How do you adapt 'Hobbit' well and than botch this so badly?

But then again, I've got to admit I don't really understand how the FINANCIAL aspects of the thing really work, when you're talking about a Made-For-TV movie, as opposed to a feature. :-/



I would assume they got paid X amount of dollars by the network, although I have no idea what the going rate was in those days, and, whatever it was, you would think it would pale in comparison to what the producers could've made, had they done a feature. (Then again, I must also admit that I'm a little unclear as to whether THE HOBBIT was a feature film or a Made-For-TV movie. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point. At any rate, if it was a feature, I don't remember seeing any TV spots promoting it at the time.) I know that Disneyland put out a book-and-record set of it, like they had for THE HOBBIT, but I don't know whether there were any Frodo and Samwise action figures made, or any other such promotions. If the motive wasn't to make money, though, it's hard to say what it could've been, but I think we can safely say that it was *NOT* to bring Tolkien's true vision to life. ;-(



One possible motivation is misplaced religious zeal. Don't know if you caught it or not, but the use of terms like "God" and "Devil" throughout the film,---words which NEVER appear in Tolkien's actual novels,---really muddy the water, especially in the impressionable young minds of the children that, apparently were its intended target audience. Sorry, but I don't remember reading anything in my Bible about elves, orcs, hobbits, or magic/cursed rings. :-/ ;-(



I saw this movie when it first aired, back in 1980. I was seven years old at the time, and my only real reference point to Tolkien's characters was that I had received a small book-and-record set of THE HOBBIT (One of those that was the size of a 45, but had a small hole in the middle, and was played at 33rpm. Remember those?) on my birthday, the previous October, and some action figures of Bilbo, Gandalf, and Gollum for Christmas that year. (I had wondered, at the time, why the Bilbo and Gollum characters looked so different from in the book-and-record set, and, at the time, my Mom was unable to explain it. I now realize that the reason is that they were based, *NOT* on the Rankin/Bass version of THE HOBBIT, but, rather on the characters in Ralph Bakshi's LOTR. That explains why Gollum looked like some kind of demonic, anorexic caveman, and Bilbo looked like a shrunken Paul McCartney with an abcessed tooth. ;-D ) Honestly, I have to say that IT REALLY MESSED ME UP. :-/ :-( I mean, here I was, a normal enough kid, had seen STAR WARS, SUPERMAN, and all of the Disney movies that had come to my area, knowing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of the whole LOTR backstory, thinking I was merely sitting down to watch a typical fantasy/adventure story with a standard good-versus-evil theme, and probably a little humor thrown in to lighten the mix, and what do I get? Well, right off the bat, I get told that the ring, which I had thought was so "cool" in THE HOBBIT, is actually evil and accursed, and Frodo has to destroy it. Hell of a letdown, right from the start. :-/ You see, I had gotten so into the storyline of THE HOBBIT, from the book-and-record set, that my grandmaw had given me a rather tacky sort of costume jewelry ring that opened up via a clasp on the side to "play hobbit" with, and I would put it on and pretend I was invisible. Now I would have to give it back or throw it away. :-( Pretty much soured me on the whole thing, right then and there. But, nonetheless, I determined to see it through. So, what did I get? A seemingly convoluted story I could barely follow, about a doomed city, a mad king, and an apocalyptic battle between Gandalf and what appeared to be Satan himself. And that was only the subplot. :-/ The MAIN story, concerning Frodo and Samwise,---which, needless to say, I was most interested in,---was even WORSE: A "hero" who is a schizoid lunatic that yells at his best friend and threatens his life, and generally acts as if he's possessed by a demon, and all because of some silly "magic ring" he inherited from his uncle, that makes its wearer invisible? :-/ It all seemed like a load of horsesh*t to me. ;-(



By the time the story got around to Frodo falling under the power of the ring inside of Mount Doom, and choosing to put it on his finger, rather than throw it into the fire, I had had enough. I simply got up and left the room. I knew what was gonna happen. He would fight Gollum, Gollum would bite off his finger to get the ring, and fall into the fire with it, and, somehow, Frodo and Samwise would survive to tell the tale. But what was the POINT of it all? :-/ At the time, I concluded that the guy who had written the story was either a madman or a sadist or both, and I hated him for writing it, hated the producers for making a movie of it, hated the network for putting it on, and, frankly, although they had no more idea what the whole thing was about than I did, I hated my parents, for letting me watch it in the first place. :-/ :-( The ultimate conclusion I had come to was that THE WORLD WAS A FUC KED UP PLACE AND THERE WAS NOTHING ANYBODY COULD DO ABOUT IT. :-/ I guess "Sauron" was somewhere laughing. ;-(



At any rate, if they absolutely *HAD* to make an animated movie of THE RETURN OF THE KING, it should've been made by either Ralph Bakshi or the people who did WATERSHIP DOWN and THE PLAGUE DOGS, and they should've picked up where Bakshi's LOTR left off. When they let Rankin/Bass do it, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that all you'd end up with would be cheezy songs, (written by the same team who came up with the songs from "Frosty The Snowman", "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer", etc.) a Pippin that looked like Chim-Chim without the tail, and a fat Merry, voiced by CASEY KASEM. Yeesh. :-/



But, to hazard a guess, I would say that Rankin/Bass did a good job with THE HOBBIT and botched this one, simply because it was a lot easier to come up with a script for the much-more-light-hearted story, considering that THE HOBBIT is only 276 pages long, while LOTR, taken all together, is over a thousand pages. (Ed. note: This was originally written back in December, before I actually had a copy of the book, and, simply judging by the thickness of the paperbook version my Dad was reading at the time, I assumed that the book was less than two hundred pages. I got a hardcover collector's edition for Christmas, which I am now reading, and I now know that it is exactly 276 pages in length.) They simply didn't take the time to immerse themselves in the story enough to do it justice, nor were they willing to spend the time and money to produce a script that would actually MAKE SENSE to people who were unfamiliar with the novels.





"Nobody's gonna tell me how to think
Nobody's gonna use my blood for ink."---CGO.

Given that they were trying to make this as kid-friendly as "The Hobbit" was, I really don't think this is THAT bad. Yes, they kind of water down what is really a much darker story and, yes, they basically pretend the first two LOTR books never happened, and, yes, they really pare down the book yet also add some kind of silly side stories (the in-fighting between the orcs and the 'evil' humans, Sam having delusions of grandeur from holding onto the Ring, etc.) but whatever. I enjoyed it as a kid and still have a soft spot for it now. And you can't deny that the epilogue is at least on the same higher level as what was done in "The Hobbit."

The Hobbit is a much shorter story. The Retirn of the kind is very long. They got enough of the important points to make the film work in the left of time allotted. I love this film