Everyone knows Dark Crystal. Most people know about the Muppets, obviously. But there’s a 1969 NBC teleplay called The Cube that barely anyone remembers — and it might be the strangest thing Jim Henson ever made.
No Muppets. No puppets at all, actually. Instead, a man wakes up inside a white cube with no memory of how he got there. Over 53 minutes, he tries to make sense of his environment, question his reality, and figure out who put him there. Sound familiar? It should — it’s basically a one-hour Black Mirror episode made 45 years before the show existed.
The Cube aired as part of NBC’s Experiment in Television anthology series, which featured experimental films, plays, and documentaries. One episode even had Marshall McLuhan explaining his theory that “the medium is the message.” So the bar for weird was already high. Henson’s contribution still managed to stand out.
It’s a bottle film — almost entirely confined to one set — but it uses that constraint to build genuine tension. The protagonist’s confusion becomes the viewer’s confusion. There’s no exposition dump, no convenient narrator explaining the rules. You’re just stuck in there with him.
If you can track down a copy, it’s worth watching. Not as a curiosity piece, but as a genuinely unsettling piece of television that predicted where sci-fi would go decades later.
