Sarah: *I’m* the Goblin Queen, bitches – you go wave your fans somewhere else.
(From Labyrinth: The Ultimate Visual History)
The Labyrinth commentaries are an Absolute Fucking Delight, seriously – from Goblins of the Labyrinth to the deluxe edition DVDs, they are replete with balls-out nerdery from Froud/Henson/Lucas, over-the-top teenage delight from Jennifer Connely who, at 14, got to SLOW DANCE WITH DAVID BOWIE!!!!!!!!!…and, wonder of wonders, sheer fucking dorkiness in the person of aforementioned rock god.
Like…
-He kept stumbling on the stairs in the ballroom scene. Jennifer keeps laughing at him because, oh my fuck, you’re David Bowie, aged 40something, Rock God Supreme, stupidly beautiful, actually trained in all this shit….and my adolescent ass remembers these stairs are here, but you don’t?!?!???????/
– The script originally called for Jareth and Sarah to kiss, but David Bowie straight up refused because Jennifer Connely was a minor and he was a grown-ass adult.
– Henson wanted a famous musician to play the Goblin King and had debated casting Michael Jackson, until David Bowie came over and…hopped up onto the table, and, with a wicked gleam in his eye, pulled a bone flute out of his pocket, hopped up onto the table, and, crouching thereon, played it at him and Henson was like “that is the Goblin King right there”
– Jennifer was apparently an absolute dream to work with and they didn’t realise how dangerous some of the stunts she acted were until they saw an actual teenager, say, going down the shaft of hands
– David Bowie was TERRIFIED OF HEIGHTS. During the Diamond Dogs tour in the 1970s, he got stuck on an elevating chair on stage, and later, in the 80s, during Glass Spider, he had an elevated prop fucking PRECIPITATELY DESCEND under him. Nonetheless, he did a lot of the Escher Room stuff himself – not all of it, some of it is a stunt guy, but damn, for a dude with acrophobia, doing ANY of it is impressive.
– Basically Jennifer Connely and David Bowie are/were fantastic to work with, and Jim Henson, who decided of his own free will to work with a baby, a teenager, numerous chickens, and a neurotic musician, was a madman. A magnificent madman, but a madman nonetheless.
aaaaaand at least one of them was dyed with an arsenic compound
one of these days i’m gonna have to write a thing about arsenic dyes
Oh arsenic pigments. So very very very deadly.
If anyone who paints has ever wondered why you can only get “emerald green hue” when most other pricier pigments (like cadmium red and cobalt blue and such) are gettable as hue and in real form? it’s cos the pigment called “emerald green” was a copper acetoarsenite (please let me have spelled that right lololol) and thus…yeah. It isn’t stable, which meant that when it was used as a clothing dye or wallpaper ink (which it was, widely, until about 1900 or so–it was cheap to produce), it eventually made people in close proximity to it rrrrrrrrreal deceased.
This is why I am really careful at my job with maps that have bright green pigment remaining. Usually greens in that family react badly with the print ink of the map and like…Italy falls out of the page because it was green. But sometimes there is remaining paint and I have to be cautious. (See also: bright orange that might be mercury/cinnabar related, white that might have lead in it…) I’m not in any danger, no more so than I was at any given time at art college, but I do err on the side of caution. Because just SOME PIGMENTS MAN.
Anyway if you wrote a post about arsenic pigments I would read the heck out of it and be very appreciative 😀
I’ve seen lots of reblogs and gotten several asks saying “these dresses would kill you.” Here ya go.
Arsenic was THE poison of choice (deliberate or otherwise) for centuries; it was even called poudre de succession, “inheritance powder”
for its ability to speed up getting to the reading of rich Uncle Edward’s will…
Poisonous Printing Pigments give a new slant on “This book is cursed, all who read it fall ill; some of them die”, and don’t forget green wallpaper. I don’t know if it was involved in Oscar Wilde’s death – “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do” (he did) – but I remember reading that it may have been a contributory factor in Napoleon’s demise.
Some selkie comes on land, right? And he’s a horny boy, just on dry land to bang as selkies are wont to do, but he’s not a dumb boy so he keeps his seal-skin close at hand, maybe in the form of a jacket tied around his hips or a cloak on his shoulders.
Anyways, he’s walking around. Looking and looking, and OH. Who is this handsome, dripping wet fellow standing by a mini ocean (the human skinned folk call them locks or something like that, our selkie boy can’t quite remember) that he has just come upon? The selkie is all, oooh, is that seaweed in your hair? I love seaweed.
And seaweed head is like, “Sure is. Wanna bang?”
And selkie is like, “Do I!”
But when they’re about to get it on, the selkie notices something strange. Seaweed head’s skin is sticky like glue, catching the hand he presses to his chest fast, and they appear to be walking *into* the mini ocean.
Luckily, seal-skins are easy to use when selkies have them close. Just as they’re disappearing into the dark ripples of the loch, the selkie transforms back into a seal. His hand turns back into a flipper, freeing itself from seaweed head’s strange, sticky hold, and he swims just out of reach.
“You’re the strangest human I’ve ever met,” said the selkie.
“I’m no human,” replied seaweed head. “I’m a kelpie, and I eat humans.”
“Well, I’m not really human,” explained the selkie, kinda weirded out because the kelpie just transmorgrified from seaweed head to a giant frigging horse with inverted hooves. “I’m a selkie. Do you eat selkies?”
The kelpie pondered this.
“I don’t think so?” He finally conceeded, and now he looked kind of uncomfortable. “Maybe you should go home now, weird little…thing.”
But the selkie said nah because this was exciting and new for him, and long story short this is how some kelpie gets adopted by a pod of selkies and learns how not to be a giant sadistic child-eating lake monster, and then the kelpie and the first selkie fall in love because why not? Let monsters love monsters. Cowards. Thanks for reading.
DarkestElemental616 