Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcrist | Hacker News Reader

Despite the Peter Jackson movies, The Hobbit was actually written as a childrens' story rather than a grand epic.

I'd wager a lot that the cartoonish nature of his pictures was an accurate reflection of how he saw that story.

If you haven't seen the 1977 animated Hobbit film (often called Rankin-Bass after it's creators), you're doing yourself a disservice.

View on HN

Online you can find a PDF detailing the differences between the pre-LotR Hobbit and the second edition (Tolkien rewrote comparatively small parts of the Hobbit to make it fit and actually didn't expect the publisher to release a second edition with the changes, hence the preface to the Lord of the Rings and Bilbo himself apologizing for "a different version of the story").

You can even see the "Hobbit-esque" writing at the beginning of LotR, remember the fox that sees them walking and talks to himself about it. The last we see of humanish animals.

Trivia: The word mithril didn't exist in the original edition of the Hobbit, and was added after LOTR was published.

> hence ... Bilbo himself apologizing for "a different version of the story"

I thought that showed the Ring's effect on Bilbo, something Gandalf talked about too, and which is important to LOTR.

That was Tolkien's clever trick for his rewrite - the "original" story was what Bilbo wrote down at the time (the "present") - the new edition was what was later edited in by Bilbo or Frodo as what really went down (after everything had been revealed in LotR.

I understand your claim. How do we know which explanation, or whether another explanation, is true?

Again, another strong explanation for the change in Bilbo's story: It was a demonstration of the corruption caused by the Ring and its effects on hobbits, an effect corroborated by Gollum's story about how Gollum acquired the Ring - all as explained by Gandalf.

You can actually purchase facsimile editions of the original (pre-LOTR) published version of The Hobbit.

True fact I learned only this week, from another HN story: Topcraft, the Japanese firm that did the animation for the Rankin/Bass Hobbit and ROTK, ultimately broke up and a bunch of its team went on to help form Studio Ghibli; several of the animators on The Hobbit went on to work on classic Miyazaki films.

I'm a fan of Jackson's LOTR, but his Hobbit was almost a complete failure (in my opinion). Radical departures from feel, and yes, plot, of the book.

You can read the book in half the running time of the movies. There's a lot of padding and pointless meandering in them. It should never have been a trilogy.

You can listen to the audiobook in just under six hours, compared to the theatrical release of the trilogy which is nearly eight, or the extended release which is over eight and a half hours.

While I think the hobbit movies were very bad, I've never agreed with this take. Mostly the movies pull details out of the lord of the rings appendixes and fill in gaps in the plot of the hobbit that would honestly be quite strange in a modern film. Gandalf just screwing off for no apparent reason for half the film would be confusing and weird (honestly it was in the book too, but it's too whimsical to be a bother). And a lot of people complained about Legolas being there but other people would complain if he wasn't, or if he was just a no name member of the mob like the elves were in the book.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an adapted version of the hobbit that fits in better to lord of the rings imo, it's just that this particular try at it was a disaster.

Wow, that really makes those movies pointless! And how much more does it cost to watch the movies compared with buying the book?

You can have an all-time great book or spend more time and money on decent (ok, awful IMHO) movie.

If you look at the word count and movie runtime of LOTR, then compare it to the word count of The Hobbit, you'll find that a similar treatment of The Hobbit would result in probably around 90 minutes of film.

There are complications with that assessment, but 90 minutes would fit quite well with the fact that it's supposed to be a children's story. The Rankin Bass animated version left out a few key plot points (particularly the arkenstone subplot) that could be recovered with a 90 minute runtime. I could also see the possibility of having a 2 hour extended edition

I found the LOTR movies completely missed the essence and magic of the books and I see them as little more than cliche-ridden hollywood garbage. I can't possibly imagine Tolkien being happy about such depraved debasement of his life's work.

The only adaptation of Tolkien's work that I think does justice to it and captures part of Tolkien's spark, are the albums of the Austrian black metal band "Summoning".

Watching Leg-o-Lamb surf in the battle of Helm's Deep kinda ripped me back to "this is just a movie". Jackson should just snip that out and burn the footage of it.

These days, I tend to just put LotR on with the sound off, as moving wallpaper.

You should try the Russian subtitling of Helm’s Deep for some comic relief

In the "Letters of Tolkien" you see a couple of references to screen-plays where he's very critical of changes, condensing, etc. But also a memorable entry in which he says:

"Stanley & I have agreed on our policy : Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations."

Tolkien sold the movie rights to both the Hobbit and LOTR in 1969 for £100,000.

Source is an interesting interview with Christopher Tolkien in Le Monde: https://web.archive.org/web/20180709130054/https://www.world...

... which is translated from the French original: https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2012/07/05/tolkien-l-...

Finally somebody other than me who is aware of Summoning. They are awesome. "The Passing of the Grey Company", "Land of the Dead", "Mirdautas Vras", "Nightshade Forests" and "Kor" all evoke specific scenes from the books for me.

If you haven't seen any of the fan edits you are doing yourself a huge diservice. Last one I saw was the M4 edit which went as far as redoing the CGI.

There are brilliant performances hidden amongst the studio meddling.

where can you find these?

I agree, but I'd also like to defend Jackson on this one. He was brought in after Del Toro dropped out and the movies had been in production for years already. He had no prep time and seemed to exist on little sleep for years. You can see some of this in the behind the scenes recordings/interviews they did. I have a feeling they were only as good as they were because of him. Regardless, they were disappointing.

Did not know this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com