And also there was a real sense of movie magic, I think. With good practical effects, you'd often look at them and wonder how they happened. Good practical effects can be genuinely astonishing.

Huh. I guess the basic mouth-shapes of "rodent" and "no dick" are pretty close.

"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious stuff!"

Steven Spielberg's 1941 could be another entry. That DVD has a 100-minute documentary that basically takes the tone of "How did this weird action-comedy-epic happen in the middle of Spielberg's hot streak?"

I haven't read it, but in general Archaia's Henson-related comics have been high quality. Even if it's not as great as Tale of Sand or the Storyteller hardcover, I'm sure it's worth a look.

The singular is "Skeksis" and the plural is "Skekses".

Have you and Mrs. Cube seen Jim Henson's earlier experimental film "The Cube"?

And it has an actual story! It's about Jim Henson having a world inside of his head that he needs to get onto movie screens, and it's exhilarating to watch him and his team make that happen.

When single shines the triple sun
What was sundered and undone
Shall be whole, the two made one
By Gelfling hand or else by none

Aughra's great. She's my favorite thing about this movie. Well, her or Fizzgig.

He was also limited by the fact that no one could follow the Skeksis scenes when they were in a made-up language, so he had to go back and put in English dialogue.

Labyrinth is the best possible balance between "70s mainstream comedy Jim Henson" and "80s fantasy Jim Henson." It has jokes and songs and colorful characters like The Muppet Show (and even a special guest star of sorts in David Bowie), but it also has the world-building and impressive puppetry effects of The Dark…

Answer: I am a huge Muppet fan. If there's a Muppet or Muppet-adjacent version of a song, 90% of the time it's the one I think of first.

I guess the crowd agrees!

How is ol' Darrell Hammond doing in that gig?

I really do wonder if they'll just have Melissa Rauch do the voice from now on.

Absolutely. That's one of my favorite things from Sesame Street ever. Especially the part where Hard Head Henry Harris says "That's me, that's me, that's me. Check out this beat here."

Or, indeed, to a show about a time-traveling alien who can go anywhere and do whatever the story needs him to.

My big problem is that, like you say, it's "just generic modern-day-kids'-show." I don't care if they use CGI for segments - they have been using it regularly for 20 years at this point - but that feels like a separate series. If you were flipping through channels and landed on it, you'd have no idea it was Sesame…

It gets good after about 50 or 60 pages, I'd say. When they're actually starting to work on development.