Rankin & Bass Made the Hobbit animated movie in 1977. Why did Ralph Bakshi make the animated Lord of the Rings in 1978? and then R&B made ROTK in 1980. I was wondering if the Tolkien Family or whoever has rights to the movies were unhappy with the Bakshi version.
shareI think Rankin and Bass originally just bought the rights for the Hobbit. Bakshi was going to do all three Lord of the Rings books by dividing them into two movies. The first movie had Fellowship and half of Two Towers. When the movie flopped, Bakshi seemed to have lost interest. Rankin and Bass felt that since no one was touching Return and Hobbit was a successful TV special, that they should turn it into a cartoon. Notice Hobbit and Return is more children oriented and Lord is more adult.
shareYep, I read somewhere that Bakshi had originally intended of making a continuation of LOTR but didn't because the first flopped.
shareToo bad, really.
It could've been interesting.
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I read in EW that the reason he didn't make it was because He and his Production partner disagreed on something as trivial as whether or not to add Part 1/2 or not to the title.
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It was actually quite successful.
shareThe Bakshi movie didn't flop it was a commercial and somewhat critical sucess.
sharedon't know
yeah that really helps!
I think Tolien saw The lord of the Rings before he died and he hated it.
shareTolkien KNEW of Bakshi's LOTR and well.... Hated/abhorred/strongly disliked/wanted to destroy the reels. You can see some of his rantings in "Letters."
Personal Opinion: Bakshi should he hanged for his tresspasses into LOTR. Grrrrrrrr. *chews on somthing*
Bakshi = Bad.
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PJ and the crew did okay. At least they didn't capsulate it like Bakshi did. *shudders*
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Nope, Tolkien died before Bakshi's movie production was even started. In his letters Tolkien commented on an earlier, unrelated attempt - which was dumped and never finished in the end.
share"Nope, Tolkien died before Bakshi's movie production was even started. In his letters Tolkien commented on an earlier, unrelated attempt - which was dumped and never finished in the end."
Which I believe was John Boorman's attempt to make the trilogy into a single 100 minute film (!!!), obviously (and thankfully) his plans fell through and he made "Excalibur" instead.
Personal Opinion: Bakshi should he hanged for his tresspasses into LOTR. Grrrrrrrr. *chews on somthing*Seriously, be quiet. Sure his LotR sucked, but he's an important figure in the annals of American animation.
Bakshi = Bad.
Personally, I think peter jackson should be hanged. the movies were pretty good i guess, but as a director, hes terrible. I can't believe he won an oscar! look at his other films (good god) , and then look at the lord of the rings. more like lord of the helicopter shots.
shareI love his first three films.
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Wow, what a bizarre thread. J.R.R. Tolkein died before Bakshi's film went into production so he never saw it, period. Any stories to the contrary are wrong. His son Christopher Tolkein undoubtedly did see it, though if he had any public position on the results I don't know what they may have constituted. Bakshi's LOTR was a financial success, earning $34 million on an $8 million budget, so any talk of it being a "flop" is uninformed. It received mixed critical reviews but was widely seen and played midnight movie marquees for a few months after the primary run ended. The reason Ralph Bakshi never finished the story for United Artists was because he was exhausted and demoralized by how much work it took to make half the story -- he had to make the movie twice, essentially, once as live action and then rotoscoping it to animation. He never even bothered pitching a proposal for a follow-up film and any talk of United Artists burying the picture because it flopped is incorrect.
The reasons the Rankin/Bass films are so different from Bakshi's animated film is simply due to the approach (family oriented not-rated for TV productions with lots of happy songs, vs a darker, psychedelic adult PG rated theatrical vision) and even more simply due to the animation techniques. Rankin/Bass' version was animated by a Japanese company based on scripts for television specials meant for families. Bakshi's movie was a theatrical production rated PG and intended for theaters. I still remember my mom taking me to see it for my birthday and being startled by how violent, dark and brooding of a movie it was compared to The Hobbit, which had been on TV the year before. It resulted in a happy sing-along LP record album with accompanying book, which I still have. The two productions had nothing to do with each other.
They were made by different production companies with different intentions. The packaging of the 3 films together for DVD is a somewhat dunderheaded marketing scheme, the 2 have nothing to do with the other, they should be seen separately and regarded as separate efforts. Yes Rankin/Bass chose to pick up ROTK at a point after Bakshi's movie left off but it was never intended as a direct sequel or follow-up. And even though both names use an R and a B, Rankin/Bass and Ralph Bakshi are not the same people. Put down the weed and at least read the Wiki pages on Bakshi's production, which you can find here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(1978_film)
That's interesting.... I was always myself under the impression that Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" didn't really make enough money to interest anyone in doing the sequel. I do know for a fact -- or at least I think I do -- that Bakshi had originally intended to do the entire "Lord of the Rings" but that the rotoscoping and what-not that they were doing was a lot more difficult than they anticipated and they basically ran out of money. The original plan was not to do it as 2 films. You might be right though, maybe the financial incentive was there but not the artistic motive for Bakshi. I wish that either he had finished his version or Rankin/Bass had simply been given the entire story to do.
Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'
I still want them to finish Lord of the Rings. There's no reason that exact style can't be totally replicated today.
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I agree. WTF are they waiting for? :-/
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Nobody's gonna use my blood for ink."---CGO.