“The best way to get Jim [Henson] to do something was to say ‘no one’s ever done this, shall we try it?” – Andrea Wright, The Fairy Tales of Jim Henson

The Great Con-Junction took place on the 8th & 9th February 2025, a two-day extravaganza for fans of the 1980s film The Dark Crystal, complete with Podling Party and  film screening. The event was hosted at Elstree Studios near Watford and boasted a varied array of celebrity guests and workshops.

For the uninitiated: The Dark Crystal was directed by Jim Henson (The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, Labyrinth) and Frank Oz (The Muppets, Sesame Street, Star Wars) who collaborated with Brian and Wendy Froud to create a cult classic fantasy film chock-full of bizarre puppets, stunts, and special effects. In the film, two elf-like Gelflings are tasked with saving the beautifully bizarre world of Thra from the vulture-like Skeksis that have taken it over. 

In 2019, Netflix released one season of a prequel series to The Dark Crystal with some of the same brilliant minds from the original at the helm, then promptly cancelled it. Because of course they did.

As a life-long fan of the film, there was no chance I was missing this event, but what was I looking to get out of it?

1 Brian and Wendy Froud.

The Frouds are a hefty chunk of the reason I fell in love with the fantasy genre. Their art struck a chord with me at a young age that has never stopped ringing. While I didn’t particularly want to meet them – meeting famous people makes me unbearably anxious – I did want to go to the workshop they were putting on and hopefully acquire an art print or two if they were available. 

2 The workshops & props.

I’m the sort of person that can’t watch a film or a TV show without trying to analyse how they made the shot happen, how they came up with those lines, and how they managed those stunts. Behind the scenes content makes the film in question so much more exciting to me and the offer of two days of workshops to learn how they went about creating one of my favourite films, and the possibility of seeing original props was too good to pass up.

3 The merchandise.

Funnily enough, finding merchandise for a cult film forty years after its release isn’t as easy as it sounds. I was hoping for some exclusive merch opportunities and a chance to buy from a wide range of vendors selling appropriately fantastical items and art. 

The range of tickets available to purchase for the event was extensive and I had to spend the better part of an hour trying to work out which ones would be the best fit for what I wanted based on what was available. In the end I went with what appeared to be the ‘regular’ option of a Gelfing pass which allowed me access to the event for both days, but did not allow me to attend the opening & closing ceremonies, the Podling party, the film screening, or the paid workshops. 

On the Saturday morning, myself and a friend arrived bright and early at Elstree Studios as we knew that we weren’t allowed into the opening ceremony, but we also hadn’t been told when we should show up, and the first workshop that we wanted to see was scheduled to start five minutes after the opening ceremony ended. There were also no room numbers or locations specified on the schedule that had been published, and we quickly worked out why.

Elstree Studios is well-known film and television studio with over ninety-nine years of filming history, so naturally they had security at the gate. We had been warned that we would need ID to get into the venue that matched the names on our passes, and that our bags would be checked upon entry. Neither of these things happened on the Saturday and only our passes were checked on the Sunday. 

When we arrived, we joined the queue to the doors, someone scanned our passes, waved us through, and I had to stop and ask where I could collect the optional lanyard I had ordered. This was a little underwhelming as I had been expecting a lanyard with a pass or badge noting my type of ticket, but it was in fact just the ribbon loop with an empty clip – not quite what I had envisioned, and this detail hadn’t been listed when I placed the order. Attendees with more expensive weekend passes had cards for their lanyards, were Gelflings just too lowly?

The convention room itself was also incredibly underwhelming. Almost every stall was in one hall (which we were able to complete a loop of in under five minutes), two stalls were tucked away in adjacent rooms, and one of these was so confusingly signposted that we didn’t find it until the end of the first day. The other dismaying thing was that there was a grand total of four vendors and one official merch booth, and every other stall in the room was an eclectic collection of puppeteers, stunt people, artists, and voice actors – most of whom I had never heard of and had no desire to meet, or pay upwards of £20 for a squiggle on a bit of paper or a selfie.

The big guests of honour were Dave Goelz (Gonzo from The Muppets, Fizzgig from The Dark Crystal) and Steve Whitmire (Kermit and Ernie from The Muppets) but you wouldn’t know it from their placement behind two big pillars at the back of the room. 

It quickly became clear that space was going to be an issue. A lot of tables had been crammed into not a lot of space and it turned out that the main theatre space was actually the marquee outside that we had spotted on the way in. You had to queue by the emergency exit to get in, but we only worked this out by asking a member of staff as there were no signs to signal this. The queues wrapped around most of the room and right past celebrity tables meaning other attendees on foot couldn’t get past easily, never mind the four or five wheelchair users I spotted throughout the day, or the attendees wearing fantastic hulking Skeksis cosplays that weren’t dissimilar to tents. We finally got into the marquee for the first workshop fifteen minutes late and the poor speaker was panicking by the time she was cut off with half her talk left unsaid. The marquee was even worse for space and accessibility with small, uncomfortable chairs rammed next to each other that made it impossible people with above-average rears to sit on just one seat and very little room for wheelchair users to manoeuvre to the front of the tent.

The weekend was not looking promising and at this point, I was beginning to regret my decision to attend, but then we got into the swing of the workshops and things began to look up.

Despite the event being marketed as being centred around The Dark Crystal, there were workshops on Jim Henson’s other work like Fraggle Rock and The Muppets, and, inexplicably, a Q&A with Dave Goelz’s wife, Debra Goelz, about her new YA novel. It was hard not to wonder if the organisers had realised how little The Dark Crystal content they had to spread over the two-day event and had to decided to bulk it out with whatever other Jim Henson content they could get their hands on.

Some of the paid workshops included a voice acting masterclass with Donna Kimball, the talent behind the voice of Aughra in The Dark Crystal, and a puppetry masterclass with Louise Gold (The Muppets, Sesame Street) and Warrick Brownlow-Pike (Sesame Street, CBeebies). We didn’t attend either of these, sticking to the free workshops instead.

One of the standout talks on the Saturday was The Making of Six and a Half Landstriders with Valerie Charlon who created the rigs/puppets for the hulking, yet graceful creatures that are ridden in a small number of scenes in The Dark Crystal.

The second was How To Walk Like A Skeksis And Run Like A Gelfling with the brilliant Kiran Shah, best known for his working as a size double and performer in literally every fantasy film ever made (The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, to name a few). 

While Valerie’s workshop had a more typical structure of a presentation and plenty of photos and anecdotes, Kiran rambled at the crowd, cracking jokes and answering questions, then demonstrated exactly what the title of the workshop suggested, getting volunteers to come up on stage and skuttle about like Skeksis or prance like Gelflings.

Then came my favourite workshop of the whole weekend: Bringing Creatures To Life with Brian and Wendy Froud. 

 It was apparent from the start that the bulk of the workshop was going to be Brian good-naturedly chatting about his art while Wendy kept him on track as they awkwardly passed the single microphone between them (there were four microphones available so this baffled me). Personally, I was absolutely fine with this set-up once they had pulled the camera strap out of the birds-eye shot they had set up for showing some of the Frouds’ art. It was an anxiety-inducing couple of minutes as everyone waited for the tech guys to realise it was hanging in shot.

They regaled us with stories about how Jim Henson discovered them, how long they had been given to design, then sculpt the myriad creatures for The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (five and three years respectively), and how often Brian had needed to send sculptures back because they kept neatening them up from his scribbly sketches. Wendy passed round her sculpted foam head prototypes for a Skeksis and a Mystic and I tried not to explode with excitement. 

The last standout talk of the weekend was from the guests of honour: Dave Goelz (Gonzo from The Muppets, Fizzgig from The Dark Crystal) and Steve Whitmire (Kermit and Ernie from The Muppets). Goelz’s presence at the con had been linked to his role in The Muppets as Gonzo in all the advertising I had seen, while I had no clue who Steve Whitmire was. I quickly learner that Goelz had been the performer behind Fizzgig, one of my favourite characters in The Dark Crystal (though apparently he had hated the entire experience) and that Whitmire had shared the performing of Kermit the Frog with Jim Henson in The Muppets. A quick Google after the talk led me to discover Whitmire had also performed one of the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal, but this was never mentioned.

In between these workshops I was able to buy a booklet of the Frouds’ art prints which they both signed and Brian drew me my own little sprite (without me asking) and I think I could have happily died on the spot right then.

However, that’s when we finally discovered the fantastic Aughra replica hiding in a different room and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a selfie with my favourite grumpy old lady.

In the end, it was a weekend of swings and roundabouts as expectations were exceeded and then fell far short of the mark over and over again, but did I get what I wanted out of it?

1 Brian & Wendy Froud.

Yes. Absolutely. Not only did I get to hear them talk about their processes and their art for nearly an hour, I was also able to buy the art that I wanted and got my little impromptu sprite out of the process. I could argue that this alone made the entire trip worth it.

2 The workshops and props.

Yes and no. The quality of the workshops varied wildly with some speakers not seeming to know what they were supposed to be doing on stage. There were microphone issues in nearly every talk with guests repeatedly not being given enough microphones for the number of speakers on stage which meant attendees at the back missed literally half the conversations. 

The props were scattered haphazardly among the tables in the main convention hall and it was unclear whether they were originals or replicas or whether they belonged to the guests seated next to them. We stumbled across the fantastic Aughra replica and the original crystal shard from The Dark Crystal completely by accident. 

It would have been lovely if the props and replicas had been displayed exhibition-style where attendees could stand and stare as long as they wanted to without having to make awkward conversation with celebrity guests they didn’t know and didn’t want to give the impression that they wanted to pay for an autograph or selfie. 

I greatly appreciated the amount of behind-the-scenes info I was able to absorb throughout the weekend and enjoyed seeing the props and replicas but overall the execution was a little awkward.

3 The merchandise.

This was poor. As mentioned above was able to buy some art and a couple of licensed pins but I got a better shopping experience from nipping up the road to the charity shops while we searched for some lunch on the Saturday. I would have preferred at least double the vendors, if not triple.

Overall, did I get what I wanted out of the event? Absolutely yes.

Would I believe you if you told me the entire thing had been organised by university students with no event experience but weirdly good connections? Absolutely yes.