The Hobbit (As you've never seen it before!)


Jamie123
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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.

Edited by Jamie123
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15 hours ago, Emmanuel Goldstein said:

Um . . .

There are no words for how bad this was. My sad eyes now regret having seen this.

"One of the worst things ever ... and not just on TV!"

tenor.gif?itemid=11674092

Edited by Jamie123
Let's get the quote right
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  • 1 month later...

This is fascinating for the history lesson that goes with it. I watched five minutes in and I'm questioning what version of the hobbit they found as it's so inaccurate it's painful. I might actually prefer to listen to by newborn cry and miss out on sleep than watch the last five minutes... but at some point I know I will because I'm fascinated by the very existence of this unfortunate production :)

 

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On 9/2/2020 at 5:30 AM, SpiritDragon said:

This is fascinating for the history lesson that goes with it. I watched five minutes in and I'm questioning what version of the hobbit they found as it's so inaccurate it's painful. I might actually prefer to listen to by newborn cry and miss out on sleep than watch the last five minutes... but at some point I know I will because I'm fascinated by the very existence of this unfortunate production :)

Unfortunate it may be, but it's not gone unnoticed that this version does at least make some sense out of the bizarre cover artwork of the original authorized US edition of Lord of the Rings.

LOTR-Ballantine.png?fit=770,420&type=ver

(Emus? What was that artist smoking when he read the books!?)

Edited by Jamie123
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