(This post was automatically translated -with some manual corrections- with www.DeepL.com/Translator)

In early 1982, test screenings were organised to gather audience feedback on the working versions of Dark Crystal. The poor reception of the film prompted Henson to make some major changes: deleting several scenes, subtitling and then dubbing the Skeksis into English (initially we couldn’t understand what they were saying), changing Aughra’s voice, changing the soundtrack, and so on.

This initial version of the film was long considered lost by fans: it existed only through the testimonies of test viewers who had been able to see it (see Aikousha’s testimonial in the appendix) and a few deleted scenes in the DVD extras (Skeksis funeral below). The Jim Henson Company no longer seemed to have a complete copy.

Against all expectations, in 2010 a copy surfaced in very poor condition. It was difficult to watch, but with the increasing democratisation of audio and video processing tools, faneditors were able to embark on reconstructions.

Jim Henson’s diary notes on test projections :

19 mars 1982 : “First preview Dark Crystal in Washington DC – not great.”

(Jim Henson’s Red Book)

12 juillet 1982 : “Preview Dark Crystal in Detroit – a bit better.”

(Jim Henson’s Red Book)

Funeral of the Skeksis emperor in the extras :

2010: Rediscovery of a workprint

Around 2010, someone called Aikousha uploaded a scan of a ‘workprint’, a working tape used by the editors, corresponding more or less to the version of the film he had seen at the test screenings.

This tape is of very poor quality, with technical annotations, unfinished special effects and a degraded, monochrome image. But it does provide a complete soundtrack, and the images allow us to imagine what the film might have been like. Of the scenes missing from the final film, some are available in better quality in the DVD extras, others exist nowhere else:

Funeral of the Skeksis emperor:

A longer version of Jen’s swim :

Jen playing his flute after his swim :

This video is available on Internet Archive :

• Internet Archive: The Dark Crystal Workprint

(I have reproduced below -translated in french post- the accompanying text by Aikousha explaining the interest of this tape, and its general condition)

2013: Reconstruction by Christopher Oregon

In 2013 another fan of the film, Christopher Oregon (scoodidabop), posted a “restored” version of this “workprint” online, with a cleaned-up soundtrack and images replaced by the better quality versions where these were available (DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.).

According to the dedicated lostmediawiki page, this version does not 100% respect the order of the scenes in the workprint, but lostmediawiki does not specify the differences.

Christopher Oregon was interviewed by Mental Floss here: Watch the Restored Original Cut of The Dark Crystal - Chris Higgins | Dec 5, 2013.

I reproduce here his explanation of his reconstruction process:

The idea was to use the entire original workprint audio and then match the clean video to it, which is how it mostly went down. The audio had loads of tape hiss and noise that I pulled out and equalized. It’s still very compressed, but I was happy to discover the dialogue was still intelligible after processing. I did pepper in some of the final high quality Trevor Jones score during transitional scenes for dynamic range and perspective but some of the score by Vangelis is of course different on the workprint, which I left in. [Ed. note: Vangelis was initially considered to score the film, but Jones got the job instead. Some Vangelis music is included in the workprint.].

(extract -translated in french post- from the Mental Floss article)

This version is available in 2 places on Internet Archive :

• Internet Archive: The Darker Crystal
• Internet Archive: The Dark Crystal The Directors Cut ( RARE Footage And All Original Dialogue!)](https://archive.org/details/the-dark-crystal-the-directors-cut-rare-footage-and-all-original-dialogue)

**20xx: 3rd reconstruction

According to lostmediawiki, a third version exists, more faithful to the “workprint” and with a re-editing of the soundtrack, but it no longer seems to be available on the net (initially available on Veoh):

This reconstruction uses clips from the finished film, the workprint, and the Orgeron cut. It utilizes a combination of the finished audio and the workprint audio and is in the original scene order.

(extract -translated in french post- from lostmediawiki: The Dark Crystal (partially found high-quality version of workprint/director’s cut of puppet fantasy film; early 1980s))

Appendix :

Aikousha’s commentary accompanying the “workprint” -translated in french post- (reproduced on the Internet Archive by lparrisj)

Way back, when the state of the art in computer graphics was 280x192 in 8 colors, and no such thing as CGI effects existed, Jim Henson made a beautiful classic little fantasy film called, “The Dark Crystal.” Long before the movie was released to theatres in the US and UK, it was provided to test audiences for reactions. The surveys taken at the showings, guide the filmmakers and producers in how to tweak and make final edits to the film. I GOT TO SEE IT THIS WAY!

As a kid, I was overjoyed with this, it was better than ANYTHING else provided for kids at the time (I still LOVE this film!). Jim Henson was a GOD!

Unfortunately, the test audience comprised a large number of mundanes and the dramatic challenged, people better suited to be couch-potatos, not theatre-goers.

When the movie was finally released to theatres, I got a shock, when what I had been waiting to see again was chopped up, and dumbed down immensely. It was great to finally see most of the special effects, but the film became severely hobbled, and the benefit of paying attention to get all the details was destroyed by having everything explained plainly or tossed in your face. These variations may not seem that big, but they were very noticeable to me… and I had waited so long to see this film again.

Then I attended The Answer, “The Rat Stuff!,” the 42nd WorldCon in Los Angeles. There I found a large number of fans of the film, most who were twice my age at the time, and one of them knew a person who knew another person…. And so after waiting several more weeks, I received this precious little videotape. It was a copy of a workprint of the film, used to review different background music soundtracks to the film (anybody remember “Legend” where it was released in the UK with a Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack, and in the US with Tangerine Dream?). The first two were Trevor Jones (the actual choice, a strikingly beautiful OST, like all his work) and Vangelis. Unfotunately the VHS tape was not long enough for more than 15 minutes of the Vangelis material.

So, after my last move, I dove into my 3000 tape VHS collection and fished out that old tape, and encoded it. Hopefully you will enjoy it, if not as a curiosity, an example of what minor things can be done to a film by others, a better version, or at least a view of what is, effectively, the directors cut of the movie.

Some things to be aware of before you watch this:

1. It is a WORK-PRINT, it was never intended to be anything but a quick hack together by the editors to test things like timing, edit points, level corrections, etc.

2. This is in black & white. My assumption is that they used monochrome stock because it was cheaper to deal with and it was not at the stage for color work.

3. As a work-print, edits, cuts, and notes are actually marked on the film with both grease-pencil and marker. You will see a lot of this. As an edit test, light levels also were not a concern, and therefore black and white levels vary considerably from one scene to another. This made it impossible for me to do any correction work. A filter might clean up one scene but completely destroy the next.

4. The film stock was actually handled by a very large number of people, and ended up picking up lots of dirt. Again having a dirty print did not matter for this work print, image clarity was not important.

5. The work print was transferred first to professional videotape, each of the small spools of film were transferred, so between each of the nearly dozen small spools of film, there was a hard analog videotape break, with all the expected audio and video noise one would expect. I edited most of these out, but that was nearly 3 minutes of hashing and breakups.

6. That tape was then transferred to VHS from which my copy of the tape was made. unfortunately, this was a long time ago and image stabilization was not yet a large part of the electronics of the consumer VHS market. Therefore, any time there was a little jump or a little noise in the original tape, the machine could not maintain the image and it often lost a lock on the image. Noise on the original tape made for chaos on the copies, and this is most apparent during the Skesis’ banquet segment.

7. Many of the special effects, and things like the titles, were not present at this stage of work, so odd things tend to show up in places. Characters appearing on black or grey backgrounds, only a small area of the screen is used because a matte would be added later, seeing a bit of the English countryside in a shot, or seeing an oddly shaped object ascending on a rope in place of the special effect of the Ur-skeks ascension… A few of the voices are even a little different.

Of the things you will notice different from the released film are the cutting of several scenes (notably a naked Jen, and the Skesis funeral), re-arrangement of some of the scenes (mostly at the start of the film), trimming of some scenes (Podling villager festival), the addition of voice-overs (lord was that distracting), added narration, and a complete re-dub of all the non-English languages. In the test version, English represented the Gelfling tongue, you should hear only English when Gelfling is spoken… Every other race had it’s own language, but the final film changed that, and you really have to look hard to see that all the races did not speak the same language. I must have been an odd child, because I didn’t have any problem understanding the gist of what was being said, when the characters didn’t speak English. I find that touch added quite a lot to the proper feel of the film.

So, here it is, Monochrome 704x352, mono audio 44.1khz AAC. This encode is the best balance of file-size versus quality I could get from the source. If anybody wants to try enhancing this, feel free, but it’s probably not worth it.

This won’t play on iPods, as the width of the image is too great.

Since there was probably only one copy of the test audience print (35mm clean color version of this), and no sign of this version of the film on any of the seven releases (soon to be eight) of the film to the consumer market, I am guessing that this may be the only surviving version of the film in this form. I hope it isn’t, because I would love to see this in HQ color. However, two of the more recent DVD releases of the film reference the loss of the deleted material. Specifically that the only full copies of the Skeksis funeral was from the camera videotapes (even though a segment of the funeral was on the preview spot that appeared in theatres).

I do plan to make a 4.38GB version of this to archive on DVD (my capture is nearly 8GB), but unless there is a VERY LARGE demand for it, I have no plans on posting it in any other form, than this.

Enjoy.
–卯侍 藍凰舎 Aiko

(extract -translated in french post- from the page Internet Archive : The Dark Crystal Workprint)