Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I wish the article wasn't so sneering in tone... sneering is good larks if you're on board with it, but if you come in like "oh wait this actually seems interesting" it can be a bit off-putting. However, it is nice to know of this show's existence, and I'm grateful to learn of that.
Because it was basically a "television play", a hybrid between a theater production and a higher budget TV series/film. Such things were common on Soviet TV.
One has to understand that Soviet Union was relatively poor when compared with the west, especially so during perestroika.
For example "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" is another Soviet tv play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCutJ-7acvg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQWLsZurF5U
I find it funny that such production is compared with Jackson’s trilogy now.
I also grew up on Soviet movies and cartoons so this doesn’t look as out of place to me as I guess it might to someone who’s never seen this genre of film.
Since then, I've forgotten all my Russian...
Also found this version of The Hobbit (as I don’t know Russian I have no idea if this is solid or not) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekbJdOGAxPQ
(sorry, don't know about English captions. Seems like they aren't available for it)
I browse in private mode and clear cookies, looks like they want to show that page for every video in that case. Is there a plugin or tool that works around a page like this?
Self answering: looks like it's an alternative front end to youtube, more details at https://github.com/iv-org/invidious .
Version history: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/412178-youtube-dismiss-sig...
Out of interest I disabled the script and tried the Customize option. Clicking Confirm then tries to redirect me via https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/ads/preferences/cu/optou...?... which is on both my uBlock and Pihole blocklists.
I'll carry on auto-consenting for cookie storage, and auto-deleting them when I close the tab.
Someone involved with this piece is still bitter that Tom Bombadil was cut from the trilogy.
The thing about Tom Bombadil is that he was an enigma. He wore the ring and did not vanish. Instead, he made the ring vanish. It had no power over him. He was just completely orthogonal to this struggle, which detracts from its urgency. He was neither in the Ralph Bakshi film nor Jackson's, in part because it detracts from the dangerous atmosphere.
https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
(and yes, this has been refuted countless times but it's really funny)
If he's dangerous, its like the old Gods are dangerous because they may be capricious. They may squash something because they aren't paying attention to it.
LOTR is not an action/adventure book, but the Jackson movie trilogy is. I was very bitter that some characters like Bombadil, Glorfindel, and the Druedain didn't make it into the movies. But the movies are not the book, and I doubt it's possible to make a LOTR movie that's true to the book.
Tolkien plotted by instinct, writing things down and then trying to figure out what that meant. Tom Bombadil was a character from other unrelated stories. He was introduced in a draft of Lord of the Rings that was much more stylistically "Hobbit part 2" than what we eventually got.
But Tolkien was a consummate retconner: once something was written down it it tended to stay. He molded and reinterpreted but rarely removed, until he found something that felt right to him.
That style of writing leaves a lot of tiny inconsistencies -- but inconsistencies that mimic the way any culture's lore evolves. That makes them incredibly intriguing, as if you'd just chanced on Greek myths or the Arthurian legends -- except instead of the product of centuries, it was one obsessive guy.
His ultimate retcon, by the way, is the first published edition of The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings grew out of the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit, but changed in ways that made it incompatible with the original. (In the original Gollum really was going to just give it to him.) So he rewrote it, but the first edition still existed -- and in the intro to LotR, he explains it as Bilbo's propaganda covering up the truth about how he got the Ring.
He's backstory. The Silmarillion was mostly backstory, is almost 500 pages, and people read that. They can stand a few pages on Tom Bombadil in their adventure story.
And he's so singularly interesting, that I remember him particularly. After 40 years. With no help from the movie industry for sure.
If you get to re-reading it again, just imagine Tom singing his songs as if they were country, like Hank Williams or Garth Brooks-style. Hilarious!
Actually officially it was "telespactakle" - which basically is theatre production but made for TV instead of being played on live stage. So no surprise here.
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2020/08/dd-wait-hang-on-ther...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuKRdgnmO8 - this is the best version in my opinion (aside from the "classic" version with Natalia O'Shea as Takhisis)
http://nyc.qadviser.com/articles/steamtank-featuring-warhamm...
Do not taunt Russian LARPers.
> In the opening song, Romanov sings a rough translation of Tolkien’s description of the origins of the rings of power,
The Soviets had their own Led Zeppelin. Perhaps we weren’t so different after all.
Even these soviet tv shows are slowly coming out and are just absolutely fascinating.
Even the lush Soviet inks had a peculiar inviting smell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_De...
Why or how it came to be there, I have no idea, and I regret not inquiring about it, and I also regret not spending more time reading it.
This quote speaks volumes about the respective audiences.
From IMDB:
Parody comedy designed to resemble a non-existent gritty 1980's Cold War Romanian police show that promoted Communist ideals. The action-packed and blood-soaked first season finds Detectives Gregor Anghel and Joseph Baciu investigating the murder of fellow officer Nikita Ionescu and, in the process, unraveling a subversive plot to destroy their country that is fueled by what-else-but the greatest enemy: Capitalism.
I think the whole thing is on Youtube (as video fragments in a playlist) but is definitely also available as a torrent.
This was released in 1991, a period of great economic and political turmoil in Russia. They were essentially in the process of switching from one-party communism to a democratic system with real private property. Many organizations were undergoing rapid (often overnight) privatization.
Just to give you an idea of the economic chaos, inflation in 1992 was 2000%. You can imagine how that plays out for a production budget.
Yet, despite the turbulence, people tried to create and to entertain.