FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for February 10, 2022

while I have seen the films, I didn’t get much into the books… I guess fantasy just isn’t quite my genre

A true “Ringhead” would have called them Nazgûl, and with the accent

I remember seeing Fellowship of the Ring when it opened, and hearing book fans in front of me commenting on their readiness to dissect deviations in the film.

I read the LOTR trilogy waaaaay back in the 70s and enjoyed them immensely. No way that movies could do them complete justice, but what Jackson came up with was pretty good.

The Hobbit, however… I’ll stick with the Rankin-Bass animated movie.

All this is IMHO, you understand.

Don’t worry, she’ll be more interested once she sees Orlando Bloom.

Let me ask about the elephant in the room, what is a Ring-Wraith?

I read the books repeatedly when I was young. The movies were awful, although they did have some striking visuals.

The first frame would have shown it wasn’t true to the book, who needs to search for what it thrown in your face?

As usual, I like the book more than the movie. although I found both entertaining.

There were a couple of things that should have been included but were not and some rewrites that were gratuitous.

Do I spoil Faramir to him or not? I wish someone had with me, I’d have enjoyed the second film better. The changes there really threw me out of the moment on first viewing in the theater.

The real undead ringwraiths refused to join SAG.

Peter Jackson’s LOTR was a masterpiece. I fear what Amazon will do to the story and characters.

How did Jason get a preview of the Trilogy.

A wise person explained to me there were a lot more potential movie fans out there than those who read the books. So the books were modified to be appealing to the mass audince.

Ha, you laugh but I saw a headline from a LOTR fan site and they were trying to translate the runes from a frame of the new Prime series trailer.

Hey: the movie was great and about as close to the books as you could reasonably make. It sure beat that STUPID cartoon version (pardon me: animated) that came out in the 1980. Gag.

Quite a divergence of LotR opinions here. I thought the books were OK and the movies were better. Peter Jackson made some improvements: the love between Aragorn and Arwen worked better in the movies. After reading the books, I thought he should have married Éowyn. And I don’t care about Faramir — he’s a minor character at best.

The Hobbit is a difficult book to turn into a film. There are 12 dwarves in almost every scene. That’s a lot of minor characters cluttering up the story. To me, the 1977 Rankin/Bass movie did it better. Yes, it’s a bit childish but Tolkien wrote the book for children. The PJ trilogy was about 1.5 movies too long.

I’m optimistic about what Amazon will do.

I remember checking a scene in “Three Men and a Baby” frame-by-frame (which wasn’t easy on a VCR ☺), for the reputed “Ghost”. I finally found the frame that proved it was a “cut-out” of Ted Danson in a top hat.

Well, they left out the entire time with Tom Bombadil in the beginning and the Scouring of the Shire at the end, even in the extended version.

I read the books after seeing the movies so I didn’t matter to me as much. I enjoyed both. I listened to the book on tape of the Hobbit and I liked part 1 or the Hobbit because what differences they made weren’t a big deal to me and I’ll still watch part 2 and 3 even though the addition of Legolas was unnecessary and the addition of a certain female elf and the romantic crap was stupid.

That’s because, Jason, in our world all of the undead ringwraiths are in politics.

Does anyone know if Jason found out about Leonard Nimoy’s “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”? I’m curious how he would react to the intersection of Star Trek and Middle Earth.

Production costs, production costs. Actual Ring Wraiths are super-expensive to cast.

I’ve never been much of a fantasy fan, especially high fantasy like that. My buddies in college were all into LOTR, but I was reading science fiction.

The books and the movies tell the story in very different ways. The movie concentrated on the violent aspects leaving out much of Tolkien’s imagery and brilliant story telling. Even so I enjoyed the movies knowing that if they were true to Tolkien they would be hours longer and would not be appreciated by a wide audience.

Ahh, the good old days. It was easy to do with a dial up router as it would take several seconds for each frame to load. Unless you had Apple Quicktime and ten you occupied yourself by talking to Clippy on your open word doc.

Fun fact, when I’ve guest lectured at local colleges on contemporary myths like those of Tolkien or Superheroes, or Star Wars/Trek, and I mention that back when I started college it would take upwards of 10 to 15 minutes to view a five minute trailer due connection speeds and software problems they look at me like I said they were Lascaux Cave paintings.