As you’ve probably heard, Amazon has announced that it’s producing a show set in Middle-earth, the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien in his landmark novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. With the new series reportedly headed into production in 2019, I thought it was time to revisit the various TV and big screen takes on Tolkien’s work that have appeared—with varying quality and results—over the last forty years.
First up, Rankin/Bass’s animated version of The Hobbit, first released as a TV movie on NBC in November, 1977.
As I watched The Hobbit, for the first time since elementary school, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see the film when it first aired on television forty-one years ago. I picture a child sitting on a lime green couch in a wood-paneled basement, wearing a Darth Vader t-shirt she got after she fell in love with Star Wars (aka A New Hope, then still simply known as “Star Wars”) when it was released in theaters a few months earlier.
Our hypothetical child would have no idea that she was glimpsing, like a vision in Galadriel’s mirror, the future of pop culture. Forty years later, now perhaps with children the same age she was when she watched The Hobbit, our heroine would find that Star Wars still reigns at the box office, the most popular show on TV features dragons, and everywhere we look, humble heroes are set against dark lords: Kylo Ren, Thanos, Grindelwald, the Night King, and even The Hobbit’s own Necromancer.
But in 1977, all of that is yet to come. The animated Hobbit is merely the first step out the door. The movie is certainly aware of its larger context. It opens with a skyward-dive toward a map of Middle-earth entire, almost like the opening credits of Game of Thrones, and ends with an ominous shot of the One Ring. But despite the gestures towards The Lord of the Rings, the film largely seems content to be an adaptation of Tolkien’s children’s adventure. It even includes the songs. All of the songs.
The film opens with the sort of “someone reading a storybook” conceit common to many Disney cartoons. We then dive down to Bag-End, which is lovingly animated, but seems to exist by itself—we see nothing of the rest of Hobbiton or the Shire. Bilbo Baggins walks outside to smoke and suddenly, the wandering wizard Gandalf appears literally out of thin air. He accosts poor Bilbo, looming over the little hobbit, more or less shrieking at him, and summoning lightning and thunder. It’s a strange greeting, and a marked departure from the banter the hobbit and wizard exchange in the book.
But the overriding concern of the Rankin/Bass film, doubtless due to being a TV movie for children, is to cut to the chase (metaphorically; Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies cut to the chase literally). Gandalf doesn’t have time to shoot the shit. He needs help, and he needs it NOW. The Dwarves, looking like discarded sketches for Disney’s dwarfs in Snow White, suddenly pop up behind various rocks and trees and Gandalf gives them a quick introduction. We then cut to dinner in Bag-End as the Dwarves sing “That’s What Bilbo Baggins Hates!”, though Bilbo does not seem all that put off by their presence in his house, nor their handling of his fine china. This Bilbo is less frumpy and fusty than either his book counterpart or Martin Freeman’s portrayal in the live-action movies. He seems more naturally curious than anything—less a middle-aged man steeped in comfort but quietly longing for something more, as in the book, and more a child willing to go along with whatever the adults around him are doing.
That night Bilbo dreams of being the King of Erebor (an odd, but nice, touch that again underlines Bilbo’s naivety and curiosity) and awakens to find the Dwarves and Gandalf already saddled up and ready to go. No running to the Green Dragon for this Bilbo: Time is a-wasting! The party needs to cross the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and multiple commercial breaks before bedtime.
Buy the Book
The Ruin of Kings
The party is captured by Fraggle Rock-ish trolls, saved by Gandalf, and then stops for dinner in Rivendell. Rankin/Bass’s Elrond sports a halo of floating stars, a high-collared cape, and a gray goatee. He looks vaguely like a vampire in a Looney Toons short who’s just hit his head. But this Elrond is still my favorite of all cinematic depictions of the Half-elven master (despite my inner nerd raging that Círdan the Shipwright is the only bearded elf). Ralph Bakshi’s Elrond looks like a bored gym teacher, and Hugo Weaving’s portrayal in the Jackson movies is too grim and dour. Rankin/Bass’s Elrond properly looks like a timeless elf of great wisdom. The star-halo in particular is beautiful and fitting, given the Elves’ love of the stars (and the fact that Elrond’s name literally means “Star-Dome”). We don’t see any other Elves at Rivendell, so it’s impossible to say if they look like Elrond or share some resemblance to the very, very different Wood-elves we meet later in the film.
Elrond reveals the moon letters on Thorin’s map, and a quick fade to black to sell shag carpeting later, Bilbo and Company are high in the Misty Mountains and seeking shelter from a storm. They rest in a cave, where Bilbo has a quick homesick flashback to the dinner at Bag-End, and then their ponies disappear and the party is captured by goblins.
I imagine our hypothetical 1977 child viewer probably had more than a few nightmares fueled by what follows. Rankin/Bass’s goblins are toad-like creatures, with gaping mouths full of teeth, plus big horns and sharp claws. They’re much more fantastical than the Orcs as Tolkien describes them—and as Jackson portrayed them in his movies—but they fit the storybook tone of the novel and the film, and also helpfully sidestep the racist aspects of the Orcs that are found in The Lord of the Rings. These goblins are pure monster through and through.
But the goblins look like hobbits compared to the slimy, frog-like horror that is the animated Gollum. Rankin/Bass’s Gollum doesn’t look like he could ever have been a hobbit. He truly looks like the ancient subterranean creature Tolkien originally meant him to be when he first wrote The Hobbit. And he’s terrifying: He has sharp claws, a disturbingly hairy back, green skin, and huge, blind-looking eyes. He also looks like he might snap and devour Bilbo at any moment.
(Funnily enough, I jotted down “reminds me of a Ghibli character” in my notes during the Gollum scene. And it turns out I wasn’t far from the truth—the 1977 Hobbit was animated by a Japanese studio called TopCraft, which was transformed into Studio Ghibli a few years later. I like to think a bit of Gollum made it into Spirited Away’s No-Face two decades later).
The Gollum scene is genuinely tense and frightening, though Bilbo again seems to take it in stride, as he also does the discovery of a magic ring that lets him disappear and escape Gollum’s clutches. The ring makes a very ‘70s-TV “vrawp!” sound when Bilbo puts it on and vanishes, and I like to imagine Sauron built that feature in for funsies: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Vrawp!
Bilbo reunites with Gandalf and the Dwarves, and then the company is rescued from wolf-riding goblins by the Eagles. The only major omission from the novel occurs here, as Beorn is nowhere to be found. Which is a shame, because Beorn is a grumpy literal bear of a man who loves ponies, and he should feature in every Tolkien adaptation. Beorn appears only briefly in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and my only specific hope for the Amazon series is that Beorn plays a substantial role, because Beorn is awesome.
But alas, Bilbo and Co. don’t meet a single were-bear, and immediately trek into Mirkwood, sans Gandalf, where they are attacked by giant spiders. The spiders are wonderfully horrible, with mouths of sharp teeth and lips (I can’t stop thinking about spider lips) and big fluffy antenna like moths have. Also, whenever one dies the camera becomes a spinning spider-POV of multiple eyes. It’s odd, but the film goes to great lengths to avoid showing anyone actually being slashed or stabbed with a sword—even spiders.
Bilbo rescues the Dwarves but they’re soon captured by the Wood-elves, and here comes the movie’s greatest departure from the text—not in story, but in design. The Wood-elves look nothing like the elves in every other adaptation of Tolkien. Hell, they don’t even look remotely like Elrond from earlier in the same movie (presumably, Elrond took after his human grandfather). They look like Troll dolls that have been left out in the rain too long, and a little like Yzma fromThe Emperor’s New Groove. They have gray skin, pug faces, and blond hair. It’s frankly bizarre, but it did make me want a version of Jackson’s movies where Orlando Bloom plays Legolas in heavy makeup to look like a live-action version of Rankin/Bass’s Wood-elves.
The Elves may look weird, but the plot is the same. After escaping the Wood-elves’ hall by barrel, Bilbo and the Dwarves arrive at the Mannish settlement of Lake-town. There they meet the warrior Bard, who sports an extremely 1970s mustache and a killer pair of legs. I will refer to him as Bard Reynolds (RIP, Bandit) from now on.
There’s a beautiful shot of the Lonely Mountain looming in the background over Lake-town, a reminder of how close—for good and for ill—it is. In fact, the background paintings throughout the movie are gorgeous and seem to consciously adapt the look of Tolkien’s own drawings and paintings of Middle-earth, underscoring the storybook feel of the movie.
Against the advice of Bard Reynolds, Bilbo and the Dwarves head to the Lonely Mountain, where they open the secret door and Bilbo finally gets around to that burgling he was hired for. Except, of course, there’s one little problem: the dragon.
Smaug is probably the most famous, or infamous, instance of character-design in this movie. He has a distinctly feline look, with whiskers, cat-eyes, and a lush mane. He reminded me, again, of Ghibli animation, especially the canine-esque dragon form of Haku in Spirited Away. It’s nothing like our usual idea of what Western dragons look like, but it also works really well. After all, Smaug is an intelligent, deadly, greedy predator who likes laying around all day. He’s a very cat-like dragon, is what I’m saying.
What’s more, Tolkien clearly didn’t care for cats, as they are always associated with evil in his legendarium. There are the spy-cats of the Black Númenorean Queen Berúthiel, and the fact that the earliest incarnation/prototype of Sauron was a giant cat (a depiction that survives in the Eye of Sauron explicitly being described as looking like a cat’s eye). Making Smaug into a cat-dragon is brilliant. Not only does it fit the character’s personality and Tolkien’s world, but it immediately conveys the particular menace of Smaug: Bilbo (who has a slightly hamster-like look himself) is a mouse walking into a tiger’s cave.
Bilbo barely escapes, even with his magic ring, though he’s luckily accompanied by a thrush who spies Smaug’s weakness—a missing belly scale. When Smaug swoops down to burn Lake-town, the thrush informs Bard Reynolds, who sticks in arrow in Smaug’s belly. Smaug dies, but his death throes lay waste to most of Lake-town.
Back at the Lonely Mountain, Thorin has finally come into his kingdom, but like most new governments, he soon finds he has a lot of debt. Bard Reynolds and the men of Lake-town want money to rebuild their town, and they’re backed by the weird gray Elves of Mirkwood. Thorin wants to fight back, and gets mad at Bilbo not for stealing the Arkenstone (which, like Beorn, doesn’t make it into the movie) but because Bilbo doesn’t want to fight.
Thankfully, Gandalf manages to pop up out of thin air again, just in time to point out to this potential Battle of Three Armies that a fourth army is on its way: the goblins are coming. The Dwarves, Elves, and Men join together, though Bilbo takes off his armor and decides to sit this one out. Perhaps he knew that the production didn’t have the budget to animate a big battle and that the whole thing would just look like a bunch of dots bouncing around, anyway.
All is nearly lost until the Eagles show up. The book never quite describes how the Eagles fight—Bilbo gets knocked out right after they arrive—but the animated movie depicts it: the Eagles just pick up goblins and wolves and drop them out of the sky. It’s actually disturbing, as you see dozens of Eagles just casually picking up goblins and wargs and throwing them to their deaths. It reminded me of the helicopter bombardment in Apocalypse Now, and I wonder how much the disillusionment with the Vietnam War (and Tolkien’s own experience in World War I) played a role in how this battle was depicted.
We also get a view of the battlefield in the aftermath, and it’s littered with the dead bodies of men, Elves, Dwarves, goblins, and wolves. There’s no glory here, no proud triumph. It couldn’t be further from the action-spectacular of Peter Jackson’s Battle of the Five Armies, or the climax of Return of the King when Aragorn bids the “Men of the West” to fight against the armies of the East. Here, there’s just relief and grim reckoning for the survivors.
Bilbo is reconciled with a dying Thorin, then heads home with a small portion of his treasure. Given that his Hobbit-hole at Bag-End seems to exist in pure isolation, it’s not surprising that it hasn’t been seized and auctioned off by the Sackville-Bagginses as in the novel.
Instead, we end with Bilbo reading a book—a Red Book—that turns out to be his own book, There and Back Again. The narrator promises that this is just “the beginning” and the camera closes on a shot of the One Ring in a glass case on Bilbo’s mantle.
And indeed, the next year would see the release of an animated The Lord of the Rings, but by Ralph Bakshi, not Rankin/Bass. It wouldn’t be until 1980 that Rankin/Bass would return to TV with a Tolkien cartoon, Return of the King, which is perhaps the oddest duck in the whole Tolkien film catalogue, being a sort-of sequel to both their own The Hobbit and Bakshi’s Rings.
Despite being a TV movie, Rankin/Bass’s The Hobbit has held its own in pop culture. It’s a staple of elementary school Literature Arts movie days, and it’s likely been producing Gollum-themed nightmares in children for four solid decades (and still going strong!). And given the muddle that is the 2012-2014 Hobbit trilogy, Rankin/Bass’s take looks better and better every day. Its idiosyncratic character designs are truly unique, even if the Wood-elves look like Orcs. Also, the songs are pretty catchy…
Oh, tra-la-la-lally
Here down in the valley, ha! ha!
Next up, Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings.
Austin Gilkeson formerly served as The Toast‘s Tolkien Correspondent, and his writing has also appeared at Catapult and Cast of Wonders. He lives outside Chicago with his wife and son.
The LoTR reread we did here (was it really 10 years ago? Yikes…) covered the movies.
I would’ve been 9 when this aired, so it’s weird that I have virtually no memory of it or what I thought of it. I was already quite familiar with the books, since my father had read them to me and my sister since childhood (he loved doing hammy voices, especially villains, and particularly relished playing Smaug and Gollum). So I expect we would’ve watched this as a family, but nothing about it seems familiar except Bilbo’s character design, a bit. My first-blush reaction was that I hadn’t liked it much because I had a low opinion of Rankin-Bass’s work in general; but on reflection, I realize it was their Return of the King TV movie I was thinking of (I still remember that “Frodo of the Nine Fingers” song). I know I disliked that one, and the impression I get from my vague memory is that I disliked it because it wasn’t as good as the previous version I’d seen, which would’ve had to be this movie. So that implies that I did like this one. Odd that I don’t remember it more.
“It’s odd, but the film goes to great lengths to avoid showing anyone actually being slashed or stabbed with a sword—even spiders.”
That’s not even slightly odd for an American animated film made for children. TV censors are very concerned about avoiding depictions of violence that children might emulate. Even if they got away with showing corpses on the battlefield, the actual stabbings and slashings would’ve been kept offscreen.
ROTFL. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always enjoyed the animated Hobbit, despite it’s many flaws (the depiction of the Wood-elves being the most glaring). Some delight in taking pot shots at it, but compared to recent Big-budget attempts, I think it holds its own. I was able to watch the original TV movie when it came out (yes, I’m old) though I don’t remember much about the experience, I had not read the book yet.
It was neither a lime-green couch (it was brick red), nor was it in a wood-paneled basement (our house’s basement was unfurnished, reserved for storage, laundry, and my father’s woodworking stuff), but I was that eight-year-old kid 41 years ago, watching the movie with my parents, and I was utterly captivated by this realization of the book I’d read and loved.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This was my first introduction to Tolkien as well (followed, in very short order, by as many of the books as I could lay my hands on; although initially the only thing I could find at the public library was The Two Towers, which was a bad place to start). I think it still holds up reasonably well; I’d be very happy for a remastered Blu-ray release or something.
This movie definitely had a strong, anti-war theme. Thorin, with just his small band (who are about to get slaughtered) refuses to yield and is handing out titles like “general” to his subordinates. When Gandalf explains they’re about to be attacked, the three leaders go from deadly enemies to deciding they’ve been best friends forever. After the battle, Bilbo finds one of the original dwarves and asks what happened in the fight. He says, “We won,” and dies.
@2, I think the author was saying the spider death effect was itself odd, not the basic concept of not showing violent death.
I have almost no memory of this one (though every screenshot rings a major bell so I clearly saw it), which is odd because I have such clear memories of both the Bakshi LotR and the Rankin/Bass RotK. Maybe it is because I already had a solid grasp of The Hobbit when I saw it, unlike LotR at the time, so it made a less formative impression.
I was 15 when this aired and had read the books something like 6-8 times in the preceding 3 years. I hated this with the fury of a thousand suns and may have turned it off in disgust at the first or second commercial break. Like many, if not most, teenage boys, I was judgey and gatekeepery. I’d like to think I’ve grown out of that, but this is something I’ve never been able to bring myself to try again.
Hot take: John Huston’s Gandalf is the best Gandalf.
Another hot take: This is the best movie adaptation of Tolkien’s work (narrowly beating out Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring).
Many of the designs are impossible to square with the books, but I love them and they still provide a lot of my default images for Tolkien’s work.
I, too, will only refer to Bard as Bard Reynolds from now on.
@7/Comfect: “Maybe it is because I already had a solid grasp of The Hobbit when I saw it, unlike LotR at the time, so it made a less formative impression.”
That could be the case for me too, I suppose. It probably didn’t live up to the version in my head.
“…it’s likely been producing Gollum-themed nightmares in children for four solid decades”
I am one of those children! I saw this on TV when I was 7, so 1982-83, and was so traumatized by Gollum that I refused to read the book even a couple of years later and therefore didn’t read LOTR in high school like everyone else. It wasn’t until the LOTR movies came out when I was in my mid-20s that I read the books. So I blame this movie for my Tolkien ignorance.
Fun fact: Gollum in this animated Hobbit was voiced by the guy (Brother Theodore) who played the elder Klopek in 1989’s The ‘Burbs. No one? Anyone else seen this wonderful film? No? Just me? Kids these days…
For years I knew both voices well, but never noticed this until more recently.
I liked it enough that when I saw a VHS cassette with it, I picked it up to show Jim (my spouse). I liked the songs, especially “The Greatest Adventure,” which I think DOES capture the sense of Bilbo as a middle-aged man in a rut, discovering that there is much more to life. Given the restrictions of the medium (TV, assumption for children), I think they did a great job. I would have liked Beorn to be included but, for some reason, the gentler/more nature-oriented Tolkien characters get left out all too often, providing an unbalanced view of Tolkien’s world.
I don’t remember ever watching it until I was an adult, but the first copy of the novel I ever owned/read liberally used artwork from this movie. When I think of some of the characters it’s the Rankin/Bass version I see.
I watched and rewatched and rewatched this as a kid. When I read it to my son these are the voices I hear in my head and try to emulate.
Music wasn’t a big thing in my home so for a long long time in my young life when people asked what kind of music I liked I would say Glenn Yarbrough.
@JLaSala – You MUST check out Brother Theodore’s wikipedia page. Dude lived a crazy life.
@ ScavengerMonk Oh yeah. The dude’s life looks like Don Quixote’s. Fascinating.
The character designs in this film were influenced a lot by Arthur Rackham’s illustration work (a particular favorite of mine). Check out Rackham’s illustrations for Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and this is immediately apparent. The cast is particularly good, with the great Paul Frees playing several roles (I believe he voices Bombur), and Thurl Ravenscroft sings in several songs.
I will go on the record to say that this is my favorite Tolkien adaptation (I didn’t care for Jackson’s movies and will never forgive him for giving one of Gandalf’s best speeches to Wormtongue). It’s the one most faithful to the source material, weirdo elfses notwithstanding. There was no compulsion to ‘improve upon’ the original dialogue.
Beorn was left out for budget and time constraints, but he is depicted in the companion book, in all his bearded, shirtless, gnarly-thewed solidity.
I was 12, and hadn’t yet seen Star Wars (I caught it when it was re-released the following summer), but I was completely enthralled with the animated Hobbit. We didn’t have a VTR (‘VCR’ wasn’t yet the universally accepted acronym) but I managed to capture the audio on my Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, and listened to it many times. Many of the songs have stuck with me, particularly Song of the Lonely Mountain and Goblin Town. I was disappointed with Beorn’s absence and some of the other small changes, but overall it was a delight. And it didn’t take 6+ hours to watch.
I still have never seen this (to my shame), but I did spend HOURS listening to the read-along book-and-record set in elementary school (a few years after the thing had aired) and knew that 24-page version backward and forward at one point. I even wrote a two-page “stage adaptation” of it, mercifully lost to oblivion. When I finally read Tolkien’s actual book in middle school, I was surprised to find how much longer and more complicated the actual story was!
I was that 7 year old in 1977. I remember the commercials leading up to it. My parents had no idea what it was, neither did I. It was a cartoon though, so I was down, and it was a cartoon, so my parents were cool with it as well. I remember thinking the 77,7 year old version of WTF while I was watching it. I also remember feeling really bad for Gollum because he lost his birthday present. I remember thinking the final battle was really cool and unexpected. I remember my parents being like WTF just happened.
Between this and Star Wars, 1977 was a seismic year in my development as a geek. I remember asking my mom to get me the book after I watched this, and a few days later I’d devoured it and noticed the “If you enjoyed The Hobbit and would like to learn more about them, their adventures continue in The Lord of the Rings” on the back cover. And that was that. Like the Jackson LOTR films, it gets the spirit right more than the letter, which is really the important thing. And it does in 80 minutes what Jackson failed to do in three entire films.
I also think this is sort of the last gasp of the hippie ownership of Tolkien. This was before D&D really took off and turned epic fantasy into the stuff of swords and monsters and battles and loot, and there’s definitely a pastoral, melancholy air to this, almost gentle, even with the scary monsters. And some of the scenes look like great lost Led Zeppelin album covers.
Agree that this is really a surprisingly accomplished adaptation, especially since high fantasy in hand-drawn animation had really never been attempted at this point (I wouldn’t consider Watership Down to be in the high fantasy genre exactly). Despite some missteps and some cringeworthy stuff (we haven’t talked about Smaug’s random red searchlight eyes yet, have we?), it’s an economically told, creative, and poetic film. And I LOVE that all the songs are left in, and have always loved Glenn Yarbrough’s reedy, 70’s-folk, evocative tunes for them. I’m also surprised that no one has mentioned Hans Conreid’s superb performance as Thorin. His deathbed speech in particular is beautifully delivered, and he and the storyboard team GET Thorin in a way that Peter Jackson almost 100% failed to.
Then again, I even think that there’s some legit merit in Rankin-Bass’ The Return of the King. “It’s So Easy Not To Try” encapsulates Frodo in the same way that “The Greatest Adventure” encapsulates this interpretation of Bilbo, and the fact that it uses the same melody as “The Road Goes Ever On” is heartbreaking. Not that I’m going to start defending the frequently incoherent plotting or the Orc techno song break. . .
My parents read us The Hobbit chapter by chapter at bedtime when we were small, and by the time this first aired, I was in high school and had read the book for myself several times over. What’s stayed with me most about the film over the years, though, is not so much the visuals — which were very, very good for that time — but the absolutely stellar and perfectly chosen voice cast. Not just Huston as Gandalf, but Richard Boone as Smaug, Orson Bean (!) as Bilbo, Hans Conreid as Thorin, and Glenn Yarbrough singing in the background. (Like Jane Lindskold, I totally imprinted on “The Greatest Adventure” — which is more subversive than you probably think it is, with its admonishment that dreaming in itself isn’t actually good enough.)
The Jackson films are gorgeous, and well made in their way. But the Rankin-Bass Hobbit is my Hobbit, and always will be.
This IS the Hobbit for me. I grew up with this. I had records and a picture book of it too and I listened to it incessantly. The Hobbit movies of recent years would have disappointed for no other reason than Smaug and Bilbo just sounded wrong. This version is cemented in my skull and always will be.
The oddest choice in this otherwise lighter version of this story is the choice ofkilling seven of the dwarves—as opposed to only three of the thirteen in the book (and even the Jackson films).
I was never frightened by Gollum, but the Red Bull in The Last Unicorn scared the crap out of me.
@23, the Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Return of the King did a really good job depicting Frodo and Sam’s relationship dynamic during the trip through Mordor. It’s just a shame that the rest of the movie is such an incoherent mess.
@23/mutantalbinocrocodile: “especially since high fantasy in hand-drawn animation had really never been attempted at this point”
Do you mean on television specifically? Since I think a number of Disney’s theatrical features would count as high fantasy. At least, something like Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, or The Sword in the Stone would count. Depending on how you’re defining it, the Fleischer Studio’s 1939 Gulliver’s Travels might count. There was also UPA’s 1959 1001 Arabian Nights, Filmation’s 1972 Journey Back to Oz, and probably others. Heck, the oldest surviving animated feature film is an epic fantasy, 1929’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, although it was silhouette animation rather than conventionally drawn.
@22: I think it was the best way to hand-animate Smaug’s ability to see through almost any concealment.
This is still the Hobbit for me. I liked some of what Jackson did with it, loved a bit of it, shook my head at a lot of it…and actually left the room for the later battle scenes. This movie is squashed by time constraints, but catches the high points of the narrative very well. I think the observation that it is “the last gasp of hippie ownership” is spot on, BTW. LOTR, which IIRC had more input from Jackson’s writing team, portray’s Tolkien’s love of peace and simple beauty between scenes of combat and monster-slaying; Hobbit sneers at, well, hobbits–and anybody like them; note Beorn’s transformation from a cheerful man with friends of his ilk to a loner who doesn’t laugh–and wallows in one grotesquerie after another. I was actually surprised that the moment of loveliness in Mirkwood got left in!
One good thing I can say about Jackson’s Hobbit is that his Smaug clears the high bar set by Rankin-Bass’s Smaug. Anybody who watches the Rankin-Bass production on DVD won’t get to savor the awesome vocals as Smaug bellows forth fire; they didn’t make the transfer from VHS for some reason. But if you have an old tape (and a player), turn up the bass! Even without that part, though, the voice acting makes it clear from the first word that this is a mighty villain. And his vastness, menace, greed, and brutality–and also his magnificence–are clearly on display, even though there are a lot of shots that basically pan over a still drawing. The animation team knew how to do a lot with a little.
Gollum is also scary; not hobbity enough, considering what he used to be, but so creepy that my preteen still doesn’t like to see him.
But then there are Rankin-Bass’s wood-elves. Good grief. When our family watches the movie, somebody is like to snap back at “Our peee-pl have suffard grehtly from de worrrrmm tru da yee-ahz” with, “Yes, he beat you with the ugly stick!”
Being only 3-and-a-half when this movie came out, I can’t really recall how much of my impression of The Hobbit came from watching it on TV (if I even did when it was first released?) vs. my father reading me a chapter each night before bed around the same time. I still have that (now very battered) 1966 Ballantine paperback edition on my bookshelf, and it just occurred to me all these years later that the Barbara Remington cover art fits in quite nicely with the Rankin/Bass aesthetic here.
I cast another vote in favor of the high-quality voice talent having elevated this one into a film that can stand up years later. Think what might have happened had they gone with the actors and voice-directing style more typical of Saturday-morning cartoons! But it should be no surprise, since by that point in time Rankin/Bass had established a good track record in that regard, having adapted various stories into formats that worked well for “kid’s TV” while providing some heft via name-brand voice talent.
I remember seeing this when I was 13. I was singularly unimpressed, like most early teens are with most anything.
I think about two years later I saw it again, after I had seen Wizards by Bakshi (*that* was a batsh*t movie). I had a much better opinion by that time, and had read The Hobbit in English class at school. My sophomore year English teacher was a cool old guy who wore sweaters every day and in hindsight may have been a bit sketchy. But he encouraged us to read without caring what it was. I thought the animated version was awesome. I think I watched the VHS tape a dozen times. I hated Smaug and I cheered when he went down. I loved how Bilbo constantly got them out of trouble without having any skills, much like my first rogue in D&D, who I would say “I assassinate the orc leader”, followed by the DM saying “how?”. Needless to say, I was a sorry rogue. I’m a much better ranger or paladin.
I recall being impressed not only by Smaug’s design, but by Richard Boone’s vocal portrayal of him. Alternately charming and threatening, when Boone’s Smaug begins a litany of his own fearsome attributes, one truly hears the welkin ring. And how appropriate, to have a dragon voiced by a Paladin…
Another one here who first saw it around age 9. I don’t have a very clear memory of seeing it for the first time – but it obviously made an impression, because my parents got me the record box set with full audio and cel art book. And that I remember very, very well. (I think I still have it around, somewhere.)
For me, this was the definitive version. I tried reading my parents’ copy of the book and bounced hard, and wasn’t able to get through it until several years later. (Though I hit LotR right after trying Hobbit and really enjoyed it; go figure?) The voice work, as several have mentioned already, was superlative in almost all cases. Not just the voices, either; the character design for Gandalf is still my mental image for him, as with Bard. Elrond, slightly less – but it’s still so much better than Hugo Weaving that there’s no comparison for me. This provided my mental image for hobbit-holes, Erebor, trolls, Sting, Smaug, and so much else. The handling of the Battle of Five Armies is far more in line with Tolkien than Jackson’s sensibilities; Bilbo and Thorin’s conversations before and after remind me of the spirit of Faramir’s ‘I do not love war, but what war defends’ speech when he meets Frodo.
The main ding I have against it, beyond the wood-elves, is the very limited animation, typical of Rankin-Bass.
I watched bits of this film once, and disliked it because I had read the book two zillion times and disapproved of any change to its perfection. But I’ve since watched two of the Jackson Hobbit films (I loved the Jackson LotR films) and this one sounds better than them. I might rewatch it someday.
I recall that I thought its version of Gollum wasn’t half-bad — a fair interpretation of his description in this particular book, as you say — if perhaps less alluring than the more humanoid one I fell desperately in love with when I read LotR. I believe the spirit of the “Riddles in the Dark” scene can never be fully captured by a portrayal that isn’t actually in the dark. But I understand the need for that in films, and try to think of it as being exclusively shown the way Gollum, not Bilbo, experienced it.
This sounds lovely! I had never heard of it before. The comment about “the last gasp of the hippie ownership of Tolkien” is enough to make me wistful.
@30/Jenny Islander: “LOTR […] portray’s Tolkien’s love of peace and simple beauty between scenes of combat and monster-slaying; Hobbit sneers at, well, hobbits–and anybody like them […].”
I thought the first Hobbit film started out fairly well, with the beautiful depiction of the caves in the time before Smaug and the dwarf song in Bilbo’s house after supper. But it quickly deteriorated. I was very disappointed when the whimsical, fun-loving elves in the trees were replaced by a bunch of super-serious, anemic figures who couldn’t even serve a proper feast.
I was the hypothetical child viewer in 1977. The cantina scene in Mos Eisley scared me more than the goblin attack in The Hobbit.
ChristopherLBennett @29:
Possibly mutantalbinocrocodile is thinking of some restricted definition of “high fantasy” in which fairy tales (e.g., Sleeping Beauty) don’t count. Harder to argue against The Sword in the Stone, though, particularly as that’s based on the sort of thing (the “Matter of Britain”) that Tolkien wanted to create a more specifically English version of.
I feel fortunate to be able to enjoy all the incarnations of the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, be it this very cartoon or the Jackson films (yup, even all three Hobbit films). At no point, thus far, have I felt my books threatened, nor my imagination. It’s all a win-win to me, and I’ve happily seen each adaptation bring in new readers. The Rankin Bass was certainly my first exposure, too.
I saw this as a kid and it changed my life. Spurred me to go read The Hobbit which touched off a life long obsession with Tolkien. I still watch it every couple of years and love it, despite its flaws.
This is a good write up, but I have one contention. You mention that the book dispenses with allegedly racist descriptions of the goblins/orcs. Tolkien was not a racist as evidenced in his collected letters where he gives a German publisher the what for when they ask if he’s Jewish and he responds that he is unfortunately not a member of that proud race. I think it’s better to say that he wasn’t always politically correct, but for his time he was rather progressive. I dislike retroactively projecting the PC war language on folks who were dead before that movement started. If he wrote his work today I have little doubt that he would write some things differently.
@38/Peter Erwin: I take high fantasy to mean stories set in alternate or past worlds with overt magic and supernatural creatures/entities, generally a preindustrial setting, and tending toward epic adventures, quests, and the like. It seems to be used as a complementary term to urban fantasy, which is fantasy set in a version of the modern, industrialized world.
I would have watched this on Betamax casettes in the mid-80s; it’s hard for me to remember if I watched this before I read the book. I think so; I was definitely reading the Lord of the Rings by 4th grade in ~1989. It really is a beautiful and economical little film. And yet it manages to capture so much; they crammed in all those songs that apparently were too silly for Jackson’s adaptations. To me, songs seem integral to Middle-Earth.
@38: I don’t think that Disney’s interpretations of either Sleeping Beauty or The Sword in the Stone feel at all like high fantasy. Not an insult, just a genre comment. Sleeping Beauty IMHO draws much more on the ballet interpretation and on Hollywood romantic tropes, and The Sword in the Stone, while a delightful film, is largely a comedy without T.H. White’s numinous elements. I’d say the same about the tone of Gulliver’s Travels (an intriguing film, but tonally mostly a combination of Fleischer-style rubber-hose comedy and 30’s operetta romance that sometimes kinda forgets Gulliver) and of The Adventures of Prince Achmed (which feels very much like the dream-logic of a preserved oral fairytale, and that seems to me very different from the tropes and pace of high/epic fantasy).
Though I’ll definitely grant you Maleficent, her castle, and her imps as an early, very successful cinematic version of a Dark Lord.
@41
Tolkien’s descriptions of the Orcs in LOTR have definite racist aspects–they are often described as “swart” and “slant-eyed”, and Tolkien makes it explicit in his letters that he thinks of them as looking like Northeast Asian peoples. The fact that LOTR is largely defined as a war between the West and the East doesn’t help, nor the fact that LOTR was published in a time when “Yellow Peril” stories were growing common. And Tolkien might have been a man of his time, but I don’t think that excuses his racism. Many people of the same time and generation were actively fighting against racism.
That doesn’t mean LOTR should be tossed aside, or that Tolkien was a bad man. As you say, he defended Jewish people to a Nazi publisher. LOTR, for all its flaws, is still a story centered on the struggle against oppression, and the belief that mercy and grace are what saves us. It’s a powerfully humane story, and I agree that I think a Tolkien of today would write something different (unlike, say, Lovecraft). But it’s still worth noting where Tolkien’s work falls short of his humanitarian ideals.
Part of why I didn’t get terrified by the goblin attack in 1977 (at age 8) may have been that I got a leatherbound hardcover of the book for my birthday in 1976, and had read the book twice before seeing the adaptation.
This movie started my forty some year love of fantasy right here. Sure, I had seen all the old Disney cartoons but they were more fairy tale type stuff. For me this was something new, something exciting. I don’t think I got up from the floor in front of the TV until the show was over, not even during the commercials.
I was that kid sitting in front of that old TV in 1977 watching this. I had also seen Star Wars just a few months earlier and had loved that too. If I remember right I saw Star Wars the summer between first and second grade for me so I would’ve been what? Five or six? Why does it seem like I was so much more mature as a child than my daughter was at that age? Is that a common thing?
So I knew what sci fi was but this whole fantasy thing was new to me. I had not read the Hobbit yet (or even heard of it), that was later in grade school, and didn’t read LotR until high school. So I had no preconceived vision of how Middle Earth should be or look like. This was truly my introduction to Tolkien.
Maybe that’s why I never saw any racism in Tolkien’s work while reading it because this is how I saw Middle Earth. This is what I thought goblins and orcs looked like. They were always monsters to me. Probably didn’t help that I started playing D&D and Merp (Middle Earth role playing game) in middle school so to me monsters were just monsters.
Like others have already said, the voice acting in this was perfect. And this will always be how Gandolf looks to me (although I think Ian McKellen was fantastic as Gandolf too). I have to say that I found the talking spiders way more creepy than Gollum and prefer these arachnids to what PJ did in the movies. I love the line “Sting? What is this Sting? We do not like this Sting!”, lmao.
My brother and I had the boxed record set from this movie, with the story book in it. I’m pretty sure he still has it, along with the two record Star Wars soundtrack from back then too. I have this movie on DVD and if I ever see it on Blue Ray at Best Buy I would buy it in a heartbeat!
Also, this movie was the catalyst for my obsession with comic books in my youth. The first comic I got was the old Marvel Star Wars series (the first six issues were based off the movie and then they continued) but that was all I was reading and it was just because I loved the movie. But then shortly after I saw this cartoon we walked down to 7-eleven to see if there was a new issue of Star Wars out yet. There wasn’t at that time but I did see this comic called Conan the Barbarian. Hey, this looks kinda like that Hobbit cartoon I thought so I bought it and loved it. Conan led to Spiderman and the X-Men and the rest is history.
One last thing, I was going to post this comment yesterday but ended up losing power last night. How is it that my Aunt in South Carolina can go through a tropical storm without a loss of power but here on a crisp, clear day near Seattle with very little wind I can lose power for around six hours? While the Hawks are playing too! I mean, WTF?!
I always liked the voice performance for Smaug in this version. Smaug shouldn’t have a British accent. A dragon should be, within his world, completely alien in every way, and his speech should be unlike the speech of any bipedal creature. I might have even given Smaug a slight drawl, and if I had been in charge of the film version (and I am second-to-none in my enjoyment of Benedict Cumberbatch in general), I might have cast someone like Trace Adkins or Sam Elliott.
I wasn’t alive when this came out, but I DO remember watching it later as a wee Jaime. That was before I read “The Hobbit” and, with all due respect to Jackson’s trilogy, the animated film remains the definitive version of “The Hobbit: to me. (While I am completely in awe of Andy Serkis’ performance as Gollum, I found the animated Gollum to be more chilling, and maybe more in keeping to what might physically happen to anyone that had lived “under the mountain” and in water for an unimaginable amount of time.) (Side-note: I’d be happy to partially live in the water if I could – but definitely not for as long as Gollum!)
@Kirth Girthsome: I am a huge fan of Eowyn (and probably identify with her far too much) and I agree 100%. I didn’t read the LOTR trilogy until I was a teenager (and have read it about twenty times since then). Wormtongue was a horrible, predatory character who had designs on Eowyn and kept trying to tempt and break her. While I don’t like “mansplaining,” Gandalf was a sympathetic, potentially non-gendered (I really don’t want to get into Tolkien’s world-building here)who was defending Eowyn and explaining her distress to other people who didn’t understand, so that they *could* understand. His speech meant SO MUCH to me when I first read it.
Also, can I just ask WHY no film version of “The Hobbit” includes what is possibly my favourite scene from the novel: when Smaug rolls over and his belly is crusted with gold and gems? I was just WAITING for that in Jackson’s trilogy
Awesome review. To this day the 1977 animated Hobbit is the most book accurate version there is.
Love so much about it and have watched it numerous times since my childhood.
I Loved The Movie & I Still Have The 45 rpm Record & Picture Book Of “The Return Of The King”. Does Anyone Else Remember This Line: “Turn The Page When You Hear This Tone- Ding
”
There was a major article about this film in “TV Guide” before the film aired. They showed lots of stills from the film & built excitement. I’d not even heard of Tolkien before then, & so was wide open to the movie. I imprinted on it hard, especially the music, and enjoy it still. The voice acting was indeed fabulous!
P. S. There’s a Maryland-area musician named Maugorn who sounds a lot like Glenn Yarbrough. He has a couple of videos on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=maugorn ; I enjoy all his albums.
“He looks vaguely like a vampire in a Looney Toons short who’s just hit his head.” is literally the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
Small point that has always stuck with me. When the men and elves show up demanding money from Smaug’s horde to pay them back for their losses, the elf-king says, “We demand retribution!” My vocabulary was big enough even then to go, “Wait, do you mean restitution?” Vengeance is no longer possible on Smaug, after all, and they weren’t blaming the dwarves for their losses.
Hi! I’m that kid! But no, no Darth Vader shirt. Merchandising was nowhere near as cheap or as prevalent as it is today. I had a “Star Wars” poster coloring kit I was lovingly filling in in my room. And I think for Christmas my parents splurged and got a 6-figure pack of action figures for me to split with my brother and sister. (I got Obi-Wan — my favorite character — and Chewbacca.) [Also, it was much, much less common to see merchandise of the villains.]
Okay, back to The Hobbit. My parents had read the books, so they did sit us down for the TV special. We were enthralled enough that the record version of the show was purchased quickly. I spent many hours playing it and pouring over the illustrated pages. This was how we re-watched things in those days. Eventually my mom started reading us the Hobbit as our bed-time story.
And yes, we were seeing the future of pop culture. But I was one nerdy girl in a majority minority classroom. This stuff made me weird. Teachers took my Star Wars/sci fi stuff if they saw it at school — and they didn’t return it. What was pop culture at school was AC/DC, Good Times/Jimmy Walker, and Jose Feliciano.
That what I enjoyed at home, with my family, is now everywhere is as surprising to me as it is to anyone.
Richard Boone’s Smaug is MY Smaug. I love the way he rumbles his very first lines. It’s a sublime and fitting portrayal.
And to Eowyn fans, I will always maintain that she is the true Hero of the Return of the King. Without her the Battle of Pelinor fields may not have been won.
For those who’ve never seen the record version some are talking about, here you go.
Note that some of this art was not used in the actual movie…
And for the pièce de résistance…
Take a moment to appreciate how the artist on this one depicted the One Ring. :)
Also, Bilbo’s foot here always freaked me out. But I loved this record and book, and the movie itself. I love the design of Sting.
I was already a fan of Tolkien’s work when this was released, so I was very excited to watch it even though at 20, I was probably a little older than its intended audience. Despite its flaws, I thought it was a very good adaptation of the books, and in some way remains better than the self-indulgent mess Jackson made of his trilogy. At the time the movie was released, there was an illustrated version of The Hobbit released using artwork from the movie which I received as a present. It remains one of my most treasured books.
@59: Interesting, that’s not the version I had. My cover looked like this:
…and the records had the Buena Vista label, not the Disneyland one.
Overall, the package looked more mature and less ‘kiddy’.
@58 I have that edition too!
Why did Smaug change color between covers?
i was born in October 1977, so I was blessed to grow up listening to and later reading the cassette tape version of this story book and watching this movie – and Return of the King – in rotation with the Star Wars trilogy on Betamax. Love the songs. Gollum didn’t look too scary, but his riddles in the dark were, and so was Smaug with his voice and his vision. I loved this so much that I resisted NyQuil during a Christmas cold to start reading a copy of The Hobbit I found on my aunt’s book shelf at age 8 (1985). It was way above my reading level at that time, but I knew the story from this movie and that helped me get through it. I enjoyed it much better the second time when I was 12, and continued with LOTR. My husband bought this and RotK on VHS during our first couple years of marriage because he was that 5-year-old on the couch and loves it, too. I was born in the best year, right? Right! I grew up as Eowyn and Leia and the princess from Voltron… and sometimes Maria on Sesame Street.
I was born in 1981 and saw this on VHS sometime as a young child. I remember enjoying the songs, being somewhat confused as to why Hobbit feet are hairy, and being fully and thoroughly TERRIFIED of Gollum. I used to leave the room before his scene came on and peek around the corner to make sure it was safe to come back and watch the rest of the movie. And he just kept getting scarier. I eventually stopped watching it because I couldn’t take it any more. The goblins never scared me at all though, funnily enough.
The spiders are what got me, the look of them. To this day, I will see something that looks like one of these spiders and I will shudder.
Regular spiders? Sure, whatevs. These? Aw hell no.
To me, this adaptation is to the original book as acid reflux is to the meal you ate a few hours before. Of course, it came out when I was an adult, so I looked at it with a more cynical eye than those who encountered it in their youth.
“As I watched The Hobbit, for the first time since elementary school, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see the film when it first aired on television forty-one years ago. I picture a child sitting on a lime green couch in a wood-paneled basement, wearing a Darth Vader t-shirt she got after she fell in love with Star Wars”
Our family room actually did have wood paneling, but it was on the ground floor, not in the (only half-finished) basement. The couches were black-white-gold, not lime green. The carpet was orange, but pile and not the iconic 70s orange shag. Darth Vader didn’t have a separate T-shirt; the one that was available was the movie poster. I didn’t have it, largely because I had a Captain Kirk uniform shirt instead. (I wouldn’t have been wearing it for watching this.) This would have been the year that we did my room up in NASA wallpaper, and stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
@45: see this is here where I disagree. Any sort of ‘racist undertones’ are only in the eye of beholder, and saying ‘Tolkien was a man of his time’ is almost disrespecting him. Tolkien was anything but a man of his time, he was unique in his views and ideals. The Orcs are not supposed to represent any real world ethnic group, they are not representing any real world culture one to one, just like Rohirrim are not representing any specific culture neither truly they are Anglo-saxons nor Vikings on horses though they may share similarities with both. Not to mention that the description of orc looks in a letter you mentioned is worded so: it’s not said they are ‘asian looking’ but are ‘degraded versions’ of certain phenotype but not an actual representation of said ethnicity. Tolkien expressed his dislike of allegory and claiming that it’s often mistaken for applicability:
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
Something similar can be said here. Stating that portraying how a certain race looks like in his world is an expression of his racism is reading too much into it. The Orcs as a whole are portrayed as minions and slaves of other power, the true threat that was Sauron and others like him. They are degraded but in the same time they are only effect of corruption by something far stronger. And if we are to base on the letters, Tolkien also wrote about Orcs:
“There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand.”
The Orcs in-universe were bred as a slave race, they don’t know any other life, they are what they were made. The war in question is also not an ethnic war of West and East, it does not represent merely invading ‘other’ ‘alien peoples’ it’s the war waged by one tyrant who wished to rule the world. Even in story characters say that Sauron’s slaves deserve pity, even in story characters wonder whether the individuals of slave armies are ‘actually evil or simply misled, coerced’ (hell even some Orcs are “driven unwillingly into Dark Lord’s wars, they cared only to end the forced march and escape the whip” paraphrasing the line from book). Besides Tolkien also wrote of other human cultures from Rhun and Harad, the Men of Darkness:
“The Men of Darkness was a general term applied to all those who were hostile to the Kingdoms, and who were (or appeared in Gondor to be) moved by something more than human greed for conquest and plunder, a fanatical hatred of the High Men and their allies as enemies of their gods. The term took no account of differences of race or culture or language.”
…
“… Also it must be said that ‘unfriendliness’ to Númenóreans and their allies was not always due to the Shadow, but in later days to the actions of the Númenóreans themselves. Thus many of the forest-dwellers of the shorelands south of the Ered Luin, especially in Minhiriath, were as later historians recognized the kin of the Folk of Haleth; but they became bitter enemies of the Númenóreans, because of their ruthless treatment and their devastation of the forests, and this hatred remained unappeased in their descendants, causing them to join with any enemies of Númenor. In the Third Age their survivors were the people known in Rohan as the Dunlendings.”
Besides if the looks were to represent something like ‘beauty-good, ugliness-bad’ there are also subversions beauty that is simply evil, and ugliness that still shows good (Druedain are described as ugly looking and yet are still good, even Hobbits are often termed to be not specially beautiful but simply average) and the skin color, if the perception is that “all the good peoples are light skinned” then it’s false, since there are several mentions of how various ‘good peoples’ are still “browner of skin” (Harfoots), “swarthier and shorter” (some of the folk of Gondor: “were reckoned men of Gondor, yet their blood was mingled, and there were short and swarthy folk among them whose sires came more from the forgotten men who housed in the shadow of the hills in the Dark Years ere the coming of the kings” ), or among Easterlings there are worthy and faithful folk (Bór people). Orcs are sometimes described as ‘black skinned’ also doesn’t mean that all bad folk are dark skinned: Saruman who fell to evil wasn’t dark skinned, nor was Wormtongue, neither were the Black Numenoreans (or generally the Numenoreans who were corrupted and build an oppressive colonial empire and fell under Sauron domination), they were the same ethnicity as the Dunedain and yet they fell to evil serving Sauron, even light skinned Elves may at times fall into evil. I would say that there are few literary works that could stand beside The Lord of the Rings and honestly claim to be more anti-racist.
And this in the end for those who would think that Tolkien was particularly…nordic :).
“Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction’. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other pans; but it is not ‘sacred’, nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a ‘Nordic’. (From a 1967 letter)
“The placing of Mordor in the east was due to simple narrative and geographical necessity, within my ‘mythology’. The original stronghold of Evil was (as traditionally) in the North; but as that had been destroyed, and was indeed under the sea, there had to be a new stronghold, far removed from the Valar, the Elves, and the sea-power of Númenor.”
Okay, first, I have to ask – are you the same Austin Gilkeson who wrote The Most Metal Deaths of Tolkien????? Because I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard at something I’ve found on the internet (perhaps with the exception of discovering the My Immortal Harry Potter fan fic but that’s for a whole different reason…).
I wasn’t alive in 1977 and I don’t know when I saw this movie – I know I have, because many of the images are familiar, and I can hear some of the voices/songs in my head. I was given The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring by my uncle when I was in the sixth grade and was a huge fan ever since then – but I don’t think I really saw this movie until I was an adult (college, maybe). I didn’t love it – the animation is a little weird to me and I probably bounced off some of the differences. I don’t totally hate the Jackson Hobbit films (I think the first one is quite good, actually) but in retrospect, I can definitely see how this one has its advantages. I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings animated movies though; I was warned away from them by a friend who really liked this movie, but not the others.
I read the Hobbit to my son last year and he’s getting interested in such things, but he’s not quite ready for Lord of the Rings. We’ve shown him a bit of the PJ movies but they’re a bit too long/intense for him. Maybe I’ll see if I can find this and show it to him :)
#68: If you click on the “Tolkien Correspondent” link in Mr. Gilkeson’s bio above, the article you mention is at the very top of the list. That would appear to be conclusive evidence, I think.
Definitely an interesting looking movie.
My sixth grade teacher that the LP soundtrack of this. And when I say soundtrack, I mean it’s the whole show’s audio, not just songs. With an extra book with animation stills and everything. He used to let us borrow it. I bet that’s somewhere on eBay …
I loved this cartoon when I was a kid! My parents told me stories how I was captured by it. Hehe, good times.
I remember it was deep-deep morning when almost everybody among our neighbors in city block were asleep.
And I wantwto make it known. I. Love. Monsters in this cartoon, they were scary as f*k, amaziing, beautiful, insane! Character design is amazing. Voice acting is good (even though I watched a Russian translation, soundtrack of translator was weaved upon original, and their reach intonations were heard, and oh that Smaug).
Golem terrified a shit out of me, as goblins did. Yet though scary, they were Amazing. My mom says that movie affected my art, she says I got a liking to their weird noses, or other aspects of it. Now that I know more about how it was designed, I guess I was affected by Arthur Radham’s style, huh? Though second-hand. We didn’t have his books in Russia back then (dang it, I do not even properly remember my age back then. Was it already russian federation, or was still USSR? Ugh.)
I appreciate… hard work that artists and animators put into this movie.
This cartoon and The Flight of Dragons were cartoons that I treasure in my memory. They are a magical thing. I will raise my children, showing them a copy of these at least once.
Oh, I forgot to mention that this was my first meeting with Tolkoen’s stories. And it was good.
I liked the book Hobbit later. I caught cold just before my patent bought it, and it was with me through the illness. This book helped me to take my mind away from pain and sickness.
And yes, I imagined all characters how they were in cartoon ^_^
Lotr book translated to my native language was too heavy for me. Couldn’t fight through it.
Loved Lotr movies. They were magical.
Felt meh about recent movie Hobbit. Monsters are not as amazing as in cartoon; too much war and World-of-Warcraft aesthetics; obsession with Glorious Fighting. >_> I prefer cartoon’s hippie take on violence. Because I saw the war, modern at least, and read record on historical ones. It’s NOT what Jackson depicted. He is obsessed with wrong aspects of it. He lives in virtual reality, or computer game. And indoctrinates sh*t to kids that take his imagery for granted. If you show war and fighting, at least show it right! Provisioning lines. 95% of marching; 5% of actual engagement. Horrors of wounds. Nobody safe. Dirt and sh*t. Losing brothers in arms in unexpected, useless encounters. Saying f*k to the glory. Thunder and horror of masses of angry bodies screaming to scare away or hit. Tears, dirt, FOREST of spears pointing in your very heart. Beating down screaming living creature into revolting disgusting bloody pulp; being beaten by others; disfigured face, the whole head of strange shape and for; like breaking wings to a beautiful fairy queen; destroying what was beautiful. Fearing not the enemy you see in front of you in chaos or shield wall; but fear for for one random enemy you can’t keep eyes on – slightly to left or to right; or flanking or already behind your back; just trusting to your mates around, faith, hope, uncertainty; are they good enough to protect you? Rivers of men flowing around on wast battlefield; breaking morale; nobody wants to fight for the last men. No plot armor, no Warhammer-like or DnD like heroes that can take on dozens of mere men and slaughter them all – three opponents already spell doom.
@bewell Thanks for mentioning depiction of Beorn in artbook. I googled it, and it looks gorgeous, especially with how he holds Gendalf’s hand. Interaction!
I first saw this movie in ’77 on Thanksgiving Day when I was 9. Like others have remarked, this movie was the one that introduced me to Tolkien, and its images remain my basic “template” for visualizing Tolkien’s world, especially hobbits. One thing that bothered me for years after acquiring the VHS version was the suspicion that the film had been “cut” from its original broadcast version to make it fit on the tape. The reason for this suspicion is Bilbo telling the dwarves, whom he has just freed from the spiders’ webs, to “Run to the wood elves’ clearing!” Though no wood elves had been mentioned to that point! A little later, after fending off the spiders, Bilbo goes seeking his companions, whom he finds at “the clearing of the wood elves.” But when he finds them, he’s in for another surprise: “The wood elves had returned, but armed for battle! The dwarves, weakened as they were by their encounter with the spiders, gave up without a struggle.” So, I long thought that something must have been cut from the VHS version. The release of the DVD didn’t correct the omission, so I gather that there never was a scene with the wood elves feasting.
@74: I’ve always noticed this quirk, too! Only as an adult do I understand that it probably means some initial encounter with the Wood-elves was in the script, but nothing ever came of it and they just let it be.
@31 Ian
You said:
“I cast another vote in favor of the high-quality voice talent having elevated this one into a film that can stand up years later. Think what might have happened had they gone with the actors and voice-directing style more typical of Saturday-morning cartoons!”
Agreed about the high quality voice actiong, but it does include some excellent Saturday morning cartoon talent:
Hans Conried (Thorin) – The Woody Woodpecker Show, Rocky and Friends
Paul Frees (Bombur) – The Flintstones, The Pink Panther Show
Jack DeLeon (Dwalin) – Fantastic Four, Emergency+4
Don Messick (Balin) – The Flintstones, Scooby Doo
John Stephenson (Bard) – Wacky Races, Jonny Quest
About the East vs. West business, sounds more to me like an allusion to the Cold War, which was just starting to heat up when LOTR was being written.
It was a black-and-white tweed couch, I was nine, and my whole family of Tolkien-loving nerds had gathered to watch it in the family room (except my brother, who was three and thus already in bed). I read the trilogy that year; we had just moved from New Jersey to Texas, I hated everything about Texas, and I had no friends. Perfect conditions for reading the trilogy, I think. (everything’s fine now. I have many friends)
The goblins gave me absolutely terrifying nightmares and inspired a serious reluctance to into dark areas alone. I have loved this movie since I saw it, and I always refused to show it to my children because I was afraid that they would laugh at it.
I was that seven year old in 1977. My sisters and I didn’t start out with the movie bit with a record that came with a picture book of illustrations from the 1977 movie. Knew that record by heart long before we got the movie in 1982. Then we had it memorized. But my older sister and I would lay on the floor with the picture book and record and listen to it in the 70s. We had the wood panel walls but it was in the den. We didn’t have a basement. No Star Wars shirts either as my dad was still under the false impression that it was a bad movie. Still haven’t figured that one out! Anyway we were never afraid of any parts of the record although I have to wonder if that is where my arachnophobia came from… nah! I was always terrified of spiders! And I still refer to most as Shelob! I love the books, the movies, and especially the songs from the animated movies. As an artist I was influenced early on by the illustrations too.
It’s too bad Tolkien died four years before this came out, I feel like he would have loved it. Charming, beautiful, and much more true to his creation than the PJ travesties (just talking about the Hobbit movies here. I love PJ’s LOTR movies.)