The Dark Crystal

My daughter decided to buy the movie "The Dark Crystal" and so I watched it with her tonight. I have only seen it a couple of times since it first came out in the early 1980s with my older children. I owned a VHS of it for years but since everything is DVD now I don't think I have it anymore. Jim Henson's puppeteers made this movie and it is probably the best puppet movie of its kind ever, so it is a classic in this sense.

Also, since I met Lamrim Geshe when he had just come out of a 17 year retreat, I realized right away he was one of the people Yoda was patterned after even though he was close to 6 feet tall in 1985 when I met him in Dharmsala, India where the Dalai Lama lives at about 6000 feet in elevation in the Himalayas.

Also, the Ewoks spoke a primitive dialect of Tibetan. I didn't know this until I took Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and his Darjeeling translator to see "Revenge of the Jedi" in New Delhi, India. Geshela laughed harder than I had ever seen him during this movie when the Ewoks talked in Tibetan.

So, there was a strong Tibetan cultural influence in the Dark Crystal through Jim Henson's researchers for Yoda and "The Dark Crystal" during the late 1970s and the early 1980s.