[Formendacil]

It has been an equally long time since I've watched either Bakshi's LotR or Jackson's LotR, and (I think) about as long since I saw the Rankin-Bass cartoons.

I say "thank goodness" to all three of them.

Unlike just about anyone in my age group, I saw the Bakshi and Rankin-Bass movies before Jackson's movies ever came out, and I had already read the books a few times--unusual since I'm right in that college-aged group that was the upper end of the "saw Tolkien for the first time in Jackson's movies" aged group.

My reactions, when I first saw Rankin-Bass and Bakshi were that they got it all wrong. Even so, I was young and foolish enough that I watched them two or three times, or more. At the time, I was rather annoyed at the liberties taken with the storyline. Legolas!! Where's Glorfindel? As a result of those movies, when Jackson's movies came out I was, on the one hand, really looking forward to what sort of a good job could be done in terms of visuals... but also burned once about storylines, and went in very wary.

Looking back after half a dozen years and more since FotR first came out, I have a different appreciation for the Bakshi movie and the Rankin-Bass Hobbit (the Rankin-Bass RotK, on the other hand, plays so poorly, it is a joke). At this point in my life, I have not watched Jackson's movies in a couple years, and I don't want to. My mental vision of the LotR was scarred first by Bahshi then by Jackson, and I've done my utmost to forget the ravages of both. But they are different sorts of ravages, I would say. Bakshi, and Rankin-Bass, scarred me in their visuals and audios. They simply did not have the clarity or seriousness or colour that I imagined in Middle-earth. Nobody looked quite like I imagined, and no place looked grand enough.

Jackson, on the other hand, captured many (almost all) of the visuals spot on. The scores were exactly the epic feel LotR deserved. But... it wasn't Middle-earth anymore. It was comic Merry, Pippin, and Gimli, girl-power Arwen, angsty Aragorn, and teen Frodo. Not that these were NECESSARILY the artistic presentations Jackson was trying to give, but they have a distinct flavour of it to me.

By contrast, I have a renewed appreciation for the Bakshi attempt. The audio-visual of the movie fails abysmally, and the movie can scarcely be redeemed since, after all, movies ARE an audio-visual medium; but it has my respect, at least, for a serious, faithful job. Much of the problem is simply monetary.

Things like pantsless Aragorn and Viking Boromir, I suspect, are as much elements of the movie being dated as we'll start noticing things about Jackson's movies in twenty years.

Nowadays I've just sworn the movies off altogether.