The Cube is Jim Henson’s little-known proto-Black Mirror masterpiece

I’m sure we’re all familiar with Dark Crystal , so we know that Jim Henson can be weird and tackle slightly more mature subject matter. But there is little in his oeuvre that is quite as mind-bending as the Muppetless The Cube . This 1969 teleplay was produced for an NBC anthology series called Experiment in Television , which featured, appropriately enough, various experimental films, plays, and documentaries. One episode even featured Marshall McLuhan explaining his oft-cited theory that “ the medium is the message .” Even among all these oddities, however, Jim Henson’s The Cube stands out. It’s a 53-minute bottle film — taking place almost entirely in a single room. A man awakes in a white cube, unsure of where he is or how he got there. There are no windows, no door. Just walls of white panels. It doesn’t take long for someone to open a section of the wall and bring in a stool for our nameless man in the cube. But when he closes the “door” behind him, our protagonist can’t open it back up. And thus begins the parade of people, dozens of them, taking turns going in and out of various invisible doors in the titular cube. The interactions start off strangely enough — why is there strawberry jam on the stool? Who is this woman who claims to be the protagonist’s wife even though he doesn’t recognize her? But they quickly escalate, calling into question the nature of reality, our protagonist’s sanity, and raising questions about what the cube is exactly. …