Only one episode in so far. It's quite well-made, though I wish there weren't quite so much CGI. It looked like the Landstriders were done with CGI, which is disappointing, since part of what I love about them in the original movie is what an impressive physical achievement it was for the acrobats inside the costumes. On the other hand, the puppet/creature effects are a step beyond the original film in a number of ways, particularly how much more detailed and expressive the Gelflings' faces are compared to the original. Although it's odd that, at least in episode 1, they haven't continued the movie's practice of using human doubles for the Gelflings and Aughra in walking/running/climbing shots. (Jen's "stunt double" Kiran Shah is still active in the industry, playing various diminutive creatures in
Star Wars and
Doctor Who and the like, so it would've been cool if they'd used him as a double here too.)
It's a nice touch that in the series, as in the movie, the very first vocalization we hear aside from the opening narration is the Chamberlain's whimper. Simon Pegg does an extraordinarily dead-on impression of Barry Dennen's Chamberlain at first, though at the end of episode 1 he takes it in a deeper, more gravelly direction in his big evil monologue. It's also a bit of a retcon that now the Chamberlain's the only one who speaks broken English. In the film, all the Skekses had kind of a broken speech pattern, because so much of their dialogue was originally in a made-up language and the replacement dialogue had to fit the rhythms.
It was a little weird at first hearing Mark Hamill do a voice so close to Joker for the scientist, but once I got used to it pretty quickly.
I didn't think it was that Joker-like; rather, Hamill was doing his best to approximate Steve Whitmire's original performance as the Scientist, but his voice doesn't go that high, and the rest is just basically the natural rhythms and intonations of Mark Hamill's voice. I guess I'm used to hearing them in the numerous other animation roles he's played, like the Hobgoblin in the '90s
Spider-Man.
The only explanation I can see is an unreliable narrator and that doesn't seem likely considering how the prologue is presented as omniscient.
Sigourney Weaver is credited as "The Myth-Speaker," which suggests she's merely someone telling a story that was written long before or passed down to her orally through the generations.
Thra is beautifully realized and each character creation (active characters and the plethora of background creatures) are wonderfully distinctive that makes Thra feel truly alien and unique.
I liked the bit that the "wheels" on the Skeksis carriage were pillbug-like rolling animals. The original film established rolling locomotion as a recurring theme in the creatures of Thra, used both by Fizzgig and by the little bug things crawling around the castle (whose name escapes me). So it was clever to build on that and postulate a larger rolling creature that had been harnessed as living wheels.
