Russian LOTR adaptation surfaces on YouTube
Well this is interesting.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/04/30-year-old-soviet-tv-adaptation-of-the-lord-of-the-rings-surfaces-on-youtube/
Holy cow, that's brutal. I was just skimming around in it, but the Hobbits all just look like regular, 45-year-old guys, I think Legolas is a woman, Gimli and Boromir appear to be absent, the special effects aren't that special, and the whole thing is just a terrible mess. Kinda good for a laugh, but it looks like they all took literally one look at Tolkien's masterpiece and then just winged it.
shareLOL, no shit, right?
I definitely didn't watch the whole thing. I clicked through the video and watched a bit of it and said fuck this. It didn't even seem fun on an ironic level.
Something tells me it was a hit when it originally aired though.
I could not possibly watch this end-to-end. Not even with a room full of witty friends firing barbs the whole time. It's painful.
Yeah, I have a feeling a lot of Russian people are going, "Oh! I remember this!" It's probably a nostalgia trip for them. This might be one of those things where the cultural gap is too wide. Like, I have a feeling that some of the strange camerawork might be a Russian TV thing? I don't know, I'm not familiar with Russian TV. Or, at least I assume things like the Hobbit actors being middle-aged men looks "right" to a Russian audience.
Who knows? Anybody Russian here, or familiar with Russian culture in the '90s enough to give us some information here?
It kind of reminds me of some of the stuff that would come on PBS in the 80s and very early 90s. I remember some of the PBS programming having the cheap, video, soap opera look to it, with unconvincing sets that looked very bare bones.
Someone in the comments mentions that it's a stage play that was adapted for TV. That doesn't surprise me at all because as I was watching I thought it felt lot like a play that just happened to be being filmed.
Pretty spot-on observation there. I know exactly what you mean.
The stage play thing makes sense... I still think we're missing a chunk of the puzzle simply by not being steeped in Russian '90s pop-culture, but yeah, thinking of it as a stage adaptation makes more sense.
Some of the choices are bizarre, too. I flicked to the Moria sequence, and the whole thing makes so little sense, the Balrog never shows up, it's just orcs that swarm them, and they assume Gandalf is dead, but like, nobody noticed during the fight...? The writing is strange. They do that (skim Moria - one of the most memorable and important sequences from the book) but take some extra time for Bilbo to trade jokes with Lobelia Sackville-Baggins...?
You clearly spent more time with it than I did. I did not actually watch enough to understand who anyone was or identify specific plot points.
You may be correct about the Russian culture though. And we've already discussed that this is probably a nostalgic piece for someone. After all, SOMEONE thought it important enough to locate it and bring it to the eyes of the world.
I watched the opening up to half-way through Bilbo's party. Then I skipped ahead to see what they did with Moria. That's about all I could take.
share