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Episode 23 - Tolkien Adaptations Part 1: The Rare, Weird, and Wonderful
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As the first part of a new series, Alicia, Grace, and Leah are joined by Producer Tim to discuss some of the lesser-known (ie. non Jackson/Amazon) adaptations of Tolkien's works. After each of us shares our personal philosophies about adaptation and adaptational changes in general, we dive into a rundown of Tolkien adaptations of every kind - from infamous foreign TV adaptations to stage shows, radio plays, video games, and more. Queer connections? Samurai Boromir? Swol-um? Potato Eagle? It's all here, and then some!
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Transcript
00:00:15
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace, and I'm here with my co-host, Leah. Hey. And Alicia. Hello. And our producer, Tim. Sup, lodgers?
00:00:31
Speaker
Thank you for joining us. Go ahead and settle into your chair with a bit of lembas spread or um food concentrate, food stuff with no chemical properties, which could be discovered, which makes it superior to other cakes of wheat meal. Refer to letter 210 for the punchline of that joke because jokes are always best when they have to be researched.
00:00:54
Speaker
Because in this episode, we're talking about adaptations of Tolkien's works. In some ways, this is a very timely episode. In this year alone, we've gotten a second season of a big-budget television show set in Middle Earth, new major film announcements with Peter Jackson attached, Jackson's Return of the King came back to movie theaters for a 20th anniversary screening within this past year, and there's an animated feature film coming to theaters this December, War of the Rojo Reem.
00:01:21
Speaker
And we're talking about basically none of them. Yup. Screw all those. In this first episode on the topic of adaptations, we're not focusing on these projects with impressive scope and even more impressive budgets. We'll get there down the road, which goes ever on and on. But in this episode, we're focusing on the adaptations that came before them that fewer people know about, remember, or have seen.
00:01:45
Speaker
There are actually more than two dozen adaptations that fit that criteria, including those that never made it through production. Wow. ah So I just wanted to take a quick note here to sort of talk about the different sort of perspectives or attitudes that people take with regards to adaptation. I actually wrote a paper for a MythCon this year on Adaptational Change, particularly as it pertains to the Fremen narrative in Dune Part 2, the Denny Villeneuve films compared to the original book. Nerd.
00:02:19
Speaker
Did you say this on this fucking Tolkien podcast? I was going to say, it turns a step fucking too far, man. But I had this paragraph in that paper that I'm just going to read. So ah there are multiple schools of thought regarding adaptational change, particularly the extent to which an adaptational work should, quote unquote, remain true to its source material.
00:02:42
Speaker
Certain fans desire maximum fidelity to the source material down to minor plot points, while others see adaptation as an opportunity for a fully transformative work, departing significantly from the original and some prefer a level of fidelity somewhere in between these extremes, more concerned with maintenance of the core themes and characterizations present in the primary work.
00:03:06
Speaker
So I have some idea, but maybe for our audience, each of us could talk a little bit about where we fall along that spectrum of like absolute fidelity to lore, whatever that means, versus fuck it, do whatever you want. Who wants to go first? Okay, someone who's not, who does not have a kitten trying to nurse from their hand. We're leaving that in.
00:03:30
Speaker
year old
00:03:34
Speaker
i mean i'll go first because i feel like i'm probably the most contentious person here i am of two minds about adaptation i either want it to stick as close to the actual story as possible and be like a faithful adaptation. So I'm thinking like 80 to 85 percent. Like I understand some changes need to be made and some changes need to be made that will actually make the story better. Or I wanted to be batshit crazy, but funny.
00:04:07
Speaker
Whether it's intentionally funny or not, because some of my favorite adaptations, I mean, it's like the Muppet adaptation school of art, right? I want it to either try to be faithful or I want fucking Statler and Waldorf, like, yeah, that's what I want.
00:04:29
Speaker
I think I fall towards that end of the spectrum more often than not. I'm definitely so ah somewhere in the ah fuck it, do what you want kind of school of thought. I think part of it is because I went to film school and kind of lost my mind. And I was kind of like, yeah, adapting shit is really hard.
00:04:50
Speaker
And also like trying to please a lot of people, most of which are not fans or necessarily fans of the original source material, but pleasing the people who are paying you and all of your peers and how you kind of need to balance making them happy with keeping fans happy, I guess, has really kind of come to inform a lot of my thoughts. I definitely used to fall when I was younger. I definitely was more of like a stickler and kind of being a lot more upset about changes from certain things. These days I'm very much more, you know, like, oh hey, yeah, hell yeah, that's a that's a wild choice to make, or but that's a ah fun choice to make, or like, oh yeah, I get that i get why they did that.
00:05:34
Speaker
i I don't know I guess I'm I'm a lot more again I feel like I've lost my mind in it to a degree so so something be sort of like you know like fuck it whatever man do it do what you want yeah I I tend to enjoy a very faithful adaptation except when there are times when that is not a good choice. Like, it's not a good choice to keep in something which no longer fits the spirit of the work, or it's not a good choice to keep in something that is simply doesn't translate to the medium that you're trying to bring something into.
00:06:14
Speaker
and And I think the tone of a piece matters to me too. So if it's a very serious adaptation and tone, I'm going to want to see it be pretty faithful. If it's lighter and looser and supposed to be having fun, like I i enjoy those sort of more wild and crazy out there like, hey, we went a weird place with it, but we actually connected to the core of the work.
00:06:39
Speaker
And I think what matters to me the most is that I can see where an adaptation is going back to the core of the work. I want to be able to see, even if we make a completely different choice, why that choice was made, why it makes sense, what purpose it serves. And if none of that is apparent, I'm going to be annoyed. yeah Totally valid. and Totally valid.
00:07:06
Speaker
I think I come from a similar place in that I really do like to see the core themes pulled through from the source material. But besides that, I'm pretty open to significant changes being made, especially if those are changes that I'll say sort of update the work, bring it into a more modern sort of modern context kind of thing. I'm not talking about like you know taking a historical work and setting in the present day, but just like bringing in some of the zeitgeist and stuff that's happening in the world at the moment.
00:07:35
Speaker
and sort of blending that with the core source material itself. There's probably a few things that I have like stories I quote hold very close to my heart that are probably mostly comic books that I would be like, I would like to see 100% faithful adaptation of this. And it probably that probably has to do something with the fact that comics are already a ah visual medium. And so there's already a visual piece and and even like framings and stuff like that to inform the film adaptation.
00:08:04
Speaker
But with books, text-based, entirely text-based stories, I'm pretty open to making significant departures from the original text. Part of me says that because I've seen some adaptations where they've tried to stay very faithful to the original text that have ended up being absolute fucking hot trash.
00:08:23
Speaker
I think I've seen those movies too. So if it's a choice between an adaptation that tries to sit way too close to the books and the pacing just doesn't work when you adapt it to a screen or something like that, or there are elements that you just can't film because they would be too brutal or gory or something to actually see portrayed on a screen, then I'm fine with there being significant departures from the source material.
00:08:49
Speaker
I think also just things like if the tone of the adaptation is not one that lends itself to overarching narration, but the book itself had a lot of like character thoughts instead of dialogue, putting that narration in there makes for a really shitty adaptation in a visual medium or whatever. So I want the adaptations to be responsive to not just the source material, but to the audience that they're working with and and reaching toward. Yeah.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And then there's also a lot of things that you can read on a page and understand what's happening. But I'm thinking things in terms of like magic or whatever, like I can read on the page that magic is happening and so and so is conjuring whatever spell or exerting whatever magical influence over this character where you can't just show that on screen without some sort of visual shorthand or visual or audio.
00:09:43
Speaker
Sort of shorthand and and that is an adaptational choice right is how you depict that and how you bring that thing that is clear to a reader reading the words on the page but would not be clear if you just tried to show a character thinking really hard at another character or something like that right like yeah.
00:10:02
Speaker
are like an internal sort of experience of a character that a character sort of like sorting through their own thoughts or kind of reflecting about like he it's like if you were to directly translate that to the screen you just have a person on the screen sort of staring off into the middle distance so So yeah, if they're wrestling with a particular choice or, again, kind of delving back into that sort of magic discussion, are they wrestling with somebody in their mind? How do you translate interiority onto the screen? yeah You know, that's always that's always a discussion, I think, for but visual adaptations in particular. But I also think but trying to translate that into like an audio medium can be tricky, especially because it can so often sort of trying to sort of represent what a character's thinking and
00:10:49
Speaker
sort of their interiority, if you're trying to translate that to a purely audio medium, it turns into just like kind of a monologue or, you know, like a voiceover sort of sort of thing. And it gets very, I don't know, it it can get a little bit lost in the weeds a bit. Or that's what I've kind of found in some horror adaptations.
00:11:11
Speaker
I agree. There's also something that I always try to hold as a viewer of an adaptation, especially because like I, most of us here that were involved in film school, art school, theater majors, et cetera. So I am always trying to hold both my preferences as a viewer of what I'd like to see and what the original thing was against what is reasonable and adaptation.
00:11:37
Speaker
And whether I like it or not, I sometimes have to recognize that, yeah, the thing I would have loved to see doesn't translate well into this medium. And I don't have to like that, but I do have to appreciate the work that was done. Yeah. And there's there's a tick tock from Brandon Sanderson, who's then another sort of like mythopoic author. And he talks in there about an adaptational choice in Lord of the Rings.
00:12:06
Speaker
that is about the decision to have Sam leave Frodo behind for a bit and then come back and he talks about exactly that thing, Leah, the interiority, trying to bring that to the screen. You can't just adapt the thing that Sam does because if we don't have that interiority and a way to show it,
00:12:27
Speaker
Everyone who hasn't already read the books has no idea how great Sam is. Yeah. And so I a lot of times I can categorize that under thanks. I hate it. But yeah, you had to do it. Yeah. Oh, my God. I am very sorry for what I'm about to say. But that's kind of like a um a reverse Fifty Shades of Grey.
00:12:51
Speaker
out Because they take away the inner monologue of Anastasia Steele, it actually makes that adaptation way better because it's not as misogynistic. It is a way more feminist-like ah narrative in the first movie.
00:13:10
Speaker
I can't speak for the rest of the movies, but like taking away that inner monologue really did a lot of good. What? Someone's inner goddess and inner cheerleader are not valued members of the the adaptations of us? This is Lea learning that Alicia has seen the Fifty Shades of Grey movie Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have to be revealing clearly that I read it. Yeah. Yeah. Can we do like a watch along like with the three of us where I'm like discovering this for the first time? yeah lay On the dark on the book and the movie. oh my yeah
00:13:49
Speaker
We'll fill you in about the shit in the book, and also it'll just be an entire primer of it. And this is how you don't do kink, actually. Yep, yep, exactly. Right, right, right. Look, it is an educational tool. Yeah. If you want to hear more of our thoughts about Fifty Shades of Grey, go back to the Aang Bang episode. We discussed it at length. Exactly. There you go. There you go.
00:14:15
Speaker
yeah yeah we oh shit ah okay Speaking of previous episodes, in terms of Tolkien's views on adaptation, we covered a fair bit of this in our 11th episode, which is Tolkien would hate this podcast, part one, fans interpretation and adaptation.
00:14:33
Speaker
Check out that episode for more of that context, but it mostly boils down to to paraphrase what Alicia said right before we started recording. I will hate it, but I'm amused to see you try. but And I will happily take the money that will come my way. harder harryy or Very important. important.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, opposite end of the spectrum from, fuck it, it's it's cool. But i very important to add in, I will happily take your cash because I have four kids to feed. And genuinely, I can't think of a single response that I have seen of Tolkien's to any adaptation made within his lifetime that was anything more than grudgingly accepting.
00:15:21
Speaker
most that he He was highly critical. He did have ideas of how his vision should come to various mediums, and he was absolutely willing to point out where there were discrepancies. He was very willing to provide us with that. Ian, George RR Martin are very similar in that way.
00:15:41
Speaker
But that didn't stop there from being adaptations. That didn't stop him from releasing the rights. That didn't stop him from giving feedback along the way of what he hoped to do and guide particular adaptations to. So I think we have to be very careful while... and definitely acknowledging all of the curmudgeonly sort of perceptions he would have. That didn't mean that he didn't think there should be adaptations, and it doesn't mean that people are doing something wrong to adapt this work into a variety of different mediums today. Amen.
00:16:16
Speaker
So we've broken this down into kind of several different categories just to try to group adaptations by their similar sort of mediums, right? So we've got television to film, we're going to talk about some of the like radio play adaptations, we've got some like stage productions to talk about, video games, and we're also going to talk about some adaptations that never actually made it to fruition as well just because somebody set out to make an adaptation of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings or what have you does not mean that it actually came to fruition. And then we also have some fan projects that we're going to talk about too. So jumping right in we're going to start with television and film. And the four of us are all relatively familiar with most of these through
00:17:06
Speaker
a sort of tradition that started with the Mythopoeic Society's online events where I was kind of looking for some evening entertainment to do for anybody that doesn't know I am the conference steward for the Mythopoeic Society. And so I'm part of the organizing for all of their events. And we were looking for basically some like evening activities that were sort of, you know, more low key, just kind of fun. People could just join in and drop in and out.
00:17:31
Speaker
And so my thought was this was right around the time if everybody remembers sort of early in COVID when that chronitelly Russian Lord of the Rings adaptation sort of resurfaced and and went viral. And so I was like, that looks like fun. Why don't we sit down and watch that as a group at one of our online events? I can i think it was the first online MythCon. We only did one that was like MythCon and then we switched to online seminars. And then we basically did like a sort of Rift Tracks Mystery Science Theater kind of like tearing it apart because some of these do deserve to be torn apart a little bit. With love. With love. Exactly. Lots of love. With affection. Yes. And then we started doing it with more. So we did some others as well. And so we we would do like one or two maybe if they were short.
00:18:21
Speaker
for a single event. And yeah, it was a lot of fun, but I think we sort of started to realize as well that it was really interesting to see sort of which characters or scenes or elements each of the creative teams decided to include or omit in their adaptations. So I think, you know, if you were to look at all of these together, all the ones we're going to talk about here,
00:18:44
Speaker
they probably end up covering every scene from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And I will say as well that you can find them all on YouTube with like English subtitles. so and i I'm going to try in the show notes as well to include. I do have a playlist as well of all these adaptations so that you don't have to go like hunting for each of them.
00:19:05
Speaker
But yeah, it it is kind of interesting to like think about like if you were to edit it all together, like would you actually have like like a really super faithful... like, ooh. The most just faceless adaptation of Lord of the Rings ever. yeah and like Kind of amazing. That'd be kind of amazing to see.
00:19:26
Speaker
There's only one version of Scouring of the Shire to choose, and we'll get to that. Oh yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say. but But there's a couple of Tom Bombadoules, which is... yeah boy there pre Spoilers.
00:19:38
Speaker
So yeah, chronologically speaking, the first ever adaptation of any of Tolkien's works in a visual medium was The Hobbit. It was an American adaptation by Rembrandt Films. Came out in 1961, and it was basically one of those sorts of projects that just got made because they had to, or they were gonna lose the rights. They were not gonna fulfill the licensing agreement that they engaged in. And it is, quote unquote, animated.
00:20:06
Speaker
If you can really call it that it's pretty much like a camera like panning across like some storybook painted kind of images. And a lot of it is in the seems to be similar to the style of if anybody knows the like Disney artist Mary Blair. If you know like that really distinctive art style of the backgrounds on like Sleeping Beauty for instance.
00:20:26
Speaker
or like the it's a small world designs but for the rides, that's who the art really reminds me of. It's very vibrant, very bright, like for a kid's storybook. Yeah. It's not like watercolor, but it's like more like gouache or something like that. But there's like a really lovely, I think that the images themselves, like even though there's like really no actual real animation in it, I think that the images themselves are actually really cool looking.
00:20:52
Speaker
i think that they They kind of remind me a bit of the very infamous Valentin paperback covers, you know, like the psychedelic kind of emu sort of token covers. So i like I kind of have a fondness for this one. I think that this one's really out there. It's one of those kind of fucking sort of things.
00:21:13
Speaker
And it's about as faithful to the novel as those Valentine covers are to things that actually occur in Lord of the Rings. The thing whole thing's less than 12 minutes. There's a princess of Dale that sort of begs Bilbo to help her retake Dale from Slag, the monstrous lizard, instead of Smough. Slag.
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, and like there's I just don't know why they made some of these changes. Trolls that that Bilbo encounters are called groans instead, and they look like they're made of wood. I'm not really sure why. They're like kind of halfway in between like a troll and an ant.
00:21:50
Speaker
Wild. Gollum's like a hairy little like gnome kind of guy. In fairness to this comparison to the Valentin book covers, presumably someone on this production team had access to the novels, right? Like these choices were made after reading.
00:22:11
Speaker
but yeah and This is very much like a, how do we make this marketable or whatever. yeah I really enjoy that like inserting superfluous female characters really dates back to the actual first entity. It's a tradition for the Hobbit. Oreo was not the first. Misfessionists can die mad about it. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.
00:22:33
Speaker
but This adaptation only had one screening in 1967 with some like random people. They just got off the street. They gave them the money for the admission so that they could say these people paid to see this animated color adaptation of The Hobbit, which is um all the contracts stipulated. It didn't stipulate how long it had to be or anything like that or how faithful it had to be or whatever. It's basically just, yep, we did it.
00:22:59
Speaker
amazing he please amazing
00:23:06
Speaker
So then as you're going to the next chronologically in terms of visual television or film adaptations, you've got, and I am so sorry because I do not speak Swedish, and I'm going to make this it very incorrect and so I'm going to apologize in advance, Swedish adaptation in 1971, Sagan Amringen. It's about 30 minutes long.
00:23:32
Speaker
live actors inserted into hand-drawn backgrounds. It's inspired by a musical album by Bo Hansen that was inspired by Lord of the Rings which it uses a soundtrack sort of a the vibes are like psychedelic rock jam band with a lot of organ. Yeah we have that. I just remembered this one Yeah, I have that album. And yeah, it I dig it, man. I i dig it. I haven't gotten stoned yet and listened to this album. I need to do that. I was going to say, I i i need to like take mushrooms and listen to this album and and see see where it takes me.
00:24:13
Speaker
Well, the plot only takes itself from Bilbo's buck birthday party to the fellowship leaving Rivendell, and there it leaves off. we can We can all jump in here with a few of our favorite things about it. So there are gender swapped roles in this, which is nice. Three of the four Hobbits are... I don't have a list of the actual cast because it's lost to the ages. I couldn't find it anywhere online. But three of the four Hobbits do appear to be played by female actors.
00:24:41
Speaker
oh And um this isn't the only adaptation I'm going to say this about. It does feel a lot like stage actors who are cast in a film production, like maybe, the you know, the national Swedish theater or something like that. I don't know. This is also the one that has the giant ring. Like it feels like, oh, yeah, you know, the the Lego set like Lord of the Rings that where the ring is like larger. Yeah, exactly. Larger than the end of any of the the figures. It's about to that scale.
00:25:12
Speaker
oh man But one of the unique things in this, and I think this is, as far as I know, the only time this happens, the Hobbits not only see the elves marching west, but as they do in the books, they actually meet up with them and like break bread with them and and have like a little meeting with them. Which again, that's something in you know the 50 plus years since we have never seen an an adaptation.
00:25:35
Speaker
And no one gives a shit about Gildor. Yeah. We do get Tom Bombadil in this Swedish adaptation. We also get Old Man Willow and Glorfindel. This is one of the only adaptations to give us Glorfindel. That's crazy.
00:25:56
Speaker
Maybe the only one. I don't know if Glorfindel pops up in any of the others. Okay, this is fun. and Technically, there is an actor who was cast as Glorfindel in the Peter Jackson movies and will sign like trading cards and things that way, but of course has very little screen time if any, no lines. You see him over Elrond's shoulder in one fucking scene. I was gonna say. I know exactly who you're talking about.
00:26:23
Speaker
I'm actually afraid you may not because that's a different actor.
00:26:30
Speaker
So is that the guy like wandering in the background when he's talking? No, that's actually CGI. We always want to know what's up with that guy. He's actually an actor who will sign things as like the actor who plays Gorefandel and like sign them as Gorefandel. That's cool. and And the really best substantiation that we get that this actor was cast as Gorefandel is that there's a trading card game or something where he is the image of Gorefandel and he what it is the same actor who was in the background.
00:26:59
Speaker
of the films. So technically, technically, there's the most like 17 different asterisks on it, sort of a Glorfindel and the big budget ones. Hashtag not my Glorfindel. This is really like the only adaptation here where you actually get the character of Glorfindel. And he like helps heal Frodo and and like takes him on Asphaloth to Rivendell. Like it was really cool to see that.
00:27:28
Speaker
fascinating switch up there, though, in trade. There's no Boromir. Well, we don't need Boromir if we're ending in Rivendell. That's pretty much it. We've formed the entire fellowship and leave Rivendell with no Boromir. Yeah, no, fuck him. Who needs Boromir? Maybe it's care you where Boromir doesn't exist and the fellowship never breaks. The fellowship breaks before Boromir. Excuse me.
00:27:59
Speaker
But the rest of the fellowship never breaks. Speaking of the Council of Al-Ran, in this adaptation... For some reason, like 10 minutes of this 30 minute adaptation of Fellowship of the Ring is the Council of Elrond. No, I mean, that's how it feels like when you're fucking reading the book. It's just like the book where it's like a full third of the book is at the Council of Elrond. Okay. I know the Council of Elrond feels like a third of the Fellowship of the Ring, but it is not technically in terms of page count.
00:28:31
Speaker
It is the longest chapter in all three of the books though. and yeah and And strangely Elrond also appears to be wearing one of those like aluminum space blankets. Like that was what his costume appears to be made of. It's like reflective silver material.
00:28:47
Speaker
like one of those emergency like bivvy sort of blankets. yeah Yeah, like FEMA had to come to Rivendell. All right,
00:28:59
Speaker
next chronologically, we get two of the more famous non massive budget adaptations. And that's the boxy and the Rankin and Bass. ones. Rankin Bass chronologically is The Hobbit in 1977 and Return of the King in 1980. But with that caveat, we're going to talk about that one second. We're going to talk about the boxy film first, because as you talk about a Lord of the Rings adaptation, that's what you got there.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, so there's kind of a whole long history to this that I know several YouTubers have done pretty good videos about if you're interested in the whole production. But the script is originally by Chris Conkling. But Peter S. Beagle, yes, that Peter S. Beagle actually did basically a second draft and a punch up, which I think is pretty fascinating. This one is pretty famous, I think, for a lot of reasons.
00:29:51
Speaker
And a lot of good reasons and also kind of a lot of like weird reasons like Ralph actually himself is kind of iconic as an animator. i I kind of feel like we don't really get to see sort of his best work here because he was sort of doing a lot of experimentations with rotoscoping.
00:30:09
Speaker
to more or less a sort of effect, I guess. In some ways, like the Nazgul rotoscope effect is actually like pretty effectively pretty creepy, especially when yeah especially when they they first encounter the hobbits. On the hard other end of the spectrum, the goblins and the orcs are kind of, it kind of looks just like they kind of slap them in on top of a ah weird backdrop.
00:30:35
Speaker
So this this one's kind of all over the place. Peter Jackson kind of famously mimicked and directly imitated a lot of, famously, the shot at Bilbo's birthday party of the moment where he says, proud feet. Basically, that's a direct adaptation from the Ralph Bakshi shot of that same moment.
00:30:55
Speaker
But yeah, I feel like a lot of people probably encountered this as as younglings and especially as they were first finishing the book and reading the book, probably in America. And I think that they it kind of imprinted on a lot of people. There's a lot of really like funny moments here, which I again, I think sort of make this sort of famous in a lot of the collective memory.
00:31:18
Speaker
It's weirdly faithful to the book, but it only goes up to Helm's Deep and Gollum plotting to lead Frodo and Sam to Shelob. So it's pretty much only to about almost to the end of the Two Towers. So it's the Lord of the Rings, but there's a whole big chunk missing. You've probably seen the images online of these, but very famously in this adaptation is the pantsless Aragorn and the Viking Boromir.
00:31:45
Speaker
Gondor has no pants. Gondor needs no pants. Exactly. Exactly. There was a pantsless Aragorn, a Bakshi Aragorn cosplayer at Dragon Con this year. It was so good. Excellent. he Even he went up on the stage like that, evening a brief, and he did the tripping over his sword that is in the animation and that they kept in. Oh, my God. It is very important that knowledge of these adaptations do not die. Well, that one lives on in a meme, so we're good. Yeah. Yeah. the longer run forever
00:32:21
Speaker
yeah Strangely, I had never seen either the Bakshi or the Rankin Bass in their entirety until earlier this year. I finally sat down and watched the whole thing like I'd only seen bits and pieces of them up till then. Yeah, if you kind of want to get into the history of this, this is kind of a wild production, but I did want to drop in this.
00:32:40
Speaker
fact from my my other life as a bad TV and film enjoyer. Apparently, David fucking Carradine offered to play Aragorn in this movie. I can't even imagine what an amazing movie that would have made.
00:32:57
Speaker
I'm just like dying at a the idea of David Carradine as Aragorn in this animated movie. I don't think I even really knew that David Carradine did like voice acting on top of like live acting. but His voice is so iconic that it doesn't surprise me. like but i I feel like Aragorn would have been totally miscasting him. I feel like he should have been Saruman or something like that. yeah like me It was David Carradine.
00:33:27
Speaker
Kung Fu, The Legend Continues, he was Bill and Kill Bill. He was Bill and Kill Bill, but he's a very prolific B movie and and ah TV actor. A part of the Carradine like family, ah like yeah your legacy family of acts.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, very most famously for for kung Kung Fu and and martial arts roles. So I'm just like i'm like, now I'm trying to like cast the rest of this movie with other like, you know, 60s and 70s actors, which I'm just like, thats maybe that's a project for another day. But but yeah, I kind of have a lot of affection for this. Again, I feel like it does, some of the animation in this,
00:34:10
Speaker
It isn't great, but I feel like that they took some swings and I kind of admire it for that, you know? So moving on more or less chronologically, the Rankin Bass ones are where my nostalgia is. I've talked about this one or two times on the podcast before, but the gentleman who was the scriptwriter who wrote the Rankin Bass Hobbit and Return of the King specials was Romeo Muller. And I grew up in the same town where Romeo lived in upstate New York. And Romeo was Santa. That was just like his other thing he loved doing. And he he wrote all of those like Santa Claus is coming to town and Frosty the Snowman once and everything too. But I also grew up knowing that he had written The Hobbit and Return of the King.
00:35:04
Speaker
That's very cool. Another thing that's like really notable about the rank and bass ones is what the animation history is, because especially for The Hobbit, it was animated by Top Craft in Tokyo, Japan. That animation team went defunct and reformed as Studio Ghibli under Miyazaki. And so there is a link between this particular Tolkien adaptation and all of the Studio Ghibli works.
00:35:34
Speaker
You can see it, like you can see some of that influence bleeding through from the Rankin Bass films into like later Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli for sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of like musical time in there, surprisingly. Some time skips and everything. We go from Bilbo's birthday party in Rivendell to Frodo and Sam and Mordor. Yeah. The frame story is basically Frodo's celebrating with Bilbo in Rivendell and reminiscing basically about in Return of the King. yeah in return In Return of the King, I should say, Return of the King pretty much covers just Return of the King. They kind of like sum up the rest of the the action in a really quick sort of like, oh yeah, by the way, this guy is a king. So, you know, it's all cool, I guess.
00:36:19
Speaker
A lot of people sort of think that that the Hobbit and Return of the King were like that Rankin Bass had done the Hobbit and then when the Bakshi version failed to go further than it did then Rankin Bass decided to do Return of the King to like jump in after there and and tie things up and sort of create it.
00:36:42
Speaker
as a trilogy or whatever. And that wasn't the intention. Rankin Bass was already planning on doing Return of the King. However, if you have a memory of like watching all three of those in a row as a trilogy, that would be because there were home video releases that did that. There are a whole bunch of weird rights hijinks and who buys who and whatever. So that is definitely a reason why people have that recollection.
00:37:10
Speaker
Some of the songs are just absolutely incredible. Yeah, the songs in both, I think, I mean, it's sort of like they're by that team of Rankin and Bass. It's sort of like they they kind of come up with some pretty iconic bangers, I guess, of our childhood. Yeah, I really like a lot of these songs. I mean, some of them are completely, I mean, I should say all of them pretty much are completely ridiculous, but that kind of they're kind of endearing, you know? Yeah. Is the really warbly proto of the Nine Fingers? yeah Is that, that's the rank and bash, right? Not the back sheet. Yeah. The cast of this is like, is baller. The minstrel, Glenn Yarbrough, who has a very distinctive voice, but they got a lot of folks to provide Zoe sobers for both of... Orson Bean was Frodo, I think, right? Yeah. Orson Bean was Bilbo and Frodo in Return of the King. And Paul Freese, who's been in a lot of, a lot of their stuff.
00:38:06
Speaker
It's Tony the Tiger, isn't it? I think so. Yeah. And like, you know, Casey Kasem was Mary and Roddy McDowell was Sam. Like, oh my God. And in The Hobbit, John Huston was Gandalf. He played Gandalf in both of the those films. and Paul Freese. And also there was a few other like mainstays of the Rankin Bass sort of productions. Like you you would recognize their voices, you know, like if you if you've seen a lot of those things, you would know them. But yeah, like The Return of the Kingcast, I think is pretty baller in a lot of ways because you're like, what, Casey Kasem's in this? Are you crazy?
00:38:45
Speaker
and good Yeah, it's wild. The Hobbit in particular is pretty faithful to the book. to generally speaking in terms of like how broad the adaptations can go, the the script won a Peabody Award.
00:39:00
Speaker
Which I think is wild. I didn't realize that and I discovered that and I was like, wow, that's amazing. Which did not stop critics from also calling it an abomination. You cannot please all of the people all of the time. I have actually never watched any of these animated versions all the way through because I cannot like do it. I can't do it.
00:39:23
Speaker
I have one where there's a whip, there's a way, and then i I just piece right out after that. It's going to happen, Alicia. We're going to make you sit down and watch it. Where there's a whip, there's a way is one of my favorite things. It's amazing. It's so catchy. It's so good. And you've got to, you know, where there's where there's a whip, there's a way.
00:39:48
Speaker
With the whipcrack in there, it's so important. it is yeah oh i chef it's It's giving marching band 100%, like deep memory of marching band unlocked during that song.
00:40:01
Speaker
As you say, is that the trauma? That's why you can't watch it all the way through. but It's so good because it goes so over the top, defies some expectations. But also, I genuinely like this is one of my soap boxes. I genuinely think that that adaptation in that song does so much more to get at the heart of what Tolkien is writing about with Orcs and what he's writing, how he's writing Orcs in Return of the King.
00:40:29
Speaker
then totally almost any other adaptation, like really the next line after that iconic like where there's a whip, there's a way is we don't want to go to war today. Yeah. So yeah I just I love that. Just unironically love that song. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And and the the Internet is big, mad lately. We'll talk about Rings of Paris season two at some point, but about the orcs being humanized in season two of Rings of Power and be like, yeah, bitch.
00:40:59
Speaker
go back and complain to Rankin Bass, because they did that shit first. They go back and complain directly to Tolkien. Yeah. For real. For real. Excuse you. This sounds like you both haven't read and also have not seen the cinematic masterpiece, The Rankin Bass. Specifically, the musical iconography, like just where there's a whip, there's a way. Yeah.
00:41:25
Speaker
The body winning where there's a whi there's a way. Thank you. Amazing. So I did also pull out something from my personal archives here, and that is ah you in the town where I grew up, there was for for one year, ah there was a quarterly humor magazine published called The High Filonion, and it it was published in The late 1970s like 1979 1980. And most of it is absolute nonsense. All these little in jokes that only the people in this like 500 person town would get or whatever.
00:42:06
Speaker
But there's also a section where they interview local famous people because we had a strange number of local famous people where I grew up. Like one of one of the interviews is with Pat Carroll, who was the voice of Ursula and the Little Mermaid. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Yeah.
00:42:22
Speaker
And so there's a two-page article about Romeo Muller that I will will find a way to link in the show notes or whatever or put up on the social media. But there is a little reference in here to him working on The Hobbit. And it talks about, quote, his most recent achievement was an animated version of Tolkien's The Hobbit. I personally would have preferred to use the real characters.
00:42:48
Speaker
And then it goes on to talk about his process and everything like that. So I do also just love that it's something that people in my community knew about, knew he was working on and everything. That it was something that folks were excited about and everything. And that there's this weird little record of this this tiny humor magazine that talks about it too. So we'll we'll share those just in case anybody wants to read the um article.
00:43:13
Speaker
Very cool. Going forward then, we we're into the 1980s now, and we get The Hobbit, Union 1985. It's the first one I'm the one with four. Me too. I wasn't alive yet. and I love the name of this one. It's fantastic. It's the fabulous journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit, across the wild land through the dark forest beyond the misty mountains there and back again.
00:43:41
Speaker
It literally sounds like Bilbo wrote that title. right yeah yeah correct This was fun that we watched again at one of the online Myth-Cons. It's kind of a trip. I love this kind of stuff, but I think we're we're kind of going to be talking a bit about some of the non-English and so specifically like Soviet and Finnish and other adaptations, which I think bring a really, again, kind of a a wild sort of aesthetic, I guess. They give us a chance to see the story through a completely different cultural lens. And I think that's really valuable actually, as we start to look at adaptations. Yeah, I think it's really cool.
00:44:27
Speaker
I think one of the interesting through lines of these like Eastern European kind of adaptations is that they generally have a frame story narrator. Yeah. one yeah And the the narrator in this one is the professor, like it's obviously supposed to be Tolkien and it's kind of set up like an Alfred Hitchcock presents.
00:44:47
Speaker
It's a very Soviet version of Tolkien kind of thing. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. This was again ah in Soviet Union, so they did not have a budget at all. But they do their gosh darn best. The puppet of Smaug I think is actually kind of amazing.
00:45:11
Speaker
The puppet of the Eagles bearing away Gandalf, less so, but... That's not this one. That's the Soviet Lord of the Rings. Yeah, that's the next one. This is a different one. This is the next one. Okay, we'll edit that out, Tim. This one just has the Smaug puppet. The Smaug puppet is interesting because they actually reused the Gollum's hands for Smaug's hands. Oh my god. Yeah, the fucking old Greg-looking Gollum with like sticks and shit growing out of them.
00:45:41
Speaker
I can't believe this is where old Greg came from. Yeah, it really feels like it. And they actually cover more of the riddles. Like, i I don't know. It's been a while since I've read riddles in the dark, but it feels like they almost cover all of the riddles that are actually in the chapter. There's definitely more in this than there are in the Jackson Hobbit.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, more than in most adaptations, yeah. I will say, I think the reason that we had to reuse the puppet hands is because this next item is where 60% of the budget went and that is to glitter candle. Yes, that's right. A lot of glitter in both the beard and the hair. So much, so much glitter and such an interesting color palette.
00:46:24
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Thorin is very orange, like bright orange hair, like tangerine orange hair and beard. What a choice. And then his costume matches his hair. And I'm going to tell you, folks, the fucking upload quality on some of these videos is trash. Oh, it's like four pixels.
00:46:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's like 360p kind of thing. And sometimes it's like it's real hard to see where the hair ends and the actual costume begins. It all kind of blends in together. Sometimes it kind of looks like Thorin's whole costume is just hair. Oh my god.
00:47:02
Speaker
I mean, that is pretty fucking Tolkienian though. Like the dwarves in the Hobbit are very colorful in the book. And they've been pared way down for the Jackson adaptation. ands mut line I mean, I don't think he was thinking like Daegloneon, but...
00:47:24
Speaker
kind of a Kool-Aid orange. Yeah. And this is the first one where we get like a lot of psychedelic guitar and the soundtrack. All the adaptations up till here, if it's had like modern flavored music, it's been more folksy. Now we're starting to get more into like rock entering the equation which is strange and doesn't really match but then there's also a lot of singing in these Russian adaptations and the the singing and the more folksy songs definitely have a very like Russian and Baltic kind of flavor to it which yeah you know I definitely never heard that reading the books or anything but
00:48:03
Speaker
Like, you know, I can, obviously if you grew up with that sort of of frame of reference, then you may have, you know, heard the songs and stuff from the books and that kind of timber, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of them, like they they almost border on Gregorian chant. Yeah. Yeah. Sombre. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:25
Speaker
I really enjoy watching these because like some of the choices are just like, some of them are like swinging for the fences and others are like, yeah, we have like $2 to make this. So we but we got, we can't make it work. Unfortunately, we came in under budget. Yeah. Some of them clearly had some budget, but just used it in really puzzling ways. Exactly.
00:48:50
Speaker
Exactly. Like the glitter budget. Yeah, the glitter budget was very big. Separate one item for sure. That's an interesting through line too. I'm pretty sure that like Gandalf's costume in The Hobbit was not actually, ah the Peter Jackson's The Hobbit was not actually inspired by this, but he also has like glittery stuff in his scarf, right? Like there are metallic threads woven into that scarf.
00:49:18
Speaker
Flutter means magic. You know, Gandalf the Gay. Yes, exactly. So um chronologically, we still stay in this region for the next adaptation, which is Carranatelli, 1991, Guardians of the Ring is what it translates to, and it's about two hours long. It only adapts fellowship, and there's definitely something infamous about this production. There's many things infamous about this production. So some of these budgets clearly had different priorities, and you were trying so hard to be nice about this.
00:50:04
Speaker
We need everyone to know that Tim is helping on our screens here by acting out the points that he is trying to make. But basically, instead of having any sort of semblance of Gandalf riding a giant eagle to safety,
00:50:25
Speaker
they basically hold up a stuffed a pigeon like right in front of the camera lens and have Gandalf flap his arms in the background. Which is what Tim was portraying for us. I know that this is an audio medium, but I just need people to envision this visual.
00:50:44
Speaker
I just, you really have to get across the horror of what this thing looks like. It's like a fully academic pigeon kind of thing. Okay, so old people used to like carve faces into apples and then let them wither. It looks kind of like a bird version of that. Of an apple head doll. Yeah, and he's not just in the background flapping his arms, he's also just like,
00:51:12
Speaker
crouching and like moving back and forth like he's surfing while c flapping his arms. We'll post a picture. I will 100% post this on social with no explanation.
00:51:27
Speaker
It's a teaser for this episode. It's a true thing of beauty, I have to say. We've made it into a reaction emoji on the Mythopoeic Society's Discord server.
00:51:40
Speaker
It has affectionately become known as Potato Eagle. It's so good. it is I love it. I love it so much. It's fantastic.
00:51:51
Speaker
and these The actors in this adaptation definitely feel like stage actors as well. In this one, there actually is a pretty solid Wikipedia entry on, so you can go and read a lot about like what went into this production, the organization.
00:52:04
Speaker
how slapdash it was put together, all that sort of stuff. and Because again, like when it sort of resurfaced, a bunch of people were like, I need to know everything about how everything about this. And so, and because it was only you know like 20 something years earlier, they went and found a bunch of the actors and like did interviews and stuff with them and felt like what it was like to make it. Fantastic. But it some of the sets and stuff look like they were from like community theater productions as well. And I don't say that as a compliment.
00:52:33
Speaker
A lot of the makeup feels like very stage makeup. And if anybody knows stage makeup, it is not meant to be viewed up close. And they do a lot of close up shots of these characters with stage makeup because they're stage actors. That's how they know to do makeup. Right. So.
00:52:49
Speaker
There's more psychedelic folk rock and guitar solos on this soundtrack and maybe it works sometimes. Most of the time, I'd say it pretty much doesn't. I dig it. I dig it, ah david man. Pretty groovy. We do get Tom Bombadil and even rarer appearance from Goldberry.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yeah. And they're huge. They're like three or four times, like, you know, you think of Tom Bombadil as Goldberry as like roughly man or elf size, right? And so a couple feet taller than Hobbits. No, here they're like clearly three or four times taller than Hobbits. I have no idea why. It's kind of cool, though. I kind of like the idea of a giant Goldberry. Like, hell yeah.
00:53:35
Speaker
And they definitely smear because they have like sort of an intro scene establishing shot with Goldberry where she's sort of dancing and they have so much Vaseline smeared on the lens. You can hardly see her. Like it's like soap off the level of like fuzzy shot.
00:53:51
Speaker
and but One of my, well, my second favorite part, because Potato Eagle, very close to my heart, my second favorite part of this is the fact that they hired a ballet troupe to play the barrow whites, and they do this interpretive dance.
00:54:08
Speaker
with, again, very, like, truly horrifying, full face, like, cakes on makeup. Oh, it's amazing. Amazing. I'm pretty sure I've had fucking night terrors about those people.
00:54:26
Speaker
But this adaptation also does give us gender swapping of a character. Legolas is female in this. It only goes until the end of Fellowship of the Ring, so we don't spend much time with female Legolas, but she's there. She's doing stuff in the background kind of thing. And then, yeah, rent this this ends right at after we're breaking the Fellowship. So we don't get to see any of this to completion, which is ah an ongoing theme here as well, right? Like none of the Lord of the Rings adaptations talked about so far have gotten through the whole story. They've all been you know bits and pieces. Yeah. And we're going to stay here in the same region, and we're going to stay in the same year, 1991, for an animated Hobbit out of the Soviet Union. I am so fucking upset this didn't get made.
00:55:21
Speaker
Yeah, this is probably the least known of any of the adaptations. And it was, I was literally just like searching around for random adaptations. And I think it was like after we'd finished watching one of these other ones, not one of the Mythopoeic Society's events. And I was like, what the hell is this? Six minutes animated Russian Hobbit. Like, okay, let's watch this. And everybody's had a few drinks. Let's just watch it. And sitting there like being ready to make fun of it,
00:55:48
Speaker
holy shit it's good it's so good like damn it good yeah the designs are like really kind of beautiful and i don't know there's a kind of a strange animation quality to them but which i think again kind of adds to some of the psychedelic sort of i don't know aesthetic that a lot of these Soviet era adaptations kind of led themselves to, but yeah, it's it's amazing. and And only six minutes of it really exists. Like when you're prepared to hate watch something and it's actually good, it has to be really good to go above that level where you you were ready to to mock it. And we all had to admit it's really good. yeah And there's a really lovely part of it too for our queer lodgings sort of framework here.
00:56:38
Speaker
It does actually depict a kiss between two men at a like feast or festival in Dale. They're sort of like sitting behind a banquet table, you know, tossing back drinks and one just grabs another dude's face and fucking plants one right on his mouth. Aww.
00:56:53
Speaker
Yeah, I was just frantically Googling because I could not remember Don Bluth's name, but like that that's the kind of like vibe that the animation was giving me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the character designs are a little more Japanese like anime inspired, but the animation style itself and especially the backgrounds definitely give that Don Bluth kind of feeling that like Anastasia Bible Goes West kind of. Yeah.
00:57:19
Speaker
ah Secret of Nim, but less scary. Yeah, less traumatizing. Yeah, less traumatizing. or For sure. I'm just going to say it like that that lovely kiss between the two men in Dale.
00:57:36
Speaker
adaptations, take note, that's how good kisses are done, you know. Good Lord, I'll talk about anything. Stay tuned for our Rings of Paris season two episode.
00:57:49
Speaker
my boy I'm gonna be needing like 20 minutes of box just to rant. Yeah, it's gonna say I'm gonna have to go like get like a sandwich or something. nine now
00:58:04
Speaker
Well, let's leave Russia finally the Soviet Union let's go to Finland. Finland. Hobbit. Hobbit is my favorite. i This is my favorite of all of these like low budget adaptations. It is three and a half hours long. It is a nine part miniseries. It was filmed in 1993. And I need you to know just off the bat, they do every single verse of the cow jumped over the moon song.
00:58:35
Speaker
trans po every single one because yourity I it today today. It's like three and a half minutes. Like this three and a half hour adaptation decided to take like, I don't know what percentage that is of their overall runtime, right? It's 210 minutes and more than 1% of this entire adaptation is the cow jumped over the moon song. Priorities and priorities. They spend longer on that than they do in Moria.
00:59:06
Speaker
Yeah, this is probably my favorite too. There's just there's so much to love in this, you know, so again, i trying to get a cosplay group together of the fellowship from this movie. Hell yeah. I'm with you on this.
00:59:23
Speaker
This one, even though it is it translates to the hobbits, it mostly adapts Lord of the Rings, although it does actually cover, go back into the Hobbit and basically adapts all of Reels in the Dark, as well as where Hornstache Bilbo finds the ring in Elem's cave.
00:59:41
Speaker
And also Smeagol obtaining the ring too. He had a mustache in that. I mean, it's pretty good, but there's still some puzzling choices. And that's like the whole, each of the episodes are about 20 minutes each. That's the whole first episode is basically recapping the journey of the ring. Well, basically until the the ring, when it falls into Hobbitish hands kind of thing until where we find it at the start of Lord of the Rings.
01:00:09
Speaker
And there's even some weirds like early CGI on the opening titles. I mean, this is 93, Toy Story is the next year. And, but there's like a CGI ring that flies into the title screen.
01:00:21
Speaker
And that was their entire budget. I think it's very important to note that this was the same year that what, Jurassic Park came out? Yes. And that it's so exciting to really see a full spectrum of CGI capabilities all the way from big but big budget Hollywood to small market Finnish public television.
01:00:47
Speaker
and Same here. This one also has a framing narrative. it It's Sam telling the story to his 13 children. um um Yeah, pretty sweet. And they keep going back to that throughout the story as well, especially when they need to glaze over one of the sections that they cut out. They basically just go back to Sam and we'll talk about that. yeah When they glaze over the majority of two towers in return of the game. Yeah, sure. Why not?
01:01:16
Speaker
They did when they went through Moria for 15 seconds, though. Yeah. Again, priorities. Yeah, and of everything with the probable exception of the rank of mass and vaccine movies, this probably has the highest budget. Well, this definitely has the highest budget of any of the live action adaptations we've talked about here. And it actually does have some like pretty nice shots, some like decent effects here and there, some integers. It's got some garbage, too.
01:01:45
Speaker
This soundtrack shifts gears from rock into kind of like a jazzy soundtrack with like walking baselines. During Smeagol's transition into Gollum, he's got like a walking baseline under him, which is a choice.
01:02:00
Speaker
And in other places, there's like sort of synthesized orchestral music, but there's a lot of alto sax solos, like wailing over the synthesizer parts. Never thought I would see in a Tolkien adaptation, but okay.
01:02:18
Speaker
So many choices in this one. there's those Yeah, there's a lot of choices. They give us a lot of content to work with the choices on. Yeah, I do want to drop in really quick that it's based on a play. It's actually based on a ah six hour play. And so a lot of the same actors that were in the play are actually reprising their roles here.
01:02:39
Speaker
Oh, it's like a Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe that's maybe that's why it's so charming.
01:02:50
Speaker
But yeah, lots of wild choices in this. We get Tom Bombadil. Yeah, do we do. Right. He's kind of styled like an indigenous shaman, which feels a little racist, but also kind of worked character.
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah. And just don't know if Finnish people can really get away with that. Definitely not in 2024. Maybe that was okay in 1993. Arguable. They do take a broad range of inspirations here and put them on display. For instance, Brie is styled like a Shogun village. It's a pretty impressive miniature, to be honest. Like, it looks pretty cool. Yeah. yeah And the inside of the Prancing Pony is like a Western saloon.
01:03:37
Speaker
Uh, as one does. As you do. A lot of homage. Let's, let's say, let's call it pastiche.
01:03:46
Speaker
Speaking of, we have to talk about, I think collectively our favorite character, characterization of a character from Advocate. And that would be Boromir. My boyfriend. My boyfriend. Leah, can you tell us about Tamara and Boromir?
01:04:04
Speaker
So I'm convinced that when they gave this actor the brief for this part, they were like, so Boromir is a warrior. And he's like, stop right there. I know exactly what this needs. My katana.
01:04:20
Speaker
that he goes away and he comes back in full samurai vibes like he's got like a crazy like scale male like sleeveless tank top a like big furry like sort of like overcoat thing a shaved head except for a ponytail held up in hair sticks and a sneak tattoo on his head, on the side of his head. I samurai bore a mirror and a full katana at the ready.
01:05:01
Speaker
And like a grimace on his face, like he has just like walked out of a Kurosawa film. I'm like i am convinced that like when he showed up on set, they were like, i what? and they And then they were like, they were too intimidated to say no. And they were like, you know what? He's just a samurai now. We're short on budget. It's a ah massive scope for our project. The costume budget is running a little thin. And he's just like, say less.
01:05:30
Speaker
You brought that katana from home and I'm pretty sure it's sharp. Exactly. Let's just let him go with it. He also dies with more orc arrows in his chest than Sean Bean somehow. Yeah, I think I counted like six or seven. No, he's like 30.
01:05:50
Speaker
like god And every single one of those arrows is played by just a random stick that they picked up off the ground out of the woods. Just kind of stuck in him.
01:06:03
Speaker
Cut off to have like a smooth end and hot glued to his tunic. It's amazing. It's so ridiculous and therefore so good.
01:06:14
Speaker
I want to cosplay as Samurai Bormir in your group, Alicia, somehow. I don't know how, but I'm going to make it happen. If we're talking about our favorite characters, I i want to like jump in. yeah Okay, go ahead. My favorite character yeah is Strider slash Gollum, who is played by an incredibly Brave Thespian. It is 100% the same actor that plays
01:06:50
Speaker
Aragorn and Gollum and I did not recognize him at first. Yeah, which I think is kind of a cool choice in a lot of ways. And it makes sense that they're trying to like save money because like when is Gollum and Aragorn on the screen at the same time? Exactly. And when we were like four or five drinks in and trying to figure and finally figured out that was what was happening, we were coming up with all sorts of like weird like theories about what that actually says about the nature of Gollum.
01:07:20
Speaker
versus early wanted to do What does this mean about good versus evil? and there's some fatal averssary on monarchy yeah ah Yeah, something very deep, very deep to be explored.
01:07:34
Speaker
yeah Also like Gollum's costume is literally a loincloth and a dance belt and that's it. ye You see more of this man than you ever wanted to see. So much Gollum cake in this adaptation.
01:07:50
Speaker
ah sbn and Like just imagine if Andy Serkis wasn't actually wearing that weird unitard. This is a physical performance.
01:08:04
Speaker
Oh yes. And that loincloth is like two strings along his hips and then like very small patches of fabric. It's working real hard. It's working real hard man. It's working very hard. I think they worked very hard. I don't think there was an intimacy coordinator on set and perhaps there should have been. I have been to burlesque shows where I have seen less of somebody's body. Like I less taint. Yeah. Yeah. but I have seen a production of King Lear in which Stacey Keach was completely nude, and I think I might have actually seen less of his taint than this man's. Oh, man. Sorry, I'm just registering seeing Stacey Keach as King Lear, and I'm like, again, what a what a thing. Okay, but anyway.
01:08:58
Speaker
I have to draw the alliterative beauty of Gollum's Grundle on a skirt. You're welcome listeners.
01:09:12
Speaker
ah This time it is Gimli who looks like a Viking for some reason instead of Gormir. I don't know why. And they just made no effort to make any of them different heights. The hobbits and the dwarves and the elf and men are all the exact same height.
01:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, my working theory is that the folks who played Vylix and Gimli were like practicing in their Finnish death metal band in the garage next door and just kind of wandered onto the set. and And they were like, hey, you want to be in this? And they're like, yeah, sure, why not?
01:09:48
Speaker
I will say also the style of acting is like fascinatingly different than what we're accustomed to in America, right? Like I have a lot of fun, like humorously poking fun at it like Finnish facial acting techniques that are employed in this film because they are very strongly employed by many actors but it's also like it was also a ah moment of like wow this has to be a cultural lens that I was lacking because this has to be actually like important and like a studied process in this framework because it's not a choice that you could have just happened into like there's a tradition to this somewhere
01:10:39
Speaker
I have to believe this is a cultural thing and not just that they've decided to do this for this one for production. It's either a cultural thing or like one director's weird kink. So I'm going with cultural things. Yeah. And I will say pacing wise, it's make some very strange choices as well. Sure does. So there's nine episodes and six of those are fellowship of the ring. At the end of the sixth episode, we have the breaking of the fellowship and Aerofilled Ceramari Boromir with a lot of blood, actually. like yeah yeah Way more blood than I think we ever really see in any of the Jackson adaptations on Aerofilled Boromir's chest. Well, i'll say i should maybe like red blood, like human blood. Yeah. practical effect Yeah. Then they're left having to cover all of Two Towers and Return of the King in three episodes.
01:11:38
Speaker
Man. Like three 20 minute episodes. Yep. Yeah. So to do that, they basically just only follow Sam and Frodo for the rest of the story. They completely cut out anything. Aragorn, Legolas or Gimli, Merry or Pippin are doing. Sam sort of glazes over some of that and the narration. But besides that, it's basically like We just see Sam and Frodo going off to Mordor. There's no problem. I mean, it makes sense at the framing of this though, like Sam's kids don't give a shit. Well, and Sam telling the story, so he doesn't have the first-hand experience of the rest of that stuff, I guess, if we're really trying to justify the fact that they cut out all of Condor Rohan.
01:12:25
Speaker
I'm less upset about that than I am what they did to Moria. I've referenced it too many times. The entirety of their Sojourn into Moria is mostly taken up by Gandalf falling into a flushing toilet.
01:12:46
Speaker
And I will point out, it's very important that we not get distracted by the Ro Hunter Gondor plotlines because the actor playing both Aragorn and Gollum needs time to get into costume, okay? Just a little out of work, man. he's he's cut Doing all that stuff in Mordor with Frodo and Sam, so he doesn't have time to be exactly why Eric. garman i you already teas yeah authorities But I will say that what this adaptation adapts, it makes some raisin choices about it what it leaves out, but what it includes is relatively faithful to the books. Like in some cases more faithful than any of the others. Like this is the only case, the only film adaptation I know of that's not like a fan film or something that
01:13:34
Speaker
adapts the scouring of the shire. It's not very long. It's like a few minutes, but it does cover it. And it talks about like the boundaries taking the feathers out of their caps. Like it's got that fucking a cap sentiment in there. So go for it. Yeah. And I feel like of some of these other adaptations, like we really are left with a really broken Frodo. at the end of this one which is kind of like I kind of appreciate that in some ways because but throughout the entire series I mean he's been through some stuff but like by the end of the show it's like man this guy has seen some shit and you can see it like on his face and in his words and by the end of it he doesn't really even like get on a ship he doesn't go really to the Grey Havens and you don't really see him kind of
01:14:20
Speaker
going off into kind of like a peaceful afterlife, basically. He kind of just wanders off into like a gray mist. and And you're just kind of left with the impression that he just kind of wanders off to like die somewhere. And you're kind of like, Jesus Christ, man. What's going to happen to this dude? He's being haunted by the demons of Gollum's tank. One of those, you can't unsee that, right? It's burning in your retina. I was going to say,
01:14:49
Speaker
Elijah Wood's proto still has like a little bit of light in his eyes by the end like before he gets on the boat. Especially like right before he gets on the boat you see that color kind of come back into his face and you're like oh man he's gonna be okay and this one you're like Frodo's not okay he's not gonna be okay he's never gonna be okay again. Instead of the the Nazgul blade he has the image of Gollum's Grundle burnt into its skull forever. That is the wound from which Inish Proto will never recover. That wound will never fully heal. he goes to that Yeah, he does finally get to the Undying Lands. We're like, sorry bro, we can't do anything about that one. He's staring directly into the sun.
01:15:38
Speaker
One of the things that I do love about the reception of Hobbitit is that a critic writing in the Finnish Tolkien Society's magazine, titled legalas in 2004. Please recall that that is after the Peter Jackson films have come out. Recall that Hobbited had succeeded in, quote, capturing the atmosphere and spirit of the book, despite the fact that it was created on a small budget in quite shocking sets.
01:16:05
Speaker
Additionally, that same critic was doubtful of the Jackson film trilogy as he felt that the epic and flamboyant side of the book that is emphasized in Jackson's film adaptation was not the most enduring and interesting aspect of Tolkien's work.
01:16:20
Speaker
Wow. OK. I just I just like your opinion, man. I mean, I love the shade throwing that goes on here because it is worth noting that it is only nine years between this production airing and the Jackson films premiering in theaters while during which there was production time. Yeah. While to me.
01:16:48
Speaker
Which makes me wonder if they saw this thing and were like, what to do, what not to do. Both golem better.
01:16:59
Speaker
Bormir shouldn't have a katana. Yeah, maybe Bormir should know that snake tattoo. Yeah, the snake tattoo is the most puzzling part of that honestly. For me, it's the hair top stick. I guess it's not really like a snake, but it's like a worm, you know? Yeah. It's like, what's with the dragon tattoo on your head there?
01:17:24
Speaker
like you're move like you the with the dragon tattoo maybe
01:17:40
Speaker
amazing oh no Okay, so that takes us through all of the TV and film adaptations. These are the ones that, you know, sort of get to tickle most of our senses, right? They're visual as well as auditory choices are made, etc. But that's not the only type of adaptation that we see and so we want to take a minute and just acknowledge some of the others so in particular radio or audio adaptations the first formal dramatization of Tolkien's work is an adaptation radio play from the BBC in 1955 1956.
01:18:24
Speaker
Almost none of the original audio survives. I've caught like four seconds of it in a different interview that was then re-released later on. But in like 2022, I think the scripts were recovered. Oh, wow. They were thought to be lost as well. And those most of them have now been recovered.
01:18:46
Speaker
And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this one is it's very much within the timeframe of Tolkien's life and very much within his cultural milieu being a BBC production. That's in English, etc. And so just a peek into Tolkien's thoughts, he says, and this is from a letter to Alan Unwin, I believe,
01:19:10
Speaker
I view the project with deep misgivings and do not expect to derive anything but pain and irritation from the result, but so long as I am firmly advised by you that it is a good thing for the book, I am prepared to put up with that.
01:19:28
Speaker
So there we see the balance of ah curmudgeonly and concern about the end result of adaptation, as well as the recognition that adaptation is a good and sometimes necessary thing in order to bring more people to the work.
01:19:46
Speaker
I am 100% just going to quote this verbatim for our Rings of Power Season 2 episode.
01:19:56
Speaker
yeah yeah ring the power season two responses just a clip show of other
01:20:08
Speaker
exactly
01:20:13
Speaker
We also then get ah some decades later, but we get what most people do. think of when they think of a BBC radio adaptation. It's 1981 BBC Radio 4 does the adaptation. We get Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell doing the script for this. It has a pretty interesting soundscape alongside the dialogue and narration, etc. Christopher Tolkien himself actually approved all of the scripts for this one.
01:20:42
Speaker
And the cast is really interesting. So you have Ian Holm playing Frodo. And of course, this is what is being drawn back onto with the casting of Ian Holm as Bilbo in the Jack of the Rings. Sam is played by Bill Nighy, which I think is, yeah, like Bill Nighy of like underworld and very cool ah of many things. But yeah, I love actually fame. Yeah.
01:21:13
Speaker
A fun note for our podcast listeners who are are in the the queer space, Phil Nahe is also very iconically in the ah film Pride, which talks about the gays and lesbians supporting the Welsh miners during the miner strike in the 1980s and you know against Thatcher and and all of that.
01:21:34
Speaker
He plays a queer character in that film and says it's one of the roles that he is most proud to have ever brought to screen. So that's just my personal plug that I would recommend that one for everyone who's was on a queer journey. He's really like one of those like working actors that I think has gotten a lot of spotlight attention. And like he's like one of those working actors who's kind of ended up being like an A-lister, I guess. But I feel like he brings a leader on in his career, yeah.
01:22:02
Speaker
Yeah, like he's always a very welcome presence in anything like big and small. And he's one of those working actors who treats everything that he's in, I think, as unequal levels. like He brings his best to all of it. Yeah, I feel like for a lot of folks, especially in the UK, this is a really beloved and sort of treasured adaptation. Yeah. I know a lot of folks who actually say that their first exposure to Tolkien was through this adaptation, which I think is just so cool because this is actually one that I have only heard bits and pieces of. I've actually never heard it the entire way through. And I really want to because it holds such a really like treasured place in so many people's hearts. And and Brian Sibley himself is just such a wonderful queer man who
01:22:51
Speaker
I think he brings so much to all the things that he's done and is always a really, if you've been to Oxenmoot, he always brings just such a ah lovely warmth and liveliness to all of his talks. And he, again, he's he's like a national treasure, especially to the token folks in the UK. And I love that he brought this to us for sure.
01:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, there's also intentionality in this particular adaptation for the radio play. Peter Woodthorpe plays Gollum and Michael Graham Fox play Boromir. They had voiced the same roles in the Bakshi version.
01:23:29
Speaker
And so I think that that link of continuity is a very interesting production choice for this adaptation and and managing people's ah expectations and and holding those and and honoring those. I thought that was really neat. There are things that that are omitted in this one. I believe Crick Hollow, The Old Forest, Barrow White's Old Man Willow, and Tom Bombadil all hit the cutting room floor here. But there is a neat thing where There's an arc where Wormtongue encounters the Ringwraiths that is referencing an arc in Unfinished Tales that had just been published. And so it's also so cool, almost like just the moment piece of that at adaptation. And we also get Bilbo's Last Song included here, which isn't in the novel, but this is where we get this coming in.
01:24:19
Speaker
Oh, but I didn't know that about the warm tongue, as to say I didn't know that. The Billboard's Last Song, I know that there's like a little standalone ah volume of that, which I've been wanting to get my hands on for a while, but that's very cool. I did not know that.
01:24:32
Speaker
There's a few other notable radio plays or radio adaptations. In 1972, the New York radio station WBAIFM did their own version and continued airing it year after year after year. NPR did a version in America in 1979. And there's a couple of interesting casting notes with that one.
01:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, so the voice of Gandalf and Tom Bombadil for that NPR 1979 adaptation was a gentleman named Bernard Mays, a gay man and a major LGBT activist active in the Bay Area in that sort of period. Putri Puritini, who runs Blog Tolkien and is very active on Twitter, she actually did a really nice thread on Bernard Mays on Twitter when queer lodgings did the Tolkien-Tuesday takeover last summer.
01:25:24
Speaker
So I encourage you to go find that. You know, if you just it's at blog Tolkien, we'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. But if you just search like Bernard Mays and blog Tolkien on Twitter, the only thing it's acceptable to dead name, you will find it.
01:25:41
Speaker
And then there's a few other radio adaptations that are made in a like almost about a 10 year span between the early 90s and early 2000s that are not in English. And I think it's important to recognize that these adaptations keep getting made outside of an English speaking space and continue to reach people in other countries who speak other languages than what Tolkien first wrote in, right? So there's a German radio station, the Herderengge in 1992. There's a Danish adaptation that spans between 1999 and 2000. My pronunciation will not be great on this, but Evan Theoret Umringen. And then there's also a Slovak radio series that aired between 2001 and 2003.
01:26:30
Speaker
Interesting. I mean mean, you see that resurgence right around when the Jackson movies were. Yeah, I was going to say that was right when they were all coming out. Yeah. And then you have some of that happening in the stage space as well. So in Cincinnati, Ohio, there was a musical theater production that they ran like each one 2001, 2002, 2003. Lifeline theater plays in Chicago, Illinois between 97 and 2001.
01:26:58
Speaker
It's also worth noting that without being specific adaptations, there's a lot of times that things that Hobbit in particular has been done as children's theater. And that's been a way that it's been made accessible to children who are perhaps even too young to read the book. They're still encountering Middle Earth, even that young. There's the first official theater production claims to be in Helsinki, Finland prior to 1997. And then there's another Finnish adaptation to the stage in 2018. And I think the possibly the best known stage adaptation is the Lord of the Rings musical, which has been done in Toronto, London and Chicago. And we actually have Tim here because he's the only one of us who's seen this adaptation.
01:27:49
Speaker
I have. I was lucky enough to have seen the Toronto run, which was the first place that it showed at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto in 2006. My mother and I went to see it together, sort of a long history of going to theatre shows together.
01:28:05
Speaker
and I had a pretty middling response to it. There's some elements of it that were great. The production design was absolutely gorgeous. They had a turntable on the stage. So for all of the walking scenes, you can't have a Tolkien adaptation without walking scenes. And they had this turntable on the stage so that people could walk around in a circle and be staying in the same place on the stage. The stage was turning underneath them, which is pretty neat.
01:28:35
Speaker
And overall, like the set design and everything was gorgeous. Costumes were great. just The songs were really hit or miss. There's a few like really great ones. There's this one called Now and For Always, which is Sam and Frodo singing to each other about like the stories that people will tell ah about them after their journey or whatever, regardless of how it ends, which is really touching and a very nice, like intimate moment between the two of them. But a lot of the songs are very forgettable as well, I think.
01:29:05
Speaker
And it just really felt like it was sort of lacking soul. And that's probably why you it basically it played in Toronto, it went to the West End in London, and then it kind of died out.
01:29:16
Speaker
Whereas this new version that has been going around the last couple of years, started last year in the Watermill Theatre in the UK, Berkshire in the UK, it seems to have a lot more heart and it is, they have like, the cast is race blind and gender blind, they have like, non-white people playing Ovid's other characters and stuff like that.
01:29:41
Speaker
women playing male characters, all that. So that's all great. And then they also have some of those actors are actually musicians on the stage as well. So it's almost like almost a concert, it seems like. i To be clear, I haven't seen this version yet. I'm just going off with people that I know that have seen it. Almost everybody I know that has seen this run of it and a couple of them did see the original run have vastly preferred this version. Not that it's perfect or anything, but It just seems to capture a lot more of the spirit of the source, I guess. This is the one where Gollum is really swole, right? This is, yes, the Gollum. And I don't recall the Gollum in the version that I saw in 2006. But yes, this is the version with Swolem.
01:30:26
Speaker
yeah but So if you, we can't convey it, but look up a picture of Gollum, particularly I think in the Chicago version as well, but in that water mill production and he is fucking ripped. Beef Cape Gollum. Amazing. Yeah. Six pack Gollum.
01:30:44
Speaker
Oh, yeah, getting yoked, man. I will say as someone with a theater background, the production quality in terms of set design, costume design, lighting design are all very impressive. Like the production stills are just every time I see them, I'm like, gosh, I really want to see this show. I just have never had the opportunity.
01:31:12
Speaker
There's also a sort of famous parody version as well that it's not exactly a true adaptation, but this parody version is worth mentioning just in case folks are like, oh yeah, the musical, the funny one, the parody one.
01:31:27
Speaker
There's quite apart from the musical adaptation that has like all of this great production value, there is a very well-known parody version of Fellowship that was done in LA and it's Fellowship the Musical. And you'll definitely, you will recognize the differences in production photos if you're just going through like a Google or Bingo image shirt search or whatever, and you will be delighted by both, I promise.
01:31:55
Speaker
I thought Grace was going to start talking about porn parodies.
01:32:00
Speaker
I didn't research properly. There's 100% Alicia's role. That's a different episode. I was like, oh, that might be a different episode. And also, I was like, oh no, I didn't research any. Also, Alicia, if you do start talking about that, that is absolutely going to be the point when my headphones die. And the other family members who are in this room will hear this recording.
01:32:28
Speaker
I do feel like we need to mention that's a thing that exists. And a lot of them. Yeah, a surprising number. So when we were living in Atlanta, Tim and I, um there's the Atlanta Tolkien band group, and we basically got banned from being able to do any Tolkien trivia in Atlanta because we were obnoxious. And basically, um
01:32:54
Speaker
Oh, by obnoxious, you mean because you kept winning and also fighting with the Quizmaster. Yeah, we destroyed everyone. And then we would do things like scream at the Quizmaster, book our movie. And they'd be like, it doesn't matter. And we're like, yeah, the fuck it does.
01:33:07
Speaker
yeah
01:33:11
Speaker
One of the quiz nights we went to, um the only question we got wrong was which of these is not an existing Lord of the Rings porn parody?
01:33:23
Speaker
Because I really thought, what was it? It was the Lord of the Ring, wasn't it? That was the one that wasn't an actual... No, it was... It was not Fellowship of the King.
01:33:35
Speaker
There are a number of them. I was going to say like I was wondering to rule them all. That's the one that wasn't real because I thought it was like really on the nose. I was going to say that seems like that would be like the most obvious one. Like what? Yeah, exactly. That was not one. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think that's what it was because I remember being like really upset about it. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. OK.
01:34:04
Speaker
Well, anyway so that's the thing that exists. Sorry, squeamish folks who ah don't think that porn and Tolkien mix. I get wrecked. Tolkien wrote sex stories. We've already gone through this. Hashtag release the elf. Hashtag release the smut. Not these specific ones. I'm sure he'd have adaptation critiques as well. but Not enough forearms.
01:34:33
Speaker
Damn it. Your arm's not pale enough. What I was going to say is I'm sure he's had, he'd have adaptation critiques, but he had adaptation critiques about all of these. but So really, what is the difference? He was like, Gollum's not swollen enough in this um porn parody. Jesus Christ. So that you need.
01:34:59
Speaker
the musical. this is why This is the service that we provide to help you make sure that you're aware of which things you'd like to watch and add to your hearing pleasure. So the next area that we want to talk about some adaptations in is the realm of video games. And for this, we yeah we are turning back to Alicia, who is our video game correspondent here in the the space of Tolkien-ian video game adaptations. Yeah, like, what a weird thing to be kind of the expert in. I just love where you went from expertise A to expertise B. It's expertise in porn parodies and also video games. I mean, it traps, but okay. Yeah, sure.
01:35:46
Speaker
This is greatly pared down from the full list of every video game that like is based on The Lord of the Rings because most of them don't actually try to adapt. um There's a lot of video games where it is set in the world but it's not an adaptation in any sort of way.
01:36:04
Speaker
But the first one that I can find any sort of mention of is the Hobbit Software Adventure from 1982. It's text-based, as are The Lord of the Rings Volume 1 and The Lord of the Rings Volume 2, which came out in 1990 and 1992, respectively. The Lord of the Rings Volume 1 was re-released in 1994 on the Super Nintendo.
01:36:27
Speaker
which I think is really interesting. So I'm assuming at some point, or at least at that point, it got some like sweet, sweet 16-bit graphics. Hell yeah. Yeah. There's this Tolkien Collectors group on Facebook where people actually collect all of these old video games.
01:36:42
Speaker
And they'll post screen caps and stuff from them, but I have not seen one of Lord of the Rings, volume one. There's also a mud that has been a multi-user dungeon that has been going since 1994. It's still active at the two towers or T2T. Wow. And that kind of takes us up to like the Jackson era.
01:37:06
Speaker
So like in 2002, Black Label Games released Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, which is not actually based on Jackson's movies. EA then released adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings, Return of the King in 2002 and 2003. They did not adapt fellowship. Some of the fellowship storyline actually happens at the beginning of Two Towers, but not all of it.
01:37:30
Speaker
There was also a Hobbit game called The Hobbit, The Prelude to the Lord of the Rings in 2003. And most of these games are shockingly not role-playing games. They're very much more like adventure games. And in the case of a skip ahead a little bit to Lord of the Rings, Aragorn's Quest, which came out in 2010, that's actually more of a platformer, which is very strange.
01:37:56
Speaker
Because generally when you think about non-video games, board games that are based on Lord of the Rings and that end adapting it, they're more likely role-playing games. And Lotro, or Lotro, I pronounce it Lotro, was released in 2007. It is an MMORPG or a massive multi... I actually forget what the fuck it is. Massively multiplayer role-playing game. Online role-playing game. Yeah, we got there.
01:38:23
Speaker
i I love Lotro so much. It is not a true adaptation of the Lord of the Rings. You're following the story of the Lord of the Rings, but as a tertiary character where you keep like bumping into what the primary characters are doing. So it is adapting, but not directly. It is incredibly immersive. It is incredibly immersive.
01:38:44
Speaker
really built out the world. If you want to, I mean you have options for like quick travel, but if you want to you can like actually ride from one place to another and that's another thing that we've done at some of the Mythic Society's online events is we've done like tours of Lord of the Rings online so you can see various areas. Sometimes we've like themed it to whatever the theme of the event was, like when we did Fantasy Goes to Hell, we had, okay, let's go visit some of the underworlds of Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings online. Like Moria, we took people down to the bottom of the ah stairs where the Balrog and Gandalf battle and all that kind of thing. Yeah, and one of the interesting things about Lotro is it has been in development since 2007, and it has come in and out of having rights.
01:39:33
Speaker
So Warner Brothers bought the development company for a couple of years and then they like divested themselves of the development company. So before then they couldn't actually use any Peter Jackson's anything and then there was a period where they could and now they can't again. Oh man. It's really interesting how they've like dealt with that though.
01:39:57
Speaker
hello They in general keep closer to the books than the movies regardless, but you can see the influence of the movies because when they had the rights, it was when they were developing parts of Rohan and Gondor. So you can see the influence of the Peter Jackson movies on the architecture in those particular areas that you can't see in other areas. I don't rest like a lot like it does in the movies and that sort of thing.
01:40:23
Speaker
But it is more accurate to the books, like the outer wall of Minas Tirith is black, like it's supposed to be, and that sort of thing. But there are so many like tiny little Easter eggs in this game. When you go to Weathertop, if you walk around Weathertop, you can see the little stream by which they had like they saw the crates that the Rangers left behind and the little hollow that they built the fire in. Like, that is in the game.
01:40:52
Speaker
Cool. It's so cool. It's a crazy level of detail, especially when they've got those little bits of lore that they can just grab onto or little. It's probably the perfect vehicle for all of those Tolkienian descriptions to come to life, right? Because you can't, you know, when you're filming a live action adaptation,
01:41:13
Speaker
You can't you know go out and find something that like looks exactly like what Tolkien described. In some cases, they manufactured it. But in this case, in a CGI world, yes, you can absolutely do that. You can create the environment exactly as Tolkien wrote it and have people go around and like find the little bits and pieces and the little like nooks and crannies.
01:41:33
Speaker
You can't do it a hundred percent exactly because Tolkien didn't really understand geology or hydrology. He did his best. I wrote in a paper that was it's based on an interview that one of the La Trobe landscape designers gave when they were talking about when they were first getting into Rohan. So they developed the map in stages and they had gotten to the falls of Rauros and they were talking about how it makes absolutely no sense for a waterfall to fall into a fen because it it doesn't make sense and if they're going to render a three-dimensional environment it has to make sense, the water has to flow. Like right the bluffs of the waterfall have to somehow communicate with this fen and then with the fields of Rohan and they were
01:42:23
Speaker
discussing the adaptational difficulties there because like it relies a lot on gating via landscape, but when you're going to gate a player into a certain area or to a certain flow of movement with the landscape, the landscape still has to be believable. And there was a whole thing about how none of this fucking makes any sense at all.
01:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Chris Larson has done some papers about Tolkien's grasp of astronomy. And I know a few other folks who've done papers on different aspects of botany and, and again, geology and and things like that, which again, Tolkien was doing his best. And honestly, I'm kind of like, I give him the hand wavy of it's magic. It's made. It's fine. An effort was made. Yeah, an effort was made. It's fine.
01:43:18
Speaker
There's a lot of good commentary and focus on that in Karen Winfongstad's Atlas of Middle Earth as well. im Trying to grapple, like trying to map parts of Middle Earth based on Tolkien's descriptions and grappling with the, but that's not how water works. Yeah. yeah yeah And I i love that that people are able to go that deep and that we we have people who are willing to commit that deeply to it in order to to give the commentary and help us you know make the best sense of it that we can. I think also one of the things that's really interesting for me with Lord of the Rings Online is
01:43:59
Speaker
how like It's a space that I am not particularly familiar with, but I've watched a lot of fans talk about their experience with this game in particular or some of the other games and the impact that these have on how people visualize characters, how they visualize how they speak or move or what spaces look like. I think it's easy to overlook the impact that some of the the the spaces where people are interacting with Middle Earth content but are not necessarily spaces where everyone overlaps in that Venn diagram what influence that has and what influence that has on future adaptations to what people are expecting to see. I will bring up Glorifendal exists in Lord of the Rings Online.
01:44:51
Speaker
and when you go near him you get a hope buff like he likes basically like ah glitters in the the sunlight and you get hope when you're near him
01:45:02
Speaker
Oh, he's the Twilight vampire? His skin's not sparkly as the air around him, but yeah. More believable than glitter Gandalf. Hmm. Perhaps. I feel like there's a scale, a spectrum that can be developed about glitter believability and adaptational. Yeah, does it run from...
01:45:25
Speaker
Wait, who's the least glitter and who's the most glitter? What's the scale here? oh man If you haven't given Lord of the Rings Online a chance and you are into forever games, if forever games and that like you're never going to finish it, like you're never going to 100% the game, you're good you can play it forever and like get really embedded in it and and you have some time that you feel like dropping into it. It's such a good game.
01:45:58
Speaker
It's very faithful to the lore if that is something that is important to you. And it was made in 2007. It's been updated a few times, but not in a way that you can't run it on an old ass computer.
01:46:13
Speaker
not super Mac friendly, which is a problem for me. Like if you are running back, you have to dual boot into windows because they no longer support Mac at all, but it's, it's so worth playing. And like the, the sheer scale of middle earth that they have adapted is incredible. Like you go all the way from Aaron Lewin all the way.
01:46:37
Speaker
to the Iron Hills as far as East and West. And you go from Angmar all the way to Umbar. ah wow like It's basically the entire map that is at your fingertips. It's incredible. It's so immersive. It's so fun.
01:46:56
Speaker
Slightly less immersive. Still fun. Yeah, lets let let's skip ahead to the LEGO games. LEGO Lord of the Rings and LEGO Hobbit were released in 2012 and 2014. The LEGO games were based on the movies. The LEGO Hobbit game was never actually completed. It's so frustrating. It was incredibly frustrating. It was supposed to be completed in a ah DLC. DLC, yes. Thank you. It was really interesting because what happened was the game was in development when they made the decision to switch from doing two movies versus three movies. Yeah. And so the the Lego Hobbit movie
01:47:40
Speaker
actually came out before the second movie did, but it actually covers halfway through the second movie. And so you actually could figure out some things that were going to happen in the second movie based on the Lego Hobbit game.
01:47:55
Speaker
Yeah, but the movies didn't do as well as they thought they were going to, and the game didn't do as well as they thought it was going to, so they abandoned development, so we never got that DLC game, which really sucks. Yeah, so we never got to do Smaug and everything in the LEGO universe, but still very fun, and a lot of fun. They're really fun co-op games, too. yeah So if you have another person you like to play with, they're very fun co-op games.
01:48:21
Speaker
And they're interesting in terms of the scale of those games, because when we we were talking about Lotro and how huge it is and like how long it potentially takes to get from place to place, like as a LEGO game, no one wants that. You want to be able to go, because LEGO is open world but staged, whereas Lotro is just open world. So you want to get to each stage as quickly as possible. So like the adaptational decisions they make regarding the landscape and like how the player is gated between these stages is very interesting. and As in your Lego minifig, you're playing as like a third of the height of a mountain and things like that. Sure. And also the source of the disco file song. It is the source of the disco file song, which is a fucking banger. You don't know it. Google the disco file song. It is amazing. Indeed.
01:49:20
Speaker
The remix is some great soundbites from the Jackson movies. It will make you not be able to hear Fade and Speech the same way ever again, so warning for that.
01:49:35
Speaker
I mean, they're taking the hobbies to Isengard, just to ruin that thing for me. so ah Oh my God, ah watching the two towers in concert when they got to that part and like everyone in the audience just started laughing.
01:49:53
Speaker
ah amazing The last kind of adaptation that's been done is the Lord of the Rings column. It came out in 2023, widely panned.
01:50:05
Speaker
ah Just put it umed kindly. Very badly. Just put it kindly. Yeah. It was an interesting choice of an adaptation, though. And not one that you often see. It follows Gollum during the events of The Lord of the Rings. So it's kind of an oblique adaptation of Lord of the Rings. But yeah, be set with troubles.
01:50:29
Speaker
Gameplay was not great. Yeah, very glitchy. Yeah, very glitchy. Gollum didn't obey the laws of physics.
01:50:42
Speaker
oby It's a shame it flopped because that studio had like a pretty decent deal to put out a few games and like, uh, it doesn't exist anymore. The studio shuttered. This game killed the studio that made it. Oh man. oh Yeah. Yeah.
01:50:56
Speaker
That's it for like actual 100% we're telling the story adaptations, but there are a number of like, kind of like real time strategy games that are based on Lord of the Rings that they are adapting parts of it. Essentially they're adapting like battles and like kind of a scenario based situation. And those include Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle Earth 2,
01:51:25
Speaker
And this is the Guinness World Record for the longest name of a video game. The Lord of the Rings, the battle for Middle-earth II, the rise of the Witch King. Electric Boogaloo, and man. yeah yeah This came out in 2004, 5, and 6. There was also the Lord of the Rings, the War of the Ring, which came out in 2003. Lord of the Rings Tactics, which is 2009. And the Lord of the Rings Conquest that came out in 2009.
01:51:54
Speaker
Who names tactics? Like, get out of here, man. Definitely the most important in Tolkienian part of The Lord of the Rings is the tactics. I know, right? It's like naming your video game, like, appendices. Like, what? What are you talking about?
01:52:12
Speaker
If from my understanding, the battle for Middle Earth 2 is the most lore appropriate of all of these games, the rest of them kind of play fast and loose with it. I have not played any of these games because that is not a genre I genuinely like to play. Super ballad. Yeah, I was really surprised when we were like going through this how far back.
01:52:39
Speaker
like the video game adaptations actually went. Like, I never would have expected there to be video game adaptations that are older than me. Like, that's crazy. Yeah, I was going to say, like, an omelette has been going on for almost as long as I've been alive. Like, good lord. So, moving into the realm of comics, we are going to turn to our comics correspondent, Tim. Yeah, Tim, what do you want to say about these comics? Which is unfortunate because I have not actually read any of these, but
01:53:10
Speaker
There was a 15-part visual serial in Princess and Girl magazine. Maybe not the, I don't know, maybe it is the target audience for Tolkien, but I doubt in the 60s that really felt like the right target audience. I need to find this magazine that sounds like Princess and Girl. I'm like, that sounds like... It's a UK magazine. Okay. And it is Adapting the Hobbit.
01:53:34
Speaker
And it's incredibly expensive. yeah and the collect and The collectors market for it is very high because it's very hard to get like a full serial run of it. It's not going to run you first edition Hobbit prices, but it's going to run you more than a grand. and Has any good Conrad archived that on the internet archive?
01:54:00
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully. That was from 1964 to 1965. Then Lord of the Rings was adapted from 1979 to 1981 by Louis Bramejo. I was only published in Europe because of a copyright issue in the US, so there was no English version, but it was based on the Bakshi films.
01:54:23
Speaker
And probably the best known, which I have seen a fair amount of the art from, but have not read cover to cover, is the 1989 Hobbit adaptation written by Dixon and the artist is David Wenzel. And I really do like the art in that. The art is very whimsical. David Wenzel's style is very nice. And we have a little bit of his art in that. David Wenzel, also just such a nice dude. Yeah. He was a guest at DragonCon.
01:54:52
Speaker
2018, 2019, something like that sometime in the four times. And yeah, Madam and Alicia bought a print and had him, and he was doing little custom drawings on each of the prints that you bought as well. And he asked me what my initial was, and he made Gandalf scratching my initial onto Bilbo's door. It was very cute. Oh, that's cool.
01:55:11
Speaker
I will say I have read this one and it is lovely. Like I have no beefs with it in particular or anything and it's just very enjoyable to read and just see things in a visual format that's like graphic novel comic space.
01:55:29
Speaker
Yeah, I will bring up the Lord of the Rings 79 to 81. That's the only official comic adaptation of the Lord of the Rings. Oh, wow. Okay. It was published in Italian, German, Finnish. One of them was in Bulgarian. It was in a bunch of different languages, but never made it to English. Wow. It's an interesting array of Yeah, space for publication and sort of like how a lot of those spaces are perceiving Tolkien himself now. Interesting food for thought. In my defense, I pretty much only read superhero comics and I'm not a big fan of comics that have adapted adapted from literary works in general.
01:56:11
Speaker
And there's not a lot of them here. It's not a super popular space. We did also talk about, if we were going to talk about audiobook adaptations here, and we decided we weren't really going to go into those. There are several different ones, the most recent ones being the ones where Andy Serkis has narrated those. But despite not spending a lot of time on these, we we do want to recognize like audiobook, and it is also a particular form of adaptation, especially given what you can do with production values and everything in order to create that soundscape or what have you. We're going to very briefly talk about some adaptations that ah never never quite made it to market. So these early attempts in adaptation that never made it to actual screen time or whatever, it's just interesting to take a look at
01:57:03
Speaker
Who were some of the interested parties who were trying to do adaptations? One fascinating one is Walt Disney. There were three different attempts within Disney to do some Tolkien adaptations. One in 1938, one throughout the 1950s, and another in 1972. Yeah, they had to fucking wait for him to die.
01:57:25
Speaker
Tolkien is not a fan of the of Disney. Yeah, ah Tolkien actually, he took Umbridge with very specifically Disney's depiction of dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He coined the term Disneyfication for sanitizing of folk tales. I can't imagine there was a an amount of money that would have made him okay with this.
01:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, these are put into production in terms of like, we should theorize what we want to do and all that, but they were never greenlit. They never got to go ahead and actually turn these into actual products.
01:58:05
Speaker
I will mention the attempt by Forest J Ackerman, mostly because that is the Zimmerman script, which is very famous because Tolkien rips it to fucking shreds in letter 210. And it's worth noting that a lot of the critiques that we hear from Tolkien about, I didn't like this, this, is did this, but did ithh yeah all of these concerns and complaints are about an adaptation that was never made.
01:58:35
Speaker
And so we get insights into his perspective and everything. But anytime someone on the Internet is telling you that Tolkien hated whatever modern adaptation because Letter 210, like they are extrapolating. They may be extrapolating correctly, but they are extrapolating.
01:58:55
Speaker
Uh, there was a tempo United artists in the sixties Apple films with the Beatles. Yeah. Went for this with the Beatles playing the four hobbits. If I recall correctly, that, that idea came from the Beatles. Yeah. Oh yes. Yeah. They were, they were big fans. Didn't John want to play goblin? Am I remembering that right? I feel like letting wanted to play golem. I might be remembering that wrong. I'm not sure.
01:59:23
Speaker
as we have seen you can do more than one role indeed i green all and i mean you golivan mary or pitten ah callroder might be a little tough but oh that would be inspired though like Let me not say that it can't be done. Many skilled actors have been able to play multiple versions of themselves in the same thing. Think of Orphan Black. ah yeah I say can do it now. Here's some directors that were looking at making adaptations that, again, never came to pass. Franco Zeffirelli, Jake Kasdan, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg had all at one point or another expressed interest.
02:00:09
Speaker
I cannot imagine what a Ridley Scott version of Middle Earth would have looked like. George Lucas, I would have been intrigued by considering Willow as a pretty impressive piece of fantasy. That is actually where Willow comes from, I believe. When he wasn't allowed to do anything with Tolkien, he goes in a different direction. And that's what Willow evolves out of, is the the desire to work in that sort of fictional space.
02:00:35
Speaker
Yeah, I can see that. Okay, so I want Ridley Scott to direct the David Carradine as a record adaptation now. the dark, gritty version of Miller. Oh my god, it'd be amazing! Let's please pour one out for the del Toro Hobbit we never got to see. Oh yeah. Even though it sort of morphed into the Jackson Hobbit, I definitely count that as a lost adaptation. Indeed.
02:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, particularly because a lot of the places where I feel frustration with that adaptation is where del Toro's vision and Jackson's vision are at odds with each other and you you feel that dissonance at times. I just I wanted the visuals. I wanted the visuals so bad. Yeah, same, same.
02:01:32
Speaker
There's also one other category, which is definitely lower budget. These are fan films, but I think it's worth noting there are fan films out there that are incredibly well produced, incredibly thoughtfully made.
02:01:47
Speaker
better produced than some of the ones we talked about earlier. Yeah. Yeah. they Yeah. I'm sure some of these had more money than Hobbit did. We also very intentionally do follow the style set by the Jackson adaptations.
02:02:05
Speaker
to the best of their ability. and for all of the music yeah So the first one that I want to mention is The Hunt for Gollum, which is a fan film made in 2009. Please note that I said 2009, because as you're looking for articles about this or what have you, you're likely to find the announcements about a major the big budget Jackson attached Andy Serkis attached adaptation coming from Warner Brothers and there's a lot of I think genuine questions that can be raised in the the space of like how Warner Brothers is going to treat this fan film and the steps they've already taken to try to eradicate it from the internet, but which to the best of my knowledge at this point, the fan film folks have been fighting back against. It's back up. they They were able to get the website and the film back up. And I think Warner Brothers like backed off pretty quickly. I think when a lot of people are like, Oh, what the fuck are you doing? Right.
02:03:07
Speaker
I do want to point out that this is an award winning fan film that was sanctioned by the estate. Yeah, I think that's a big part of why they were able to like, be like, ah back the fuck up, because we were here first. And also, they're using our title, which Well, it's Tolkien's Tolkien's title. I mean, it's sort of like, but I mean, it's like in terms of like copyright and rights and stuff like that. I feel like they have there's this argument like more than others of, oh, this could hurt our brand. Our brand is this title. It's like.
02:03:42
Speaker
The year is 2024. You chose that title title in 2024, knowing full well that a fan film already existed. Existed, exactly. you like If there is a concern about your brand, you walked straight into it. And I think we should be critical of practices.
02:03:59
Speaker
like that because these are this fan film in particular is one that does not deserve to disappear from the internet and I want to really reassure everyone. it like As long as you are watching it streaming, like that is 100% the fair use that is licensed. You are 100% cool to watch this. No moral qualms about like, oh, or is it infringement or whatever? No, like this is a sanction by the estate, all of that.
02:04:25
Speaker
Yeah. And it's really good. Like the orc costumes, yeah not the best, but it's a fan film. Like you're not expecting, it's better than like, you know, Halloween store orc. It's not like, you know, Warner Brothers money orc, but it is pretty good. And it follow it does exactly what you think it would do. It follows the story of Aragorn and Gandalf failing.
02:04:53
Speaker
And so it's kind of interesting, you know? It's sort of like, I feel like it's like an interesting tangent to kind of go down where it's like, oh yeah, ultimately this storyline, it ends in in failure and how essential that failure is to the eventual success of the quest, I think is kind of interesting to think about too. But i I do kind of like the idea where it's like, oh yeah, you know, Aragorn, he's been out here doing a lot of stuff. And sometimes he doesn't always get his quarry, I guess.
02:05:22
Speaker
There's another fan film in a similar space in terms of like very good quality of production, especially for a fan film and all of that. And that's Born of Hope, which I believe is also 2009. And that one is looking at Arathorn. So Aragorn's father and his mother and like that story of his birth in early years and the people who are grown folks at that time in that story.
02:05:53
Speaker
also very good. Yeah, that is one I know that we've talked about. Like it would be so interesting to see that that film get the full budget that it would be like so beautifully deserved to have to be able to tell the story in every way they'd like to because it's so good already with the level ah of production that they were able to put forward.
02:06:18
Speaker
There's also another one that never came to fruition. It was being advertised and in and like there were announcements that it was going to be made in 2013 to 2014, and that was called Storm Over Gondolin, but that one was not ever made. And then there's a fan film in a slightly different sort of narrative space. A slightly different tone. And that is... That's the My Little Pony adaptation in the style of Friendship is Magic. That is 2012. The actual type title of the video is Lord of the Rings Reenacted by Ponies. Rather than a ring, it is a golden horseshoe with the ring stripped on it. And it's very much like the we're going to like defeat Sauron and and destroy the ring or the horseshoe.
02:07:12
Speaker
with the power of friendship kind of thing. And he yeah we watched this at MythCon earlier this year, a month or so, a couple months ago now. and I was very skeptical about it because I'm not a big pony person, but it was hilarious. I fully recommend it, especially the Ent who is basically a pony wearing like a grade school tree costume. It's so good. It's so good.
02:07:44
Speaker
I mean, I like unironically, unabashedly love my little pony Friendship is Magic. So this is like so many things, so many things that I love all coming together. Yeah, this was a great adaptation, I think.
02:07:59
Speaker
Like surprisingly faithful to the work as well. Yeah, exactly. Being like a 12 minute video, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was mega impressed. As a fan of both properties.
02:08:15
Speaker
There is one more adaptation that we do want to just make a brief note about, and it sort of straddles the space between an unusual type of adaptation and a big budget adaptation because it's very definitely a a major studio, big budget adaptation, and that is that we are getting War of the Rojoim in December, and that is Produced by Warner Brothers and everything. It's the story of Rohan, like 500 years before the events of Lord of the Rings. So it's still a third age story drawing information from the appendices and things like that. And it's done in a anime style. It's an animated film, feature length film coming to theaters with big budget backing. And it's a very, very interesting
02:09:10
Speaker
space that we actually get something like this. It's an interesting time to be able to to go and see an adaptation like this. Yeah, I'm really excited to have like a modern animated adaptation. I'm famously kind of an anime hater because I went to art school and like basically everyone's heard this story about how all my friends tried to force me to watch Cowboy Bebop and therefore I hate anime.
02:09:35
Speaker
So like there are definitely like some some tropes to like annaee like animation that are not necessarily my favorite that I am definitely kind of seeing in the previews for this adaptation, but I am so, so compelled. I have to see this. It seems like such a ah weird, but potentially good adaptation.
02:09:59
Speaker
and Yes, I'm very encouraged. We have Miranda Otto coming back as the voice of AON or as a narrator in this, taking us back to the context and events. I'm encouraged by folks that I've heard of who have been consulting on this film. I've been encouraged by a lot of the things that I've heard.
02:10:20
Speaker
and wary of many of the things as well because you know and'm I'm not a huge anime fan either. I struggle with animated things in general and I did not realize how excited I was for this until we went to go see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the seats are all those sort of like dream lounger like reclining armchair seats and this trailer came up, and as soon as the first note dropped, I was just like, not in control of my body, flailing my legs so hard that my flip flops flew off. And like the guy that I was sitting next to was like, are you excited about this one? Yeah, I 100% started crying.
02:11:09
Speaker
I also saw this at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and like because they started with the fucking Rohan theme and I'm like oh god no not the Rohan theme and then it's all it's shots from the the movies there's like Aragorn doing the sluttiest thing a man can do and then like it cuts to the animation and oh i just the rohan theme fucking hits me man and i'm like sitting there because if we're we're there to watch a comedy and i'm like you can't fucking cry don't let those tears fall you're not going to be the nerd crying about a fucking preview
02:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I wouldn't say like I'm the super hardcore anime fan, but I've probably watched a lot more anime than anybody here, and I've enjoyed a lot of a lot of it. And I'm also really like ah animation in general, so I'm pumped. i've I've been pumped, and I continue to be pumped. So yeah, that's that's kind of all I have to say.
02:12:10
Speaker
The director, I'm not a big anime person either, but my understanding is the director has some level of renown as well. Yeah, he does. And he just looking back at his experience has worked on stuff back to like 80s DuckTales, Akira, Iggy's Delivery Service as like artists, like doing artists back in those days.
02:12:33
Speaker
So he's been around for like 30 plus years doing actual, like the actual drawing and then moved into directing and has since directed a bunch of Ghost in the Shell animes. Yeah. Yeah. The biggest guess thing that he's been involved in. But ah yeah, he's legit. At DragonCon, we had like a 30 minute DragonCon exclusive interview with the producer.
02:12:57
Speaker
Yeah, Jason DeMarco. And everything I heard makes me feel really good about what they're trying to do. Everything that I've heard from all the people I know who are consulting on this also makes me feel good about what it is they're trying to do. Very cool. Also, I don't know. have Have you guys seen the Japanese preview or just the English one?
02:13:22
Speaker
Just the English one. So in the Japanese preview, you see Saruman in this Christopher Lee. at pool shit what They got they got specific permission from the estate to use from his widow. but They got permission from his widow to to use his image, his visage in the animation. Oh, wow. She was like, oh, yes, he would love this. Yeah.
02:13:50
Speaker
We don't we don't know who's voicing him yet. But yeah, I thought that was really cool. That's incredible. Oh, yeah, that's awesome. Also the Japanese version of the the preview very different. Oh, yeah, it's worth watching. Also, this is also why like I'm just going to get on a soapbox here about AI. like When we have technology to be able to use someone's voice or visage or whatever and when they've passed, it makes such a difference to me if their loved ones have been able to consent to that instead of a studio saying, like oh, we own this so we can just do what we want.
02:14:31
Speaker
I think it's also very important to note that even as we went back through all of these different adaptations that are out there, you will also see on the internet, for instance, stills from the 1929 Black and White Hobbit film.
02:14:49
Speaker
Which predates. job The habit was written in 1937. And in 1929, it did not exist, nor was it a published book, nor had it been made into a film. These are AI-generated images that go around and that people, they're trying to dupe people and get clicks and everything and just hoping that people aren't noticing those dates, that it seems close enough, memorable enough, because they remember a couple big movies that came out in like 1929 or whatever. so
02:15:26
Speaker
yeah this fine
02:15:30
Speaker
you managed to take down both bras but bookends Just trying to ride the horse. um Like she wants to be in more of the row her room too I guess.
02:15:43
Speaker
ah yeah People who are making up AI nonsense are shit and we have to continue like fighting back against it.
02:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm really glad that there are ethical ways in order to go about keeping some of the ways of honoring actors and the work that folks are doing alive in film and television everything still.
02:16:11
Speaker
I will say also most of my qualms that I had had about War of the Rovering have been mitigated because all of my qualms were about upper level management at Warner Brothers. And I do have a sense that the folks behind this film have been trying much like Jackson did and much like others have done to try to make sure that the people who are way at the top with whatever their political conservative nonsense is, are not getting to control the storyline of the piece. yeah I am hopeful that David Zaslav has not been able to fuck this one up.
02:16:53
Speaker
That's the TLDR of my opinion. Knock on wood. Yeah, yeah. Inch a law, pretty much. So really, the entire reason that we wanted to look at adaptations outside of these big budget ones is that the more adaptations there are, the more people they reach, the less definitive any single adaptation is, the more versions we see of a way to tell a story.
02:17:19
Speaker
the more people get intrigued and curious and keep coming back to the source material. And so my personal view is that there's no such thing as a bad adaptation in terms of it being bad for the source material, whether any particular adaptation succeeds or not in any particular viewer's eye, the more of them we have, the more attention keeps coming back to the source material and to the story. I would just like to add that no matter how many people cry about it on the internet, none of these adaptations, whether you love them or hate them, have ever changed a single word on the page.
02:18:02
Speaker
Those books are still there. You can go back to them and enjoy them. Enjoy the adaptations you like. Leave the ones behind you don't. Enjoy the parts of the adaptations that you like and just ignore the ones you don't or make fun of the ones you don't, whatever. But just don't be a dick about it and every adaptation is probably somebody's favorite.
02:18:23
Speaker
100% Amen. Amen to all of that. I just have a really quick mathom, basically, or a bookmark or something. So i I mentioned a while back in the podcast that Claire Moore and I were developing a note in response to a... How do I put this delicately?
02:18:48
Speaker
a ah fascinating take published by Mythlore. I'm really excited to ah say that our our note is actually going to be published in the next Mythlore which should be out by the time that this episode I think is edited and up. So Yeah, this is, I'm blushing and excited because this is a note and this is the first time I've been published in something. And I'm super excited that I got to do it with Claire. And our note is entitled, A Bleak Baron Take, a Response to Women and Fertility in the Lord of the Rings.
02:19:30
Speaker
And I am yeah so pleased to see that in the table of contents that Janet put out, we are above Verlyn Fleaker's note. And I'm like, oh, the six degrees from Verlyn Fleaker has just narrowed by that much. I am in a table of contents with her now. so
02:19:51
Speaker
So yeah, so look out for that and I i don't know, I'm excited about it. I just want to say how i excited I am about it because I have ah recently a friend sent me, like knowing that I do the podcast, knowing that I'm a Tolkien nerd, sent me a more sort of like pop culture-y article.
02:20:09
Speaker
that really seem to be taking the same sort of, oh, Middle Earth is barren and there's like no women and no whatever. And babies. Yeah. Just this bizarre taking was like, wow, having read the article that your note is responding to and very much feeling that it needs a response.
02:20:34
Speaker
I see that this pop culture article seems to be drawing from things that are in that article and I think it's very, very important that there is the space to counter that narrative before it gains a lot of steam and so that when it's encountered there is the response to it and people can view it in context.
02:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited. where I was dokingly referring it to as our very demure, very mindful response that was basically trying to say, do you even read you misogynist creep? In a much more delicate way. Or diplomatic way, maybe.
02:21:17
Speaker
yeah If you want to check that out, Mythlore is open access. I will have a link to it when it goes live in the resources tab on our webpage. But also if you want to read it in its full context, you can get a digital or print subscription to Mythlore at mythsoc dot.org.
02:21:35
Speaker
yeah I personally love having physical copies of things in my grubby little hands and I am super excited to be about to have a physical copy of something that Leah has published on my book shelves alongside of physical things that Alicia has published and so this is this is ah a fun little part of my library that's growing and I'm very excited about it.
02:21:57
Speaker
So many amazing folks that we've interviewed on the podcast too. I'm just getting to to put together this whole physical little library of tangible pieces of amazing work in the Tolkien space. I'm very excited about that. So cool.
02:22:13
Speaker
All right. And that does it for our first episode on adaptations and in this, the smaller adaptations, the the lesser known ones. And we, oh fuck, I don't know what to say. Alicia take over. We've been recording for a while guys.
02:22:34
Speaker
lee so Don't edit that looks all out. editing
02:22:43
Speaker
No, don't salvage it. oh i Just fucking leave that one. i love it god yeah ah Thank you for joining us today. You can find us basically wherever you stream ah your podcasts. We're on Apple, Spotify, YouTube music.
02:23:01
Speaker
You can also stream us directly on SinCaster, that's sincaster.com slash queer lodgings, the Tolkien podcast with a whole bunch of hyphens in between all of those words. Please leave us a rating, like, share, and subscribe where it is possible to do so. You can find us on Facebook at queer lodgings.
02:23:20
Speaker
Twitter at queer underscore lodgings. We're also on blue sky as queer lodgings. You can also send us an email if you have feedback or ideas for future episodes at queer lodgings podcast at gmail dot.com. Also guys, we have a website, which is queer lodgings.com where we post all of our episodes, put all of our resources, and we also have a merch shop.
02:23:48
Speaker
It is full of fantastic things such as holographic stickers that say hashtag fueled by spite. It gives me so much joy to see those in the wild.
02:24:03
Speaker
i Hope to see you guys there. Yeah. Thanks guys. Bye.
02:24:30
Speaker
here. Hold on a second. Let me hold on one second. Let me double check that my rabbits aren't like destroying my bedroom. I'm hearing a lot of but we a lot of stuff going on. yes like but One second. Yeah.