![]() ![]() While Henson controlled the basic head and body movements, giving the performance its breadth – Midener, with a little gentle pressure on this lever or that, added inflections that brought the hero of The Dark Crystal fully to life. As Henson put Jen through his paces, Wendy Midener would sit a few yards away, with a control box – not much larger than a shoe box – in front of her. While Skeksis were followed about by a swarm of assistant operators, Kathryn Mullen and Jim Henson were unhampered on set. What radio control did for Jen and Kira was to allow the performers to concentrate on acting, free of technical encumbrance. We did the work in three and a half weeks, and it turned out very well – perhaps because we had to keep things simple.” Performance They asked me to build two robot heads with full controls for the ears, eyelids, everything. “They were relatively crude,” he says, “with only partial movement, but Jim and Frank were delighted. Radio-controlled servomechanisms, on the other hand, can be very expressive and subtle.” He quickly built radio controls into a pair of substitute heads and brought them to London. People tend to be too strong and to use too much force for the effects they’re after. Because it’s an engineering system with no fulcrum, it involves a lot of work in order to create very little effect. “The cable-control system is inefficient. “Actually, it applies well to characters of that sort,” he explained. Fazakas, however, was sure Jen and Kira would benefit tremendously from remote control. If there were any doubts about applying remote control to Jen and Kira, it was because these puppets were so naturalistic that they might present special problems. Kathryn Mullen’s request for remote control functions was not totally without precedent, since the Muppets had often used radio control in limited ways. In Kathryn Mullen’s efforts to become comfortable in her puppeteering of Kira, she requested remote control functions for Kira, rather than a cable-controlled system. ![]()
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