim Henson's son, John, who has, you know, now died.

unfortunately passed but John Henson was apparently a huge fan of David Bowie and was the one who recommended him and when Jim met with him to discuss you know would you be interested in a project like this he was really drawn to what Jim Henson called the other worldliness that David Bowie just, you know, had in most of his onstage personas and kind of carried into real life.

And so he was, after meeting with him, it seems he was kind of

sold.

I mean, it's not too far in a way from a movie that Bowie had done 10 years prior to this, The Man That Fell to Earth.

Yeah, which is, The Man That Fell to Earth is not everybody's cup of tea, even in the Bowie fan community.

But that is a more intellectual film.

It tries to be more avant-garde and deeper in what it says about humanity and the soul and you know our world and stuff like that so it is a very slow thinky movie labyrinth is you know it might appeal to a lot of the same type of people it definitely i i like both of them

this is more fairy tale than anything else

But this is a fairy tale.

And also, one of the reasons why Labyrinth is the way it is, is because Jim Henson had done The Dark Crystal, you know, just a couple of years before this.

And The Dark Crystal had been not well received.

It was a hard bomb, let's be real.

Called classic today,

but was not well received at the time.

And it wasn't just that the audience didn't show up for Dark Crystal.

It was that most of the critics and stuff didn't get it and what Jim and the crew were trying to go for as far as the storytelling and the world building.

also, I mean, if the movie had been released as Henson wanted it, it wouldn't even have been released in English.

It was going to be either all silent characters or a made-up language for the movie with no subtitles.

Yeah, and you know, and it's kind of, we saw how well that went over in large portions of the Star Wars Holiday Special where all you're just hearing is Sherry Wook.