Aug 07 2007 10:40 AM
There was a book that's worth seeking out called The Goblin Companion: A Field Guide to Goblins, that Terry Jones and Brian Froud produced as they were developing the script and design of the film. The were clearly up to something a little different as they created their pantheon, conceiving of goblin society as a direct satire of human British society.
I recommend the book highly. (It was re-released as The Goblins of the Labyrinth, but go with the original if you can, as it detaches itself from the movie. That barely comes through, and the film is's not sure what it wants to be: adult satire, cute childhood fantasy, moral fable, subversive sendup, a little light vulgar humor for the 13-year-olds.
Nobody toed that line better than the muppets in the The Muppet Show and the original Muppet Movie. But here they're telling adults to put aside childish things and kids to revel in them, and it gets boring watching them trying to ungarble the message.
A lot of cool stuff here: the contact juggling, the showdown in an MC Escher illustration, some (but certainly not all) of Bowie's songs, but you have to sit through some things that don't work at all --- fart jokes, British dubbing, some overly cloying characters that the Muppets historically wouldn't have indulged. The wikipedia article includes a handful of characters and subplots that didn't make it into the final cut, but I didn't notice any new material in the cut I saw over the weekend.
Two and a half stars out of five. One of Henson's interestingly ambitious failures from the eighties.
