5 ms·

It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that worl

It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world. It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it hacked the story instead of treating it with reverence. The movie should have changed nothing, regardless of what "modern audiences" expect. The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script. Thank goodness there's a single example in this world of a great work not being commercialised - Calvin and Hobbes. UPDATE: A counterpoint to my grumble about the hacking of Tolkien's work: Anyone who would like to listen to the most fabulous audiobook of The Hobbit that was ever made: https://www.discogs.com/release/4205817-JRR-Tolkien-Nicol-Wi https://www.discogs.com/release/4205817-JRR-Tolkien-Nicol-Wi... It was made in 1974 narrated by Nicol Williamson. You can find pirated versions of it popping up on the web from time to time. It's truly beautiful. Email me if you want a copy - I might know a link. andrew.stuart@supercoders.com.au

marcusverus 3y ago
While I mostly agree, it’s hard for me to imagine a better adaptation of LOTR than Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Last I checked, 3/3 are in the top ~15 movies of all time on IMDb! It isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
csallen 3y ago
If you don't like the recent commercial depictions of the LotR series… don't watch them? Of course you have the right to criticize and complain about them. But to let their existence "spoil" your enjoyment of the original works seems excessive. The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works, and so neither should your ability to enjoy them change.
- rcme 3y ago
  No man is an island. You can’t ignore what happens in the world.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Sure you can. I never saw the hobbit movies because I heard they had a lot of fighting. It’s a lighthearted book.
    - zabzonk 3y ago
      You might not like the movies (I don't) but I think it is a bit suspect not to watch them because of a review, if you like the books. Also, there is quite bit of fighting in the book.
      - gumby 3y ago
        In the Lord of the Rings, sure, but not much in the hobbit. But in general I’m not interested in a film of a book I liked anyway.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  >> The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works I was changed by seeing the new works. Some things can't be unseen.
  - mikercampbell 3y ago
    That Hobbit trilogy? GAWD. I tried reading the hobbit and while I loved it, I agree while at the same time saying that culture is rampant. Like how they’ll never stop making Willy Wonkas or Alice in Wonderlands, and each gets increasingly painful.
- mellosouls 3y ago
jimbob45 3y ago
The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author They gutted Rowling’s clever ending that tied everything together neatly to replace it with a laser gun fight.
vlunkr 3y ago
Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convinced New Line to take a big risk on it. Maybe they should have changed nothing, but I think that's unreasonable. It's a different medium, where storytelling and pacing are just different, and also we live in reality, and people are looking for returns on their investment. The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors. The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.
- retrac 3y ago
  > At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. The problem, if you will, with a great but imperfect work of art is that no one else will attempt the same work again. Because it has already been done and it's hard to top a smashing success. If it had been a bad LotR movie, one would be able to hope, probably reasonably, that a good one might eventually be made. It would be a dissatisfying situation, just like that 1978 film. But the 2000s LoTR films were, indeed, quite good. And so they will likely be the final word.
  - dfmooreqqq 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's really true. Take, for example, the Harry Potter movies. They were great, but imperfect, and were really well received. But they are still being readapted into a TV series.
  - aikinai 3y ago
    There’s no way it will be left alone; I don’t think you need to worry about any “final words” from Hollywood. They’re already moving on another large LotR project that might actually just be the main story remade already.
hogepiyo 3y ago
I don't think the original Lord of the Rings trilogy would really be filmable as a 1:1 book to film adaptation. As a book fan I think Peter Jackson did a pretty good job with it in general; the behind the scenes footage really shows that they did care about the source material. Fellowship particularly I would still say is great, Two Towers and ROTK have some moments that are either downright ridiculous or against the spirit of the novel but they're still okay as films. The Hobbit on the other hand really feels generally awful. I watched a fan-cut of it that cuts all 3 movies down to about 4 hours of content and it felt just about watchable. >The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script. I think you can attribute this more to JKR being still alive and in control of her creation than well-meaning production studios / directors.
- hinkley 3y ago
  It is for instance interesting to see Gaiman’s adaptations before and after he basically had a blank check from studios. Stardust is… okay. Cute. I need a new Neverwhere. Even though half the reason I gave “Vigil” a shot is because it had the Marquis as the captain.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  As a potential heir to the stewardship, Christopher Tolkien was very much alive at the time the movies were being made and was famously opposed to a lot of the artistic choices being made.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Rowling apparently maintained some artistic control on her movies, whereas Tolkien had sold the rights entirely, so Christopher didn't have much of a say beyond complaining. I think the thing that really "solved" it for me was realizing that the vast majority of the people who watch LotR will never read the book, let alone the Silmarillion. And those who DO decide to read those after seeing the movie - the movie won't destroy it for them.
porknubbins 3y ago
I felt that the Harry Potter films kind of missed out on what made the books so special. In the books, besides the slowly building adventure/mystery story, all the episodic, mundane day to day drama in the life of the school really felt like living through a school year in a surprisingly realistic way. The movies I saw focused on the adventure and lost a lot of that charm of feeling like you’re back in school alongside the characters.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Amusingly enough, the silly game recently released captured that better than the movies did (though the first did pretty well), even though the school slide was a bit slap-dash.
eredengrin 3y ago
I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra material could have been removed, and I don't think it needed to be a trilogy, two movies at most. The book has far less material than the LotR trilogy books do and the third movie dragged on forever on pointless battle scenes. But as for the original Jackson trilogy movies, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate those as someone who loved the books. There are only two major gripes I can think of which are particularly inexcusable and a few smaller things I would've liked to change but which are excusable either for not being particularly consequential, or because of time constraints. Overall though blocking the two major complaints out of my memory, it's quite well done. For a twelve hour film to have only two major gripes compared to the books, I'm not actually sure if there are any other film/book adaptations with a ratio that good.
- soligern 3y ago
  Well what are the two major gripes?
  - aikinai 3y ago
    One has to be the ghost army wiping out all impact and meaning from the mortals’ battle and sacrifice in the Return of the King. I’m in the camp that the quality and faithfulness in Peter Jackson’s movies were an insanely improbable miracle—lightning in a bottle that we should be thankful happened once and you could never hope to capture again. But I’m still flabbergasted at the decision to make the ghost army omnipotent. They were so thoughtful with everything else, especially the changes they made—you can see this clearly in the behind-the-scenes discussion. So what in the world happened here?
    - eredengrin 3y ago
      I actually don't consider that a major gripe. It's certainly a very weird decision and I'd prefer the original version, but it doesn't ultimately affect all that much imo, it mostly just means the humans did a bit less orc killing in the movies than they had to do in the books. But yeah, I agree with you, I'm happy it turned out as it did for the most part, some of my favorite movies for sure.
ggm 3y ago
> It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It saddens you that Tolkien found a publisher? How did you want them to disseminate? By the oral tradition in mead halls? I know you mean debased beyond the printed word but that happened when Ralf Bakshi made his not very good cartoon and when Leonard Nimoy read the poems.
trzy 3y ago
The Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit was the high water mark for commercial adaptations and it's been downhill since then.
noduerme 3y ago
I feel fortunate that I read those books as a kid before seeing so much as a fan-art drawing. Nothing can compare to the visuals drawn in your imagination from reading Tolkien. Jackson's aesthetic take on the places was largely as wonderful as his take on the characters was abominable, but either way it would be a tragedy for someone to see the movies before reading the books. And you're right that there was no excuse to so mangle the material. Waterson has a degree of artistic integrity that's sadly vanishingly rare these days.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I loved the whimsical art version from the 1960s, and looked to find the paperback editions with that art.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gumby 3y ago
> It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. You might note that the author worked hard with Allen & Unwin to have it printed and offered for sale. If you have the official ‘60s paperbacks from Bellentine you’ll see the back cover is a letter from Tolkien complaining of the unauthorized Ace editions and telling you you should buy only the authorized editions (Ballantine or Houghton Mifflin). It’s been commercial since the day it first went into print.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's also arguable that undue concern for commercialization kept the Silmarillion out of print, because he kept trying to bring it to the level of perfection found in the LotR.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    The Silmarillion has not reached the level of quality that would normally be required for publication. The only reason it's published at all is the popularity of Tolkien's other work. "Perfection" really isn't the right concept here. The Silmarillion is not perfectly written. It also isn't adequately written.
ycombinete 3y ago
What was hacked for you in the LotR movies? The only egregious hacking I noticed in the movies was the character assassination of Faramir. I must disagree on Harry Potter. All the moves after Columbus stopped directing them were bad. From angry-American Dumbledore, to Fiennes’s bizzare Voldemort, to Hermione being bolstered at the expense of Ron.
- teddyh 3y ago
  Name one place in the movies, one single line of dialog, where Gimli is not changed into a clown (compared to the book).

marcusverus 3y ago

While I mostly agree, it’s hard for me to imagine a better adaptation of LOTR than Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Last I checked, 3/3 are in the top ~15 movies of all time on IMDb! It isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

csallen 3y ago

If you don't like the recent commercial depictions of the LotR series… don't watch them? Of course you have the right to criticize and complain about them. But to let their existence "spoil" your enjoyment of the original works seems excessive. The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works, and so neither should your ability to enjoy them change.

rcme 3y ago
No man is an island. You can’t ignore what happens in the world.
- gumby 3y ago
  Sure you can. I never saw the hobbit movies because I heard they had a lot of fighting. It’s a lighthearted book.
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    You might not like the movies (I don't) but I think it is a bit suspect not to watch them because of a review, if you like the books. Also, there is quite bit of fighting in the book.
    - gumby 3y ago
      In the Lord of the Rings, sure, but not much in the hobbit. But in general I’m not interested in a film of a book I liked anyway.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andrewstuart 3y ago
>> The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works I was changed by seeing the new works. Some things can't be unseen.
- mikercampbell 3y ago
  That Hobbit trilogy? GAWD. I tried reading the hobbit and while I loved it, I agree while at the same time saying that culture is rampant. Like how they’ll never stop making Willy Wonkas or Alice in Wonderlands, and each gets increasingly painful.
mellosouls 3y ago

jimbob45 3y ago

The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author They gutted Rowling’s clever ending that tied everything together neatly to replace it with a laser gun fight.

vlunkr 3y ago

Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convinced New Line to take a big risk on it. Maybe they should have changed nothing, but I think that's unreasonable. It's a different medium, where storytelling and pacing are just different, and also we live in reality, and people are looking for returns on their investment. The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors. The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.

retrac 3y ago
> At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. The problem, if you will, with a great but imperfect work of art is that no one else will attempt the same work again. Because it has already been done and it's hard to top a smashing success. If it had been a bad LotR movie, one would be able to hope, probably reasonably, that a good one might eventually be made. It would be a dissatisfying situation, just like that 1978 film. But the 2000s LoTR films were, indeed, quite good. And so they will likely be the final word.
- dfmooreqqq 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's really true. Take, for example, the Harry Potter movies. They were great, but imperfect, and were really well received. But they are still being readapted into a TV series.
- aikinai 3y ago
  There’s no way it will be left alone; I don’t think you need to worry about any “final words” from Hollywood. They’re already moving on another large LotR project that might actually just be the main story remade already.

hogepiyo 3y ago

I don't think the original Lord of the Rings trilogy would really be filmable as a 1:1 book to film adaptation. As a book fan I think Peter Jackson did a pretty good job with it in general; the behind the scenes footage really shows that they did care about the source material. Fellowship particularly I would still say is great, Two Towers and ROTK have some moments that are either downright ridiculous or against the spirit of the novel but they're still okay as films. The Hobbit on the other hand really feels generally awful. I watched a fan-cut of it that cuts all 3 movies down to about 4 hours of content and it felt just about watchable. >The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script. I think you can attribute this more to JKR being still alive and in control of her creation than well-meaning production studios / directors.

hinkley 3y ago
It is for instance interesting to see Gaiman’s adaptations before and after he basically had a blank check from studios. Stardust is… okay. Cute. I need a new Neverwhere. Even though half the reason I gave “Vigil” a shot is because it had the Marquis as the captain.
mikepurvis 3y ago
As a potential heir to the stewardship, Christopher Tolkien was very much alive at the time the movies were being made and was famously opposed to a lot of the artistic choices being made.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Rowling apparently maintained some artistic control on her movies, whereas Tolkien had sold the rights entirely, so Christopher didn't have much of a say beyond complaining. I think the thing that really "solved" it for me was realizing that the vast majority of the people who watch LotR will never read the book, let alone the Silmarillion. And those who DO decide to read those after seeing the movie - the movie won't destroy it for them.

porknubbins 3y ago

I felt that the Harry Potter films kind of missed out on what made the books so special. In the books, besides the slowly building adventure/mystery story, all the episodic, mundane day to day drama in the life of the school really felt like living through a school year in a surprisingly realistic way. The movies I saw focused on the adventure and lost a lot of that charm of feeling like you’re back in school alongside the characters.

bombcar 3y ago
Amusingly enough, the silly game recently released captured that better than the movies did (though the first did pretty well), even though the school slide was a bit slap-dash.

eredengrin 3y ago

I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra material could have been removed, and I don't think it needed to be a trilogy, two movies at most. The book has far less material than the LotR trilogy books do and the third movie dragged on forever on pointless battle scenes. But as for the original Jackson trilogy movies, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate those as someone who loved the books. There are only two major gripes I can think of which are particularly inexcusable and a few smaller things I would've liked to change but which are excusable either for not being particularly consequential, or because of time constraints. Overall though blocking the two major complaints out of my memory, it's quite well done. For a twelve hour film to have only two major gripes compared to the books, I'm not actually sure if there are any other film/book adaptations with a ratio that good.

soligern 3y ago
Well what are the two major gripes?
- aikinai 3y ago
  One has to be the ghost army wiping out all impact and meaning from the mortals’ battle and sacrifice in the Return of the King. I’m in the camp that the quality and faithfulness in Peter Jackson’s movies were an insanely improbable miracle—lightning in a bottle that we should be thankful happened once and you could never hope to capture again. But I’m still flabbergasted at the decision to make the ghost army omnipotent. They were so thoughtful with everything else, especially the changes they made—you can see this clearly in the behind-the-scenes discussion. So what in the world happened here?
  - eredengrin 3y ago
    I actually don't consider that a major gripe. It's certainly a very weird decision and I'd prefer the original version, but it doesn't ultimately affect all that much imo, it mostly just means the humans did a bit less orc killing in the movies than they had to do in the books. But yeah, I agree with you, I'm happy it turned out as it did for the most part, some of my favorite movies for sure.

ggm 3y ago

> It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It saddens you that Tolkien found a publisher? How did you want them to disseminate? By the oral tradition in mead halls? I know you mean debased beyond the printed word but that happened when Ralf Bakshi made his not very good cartoon and when Leonard Nimoy read the poems.

trzy 3y ago

The Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit was the high water mark for commercial adaptations and it's been downhill since then.

noduerme 3y ago

I feel fortunate that I read those books as a kid before seeing so much as a fan-art drawing. Nothing can compare to the visuals drawn in your imagination from reading Tolkien. Jackson's aesthetic take on the places was largely as wonderful as his take on the characters was abominable, but either way it would be a tragedy for someone to see the movies before reading the books. And you're right that there was no excuse to so mangle the material. Waterson has a degree of artistic integrity that's sadly vanishingly rare these days.

WalterBright 3y ago
I loved the whimsical art version from the 1960s, and looked to find the paperback editions with that art.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gumby 3y ago

> It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. You might note that the author worked hard with Allen & Unwin to have it printed and offered for sale. If you have the official ‘60s paperbacks from Bellentine you’ll see the back cover is a letter from Tolkien complaining of the unauthorized Ace editions and telling you you should buy only the authorized editions (Ballantine or Houghton Mifflin). It’s been commercial since the day it first went into print.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bombcar 3y ago
It's also arguable that undue concern for commercialization kept the Silmarillion out of print, because he kept trying to bring it to the level of perfection found in the LotR.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  The Silmarillion has not reached the level of quality that would normally be required for publication. The only reason it's published at all is the popularity of Tolkien's other work. "Perfection" really isn't the right concept here. The Silmarillion is not perfectly written. It also isn't adequately written.

ycombinete 3y ago

What was hacked for you in the LotR movies? The only egregious hacking I noticed in the movies was the character assassination of Faramir. I must disagree on Harry Potter. All the moves after Columbus stopped directing them were bad. From angry-American Dumbledore, to Fiennes’s bizzare Voldemort, to Hermione being bolstered at the expense of Ron.

teddyh 3y ago
Name one place in the movies, one single line of dialog, where Gimli is not changed into a clown (compared to the book).