Do you remember the first movie version of The Hobbit?
If you think I'm talking about the Bass-Rankin animated version, think again. Not many people know this, but the first movie adaptation came out in 1967, a full 10 years before the Bass-Rankin movie!
Wikipedia gives us the story behind it: it seems that producer William L. Snyder had bought the film rights in 1964, but was unable to find the collaborators he needed to make the movie. With the rights about to expire, he needed to (i) make the movie and (ii) have people pay to see it, or else the rights would revert to Tolkien
So he commissioned animator Gene Deitch (who had worked him on Popeye and Tom and Jerry) to make The Hobbit as a cartoon short. Having flung the thing together as cheaply and nastily as he could, he charged his audience a dime each to see the it (dimes, by the way, that he had given them beforehand) so that they could honestly say they had "paid to see the movie".
Thanks to this, Snyder kept the movie rights, which he was then able to sell back to J.R.R. Tolkien for $100,000.
And thanks to YouTube, we can see this wonderful movie in it's full 12-minutes of glory! Enjoy!
P.S. I was so fascinated I did some more web searching. I don't know how reliable this is, but I've read the movie cost $50 to make. I don't believe it - even the puerile Super 8 animations my friends and I used to make at school - which didn't even have sound (let alone music) - couldn't have cost much less if you factored everything in.