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When Guillermo del Toro tackles a franchise movie, it usually goes down as a great example of what those films can be. Think of movies like Blade II or the Hellboy duology and you'll get what I mean. Even so, there are projects that the director still hasn't been able to get his hands on, despite the Oscar he now holds. And in a recent fan Q&A, del Toro revealed a surprising addition to that list.

The Q&A we're talking about is the September 9 Reddit AMA del Toro did in advance of the 20th anniversary rerelease of his dark fantasy classic, Pan's Labyrinth. On the subject of dark fantasy, actually, redditor u/Lizzard_Wizzzard wanted to know if there were any areas of fairy tale lore the Frankenstein director wanted to work with but hadn't gotten the chance to.

"I have a huge fairy tale anthropology library at home," began the filmmaker, "A lot of texts from the 19th century of classification of fairy lore in Great Britain. A lot of the taxonomy of fairies, and so forth. I would love to, I really would. [...] Many times, I proposed to The Jim Henson Company to headline a new version of Jim Henson's The Storyteller but it never came to fruition through the decades."

In case you don't know, The Storyteller was a puppet TV series that ran for 1 season in 1987. The show featured Hellboy star John Hurt as the titular storyteller, who would bring lesser-known fables to children with the help of the Henson Company's signature puppetry. Nearly 40 years later, the series is now the basis of a Dark Horse comic, and even though del Toro hasn't gotten his wish of giving new life to it, he's still in the practice of working similar dark fantasy magic into his projects.

"When we did Shape of Water," del Toro concluded, "The subtitle I was proposing was, 'A Fairy Tale for Complicated Times.' So there's a huge streak of fairy lore in my work."

Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth returns to theaters for its 20th anniversary October 9.

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