Lord of the Rings

lol, this Soviet LOTR is almost unwatchable, but kinda fun to flip around through.

The techno fight in Moria is great.

Lothlórien a bunch of new age nonsense confirmed.

Ah but which new age

Lol @ Lorien as "a complete spa day".

Like Tolkien's equivalent of the spa scene in Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

Or is that where the reference comes from?

haha i was just referring to spa days! but i think someone mentions a "warm bath" upthread.

Anyway, our episode on the Rankin-Bass Hobbit is up!

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/25

Also I found out what I could have watched that night instead:

https://www.ultimate70s.com/seventies_history/19771127/television

anybody who was in the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, which I rented over and over as a kid

Does everyone have movies that they for some reason rented repeatedly when it would have been cheaper to just buy a copy?

My parents definitely let me take out Willow and Army of Darkness many times.

Lothlórien is truly the Enya of places

Well, yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frTPnVRecxs

still sad they didn't use that in relevant scenes in the film

I mean it was kinda fated she'd end up on the soundtrack of the first film regardless. I'm just happy they found room for folks like Elizabeth Fraser and Sheila Chandra too, among others!

others like billy boyd

Should have used Rush' "Rivendell" - Geddy sounds even more like an elf than usual.

Gandalf's faithful steed, Cygnus X-1

But the Ents can’t help their feelings
If they like the way they’re made

I dont want to eomer the joint but lads the borders of ilm are over that way

xp

I mean how great would the sundering of the fellowship have been soundtracked by the battle portion of By-Tor & the Snow Dog?

That xp is the equivalent of strider offering me out in front of my entire band tbh

stoked to have that ep be my gateway to the podcast, Ned! in the queue for this week.

tbh i'm not sure we would have known where/how to buy The Hobbit on VHS in the late 80s. new release VHS was pretty expensive until right around that time, and I don't think stuff stayed in print and on the shelf that long. you can see why the families with HBO all had numerous hand-labeled cassettes with three unrelated movies each, recorded in the pathetically noisy "EP" mode. whoof.

you can see why the families with HBO all had numerous hand-labeled cassettes with three unrelated movies each, recorded in the pathetically noisy "EP" mode. whoof.

*whistles idly*

like i'm sure there was a VHS section at Sears or w/e, but not with a deep back catalog? i have no memory of ever browsing through such a thing, which surely i would have done for hours while my parents looked at boring grownup stuff, had it been an option.

Listening to Ned's episode now, and yeah, the fact that Bilbo specifically sends the thrush off to warn Lake-town is an interesting change from the book to the movie. It addresses the sense of randomness somewhat, since Bilbo gets to share the credit. Personally, I'm not sure I like it more. I like the strange old thrush just lingering nearby, cracking snails, and operating on his own initiative.

The whole thrush/raven world is a lovely detail in The Hobbit not really having an equivalent in LOTR. The eagles are the eagles but otherwise there's just that one little comment from a fox seeing the Hobbits asleep during their Shire walk.

there is the whole existence of radagast, who is implied to have a vast network of semi-sentient birds (co-opted by saruman).

that last "co-opted by saruman" bit might be a detail from the film, now that i think about it

He used radagast to entice gandalf to a meet iirc

Read the intro and prologue to lotr today and the discussions itt def enriched it for me.

Got emotional!

!

:-)

I mean im sure its clear from the thread but these books meant a lot to me at very difficult periods of my youth

Dad used pick me up a volume after a dentist visit, worked out neatly tbh

<3

Youll say perhaps if id have had more than three visits to a dentist before i was in college id be better off now and i wouldnt necessarily disagree with that

But i will say that reading lotr in a morphined adolescent frenzy wasnt the worst way to take the trip neither

Anyway tolkiens writing on the process, the timings, the meanings etc in the prologue is deeply warm, wise, humourous and human and anyone who has enjoyed this thread should take five mins to revisit that alone imo

}3 tbh xp

I came to love Laurie Anderson in a teenage post-surgical opiate haze

O stuporman

pic.twitter.com/PffvDO3nvK

— CJ Ciaramella (@cjciaramella) April 5, 2021

i read in a letter Tolkien wrote to WH Auden that he sort of saw himself in the Ents, in that they had the most of his “voice” iirc

which made me love them all the more

hurm

His shade game is strong when he sidecuts at critics of the books or those who insist on allegorical parallels he denies

"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer"

Plenty of gandalf waspishness in that

love it

It is pure.

loved the Rankin-Bass podcast, Ned! great thoughts from everyone, and y'all all have very good "radio voices" i think!

i especially love how much you come back to the LP. reminded me that also grew up with it, also on a Fisher-Price record player, and probably some of the "rentals" i remember are just me listening back to the album again. probably explains why SO much of the dialogue is really burned into my brain, at the level where any time i hear "mutton" i think "nothin' but mutton to eat." i don't think it was the double LP with the complete thing, though... but maybe?

anyway, once you started talking about that, i decided to pause the podcast and listen to the album first, to get in the mood and bring back the vibes. the copy i have now is one i grabbed a few years back when i saw it in the bins someplace; the cover doesn't match what i remember from childhood, but i could be scrambling things up. it's one LP with a lot of songs trimmed down or eliminated, as well as much of the dialogue. so basically taking the film's already very economical edit and turbocharging it. god knows what it would mean to a fresh arrival, but as just a way to relive the movie without watching it, it did the trick. i love how even in this hyper-compressed version, the depth of the voice performances adds all this space and mood and gravitas. there's just no way to rush through john huston's delivery. agreed that the major voice roles are all fantastic (with brother theodore's gollum maybe being the most inspired), and that preminger's thranduil is bizarre (but memorable!).

next to the voices the best thing about the film is the art style. nothing else really looks like it, and while it's incredibly 1970s it also gives it this weird out-of-time storybook magic for me... maybe that's just growing up with it, idk.

i don't miss the Arkenstone, but of course i've read the book far fewer times than i've seen the movie, in my lifetime... so things like that and Beorn almost feel like bonus deleted scenes when i encounter them. i do think the breathless, episodic story construction of the film does drain out some of the charm and nature-hike qualities which i think are present in this book (if less prominently than in LOTR). i've said this before, but imo the ideal hobbit movie is essentially "imagine Rankin/Bass had been in a position to make a 100-minute theatrical film rather than a 78-minute TV special." that's all it really needs... fill in some gaps so it isn't QUITE so breathlessly jumpy, let the characters breathe a little, and there you have it.

also, yarborough's songs never really bother me... again maybe because they're comfortingly familiar as part of the tapestry of the film. try as i might i can't *really* hear them as the work of a successful 20th century musician in his mid-40s choosing to employ a ridiculous amount of vibrato and lilt...... i just hear some bard of middle earth. pathetic i know. tellingly, i have a much easier time scoffing at his cheesiness for "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" (wtf), in a film i didn't see until i was probably 15.

whither the wtf re frodo nf

what the frodo

Sing along!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzl1iDuE-2I

The Ghibli connections are so interesting. I wasn't aware that they used a Japanese animation studio, but you can totally see how that might have influenced the feline/lupine dragon design.

https://lenafrank.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/smaug.jpg

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/studio-ghibli/images/3/30/Catbus.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20181024032653

https://cdn.myanimelist.net/s/common/uploaded_files/1448519241-203158f56b7d51d7d6037de6c3cadb03.jpeg

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/studio-ghibli/images/3/30/Catbus.jpg

the Minstrel of Gondor is such a dick