Was Lord of the Rings really that popular back then? The Peter Jackson movie didn’t exist and all there were was the novel and the Ralph Bashki version. Don’t get me wrong the novel is one of my favorite novels of all time but was it as mainstream as Stranger Things seems to suggest?
share"Mainstream"? Hardly.
Tons of closet fans though.
I was one of them.
Yeah I was about to say, I doubt most people had read the novel. Now the cartoon version of The Hobbit was mildly popular when I was a kid in the early 90’s but even then it was nowhere near the level of popularity as let’s say Peter Jackson’s version of Lord of the Rings, or even Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit.
shareD&D was really big in the '80s and EVERYONE who played D&D in the '80s was a LOTR fan and we all loved the Bakshi and Rankin Bass TV adaptions from the late '70s as well.
LOTR was also huge in the late '60s and early '70s among hippies when there weren't even any cartoons. Hippies wore "Frodo Lives" buttons. The Beatles wanted to film it. It was a counterculture phenomenon. That's how the counterculture director Ralph Bakshi got on board with it.
It was probably the most read fiction books around in the 80's. Heard many talking about it.
shareWhile some loved it and some made fun of it.., but most kids in the 80s knew about it…it was not some niche unknown except for the chosen few kind of thing.
shareI had a friend who was a fan of the Lord of the Rings books back then.
shareIt was well-known and semi-popular. Not like Star Wars. I read The Hobbit and attempted to read Lord of the Rings, but couldn't get into it during the late 70s. My friends and I watched an animated version of the Lord of the Rings.
shareTHE novel? It’s three novels and the Hobbit. Those books have been massively popular around the world since the 50s.
shareNo. It is one novel that its publisher chopped into 3 pieces; ergo, it is also not a trilogy. It is a long book and the cowardly publisher worried that it might not sell and he would have to pay for printing a lot of pages that made him no money. He chopped it up and published The Fellowship of the Ring as a test run.
shareWhich means it’s three novels and the Hobbit.
And how is that cowardly? That was a damn good business decision.
If the publisher hadn’t done that sales would have been limited and so would the popularity of the books.
That move helped make LotR a huge success by enabling more people to afford the first book, which earned much more money for Tolkien and his estate.