[Kalimac]

Mwahahahaha! I will always be a staunch defender of the movies, if only for the hours of entertainment they provided for me and my various Tolkienphile MST3K-oriented friends during our various spells (in college) of being broke and bereft of entertainment in a 3,000 person town in the middle of nowhere. For $10 (video rentals were 3 for $3, and liquid refreshment and snacks not much more) we were set. <P>The Hobbit cartoon isn't bad, comparatively, and so is actually the dullest of the three to watch. Except for the wizened little blue Elves who look like they just escaped from Smurf High-Security Prison, they actually play it pretty straight. Bilbo is lamentably cute and they inevitably cut the best lines, but the only truly humourous thing was the way the continuity sort of went on and then off again; for example, the scene where Bilbo and Dwarves are fleeing the spiders and Bilbo tells them "Quick, over there, to the Wood-Elves' clearing" Considering that neither the viewer nor Bilbo has been given even a ghost of an inkling that Wood-Elves even exist, this was rather...prescient of him. Smaug is OK, even if his eyes do look like lasers. Alas, they cut the Sackville-Bagginses at the end.<P>Bakshi's LOTR is - well, everyone's pretty much said it, and I've teed off on that one on other threads before. (S)Aruman the Red! The scene on Orthanc looking like a bad disco! Gandalf the Naysayer! Sam the Vicious Moron! ("There's that Mt. Doom again, Mr. Frodo" in a tone of voice that implies that that dratted Mt. Doom has been following them for the last hundred miles). Legolas the fey Elf! Aragorn the Indian! Boromir of the Horned Helm! (Where WERE their pants, anyway?) Elrond in a T-shirt! Gimli who says so little that you can't figure out why he's there! Galadriel, as played by Daphne from "Scooby-Doo" and who can't even pronounce "Celeborn" correctly! Ah, the list goes on. And let's not forget those Orcs. Who could?<P>In a sick way, I sort of wish that Bakshi had made his sequel. If nothing else, it would have been interesting to see what he did with Shelob.<P>Rankin-Bass ROTK. Worse than Bakshi, in some ways, and in that way even more entertaining. The minstrel singing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" for some reason is weirdly reminiscent of the minstrel from "Holy Grail" ("They were forced to eat the minstrel...and there was much rejoicing."). He sounded very...seventies...and had a way of singing background music at highly inappropriate moments, for example when Sam is standing with the Ring, trying to figure out whether to claim it or not, suddenly he has a vision of a perfect life after the Ring is destroyed, with the minstrel's voice in the background singing about how happy they were in the old days, like "Mindless butterflies." Undoubtedly the most memorable line in the thing, along with "If you never have to say hello/Then you'll never have to say goodbye." This means we should never talk to anyone, or what?<P>Another major problem with ROTK (besides the fact that poor old Sam, as usual, gets drawn as a moron yet again) is the fact that during the scenes where Sam is trying to rescue Frodo from Cirith Ungol, there really isn't a lot of talking, it's mostly going on his head. They solve this by lifting verbatim huge chunks of Tolkien's text and having Sam speak them as soliloquies. While normally sticking to the text is a good thing, having Sam say out loud to himself "A plot of earth is all my need and due, my hands to use, not others to command," and then go back to the Happy Moron routine they've foisted on him is rather incongruous. <P>Final ROTK moments: Elrond looking like a Tinky Winky who has grown up and really gone off the deep end (he has Christmas lights around his head for some reason) Merry and Pippin looking like even bigger dolts than Sam, Gandalf telling them that hobbits will one day become men, Faramir, Gimli and Legolas just DISAPPEARING from the story (which makes the Denethor scene go something like, "I will burn, everything will burn!" "No, Denethor, you must not do this." "Well, I'm going to anyway! Servants, come here!" "Well, OK." Gandalf basically shrugs and walks away). Gollum the Frog.<P>Eesh, sorry, didn't mean to go on so long. To sum up; if you've read the books, the movies are entertaining as all heck, if you haven't...they're probably not. I think of it as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" only for the Tolkien crowd. And there's redeeming virtue even in that.