Flutterby™! : The hobbits are coming 2001-12-13 20:25:46+00

The hobbits are coming

2001-12-13 20:25:46+00 by TC 12 comments

Get in the hobbit of seeing more Tolkien Hype as we are about to be overun by little furry feet.

I'm expecting the same sort of thing that happened with Fandom Menace

, that tickets will appear as if by magic on opening day. I just hope the rest of the experience is different...

I'm actually going to wait a few days before watching it. My wife and I waited a week after the Harry Potter opening and dropped the kid's off at Grandma & Grandpa's went to a 7pm show got great seats and then went to a nice dinner and talked about the film pciked up the sleeping children and put them to bed and ...well I forgot what a great evening could had based on a movie date. Movies are great story adventures in themselves but if you turn it into a proper social event ...Whahooo! So I don't know when and where but that is my hope with LOTR and perhaps "A beautiful mind"

flushy: I started organizing a group to go about a month ago and we purchased our tickets the day they became available (or maybe a day after - a friend alerted me after he got his). Two days later it was sold out, so not everybody who had wanted to is going to be able to go with us.

(And this is actually regardless of the hype, not because of it. I've been psyched ever since I heard that Peter Jackson bought the rights [to do the films] about three years ago. I didn't know him at all, but he sounded like he had the right mindset to do a good job - and everything I've seen about it since seems to hold to that initial impression.

My wife and I are doing dinner before, but I don't think anybody else is planning to join us - work schedules and all that.

I'm in the UK, where LOTR goes on general release tomorrow. Having read the book quite a few times over the years, and seen the trailers, I'm looking forward to seeing the new film sometime over the Solstice holiday.

Actually - and this has been one of my major beefs for several years - we've had the special effects capabilities for quite some time. The problem is that the studios don't see fantasy films as serious movies - and so they get relegated to smaller studios, with smaller budgets, who do cheap, cheasy special effects work.

I was ESTATIC when I heard that Jackson was bringing LOTR to the screen with the full power of modern SFX behind it. And again so when I heard that the Harry Potter movie was going to be made. My hope was that these two movies would help pave the way for a new era of quality fantasy films.

Alas, we were quite disappointed in HP. Character development was shallow, the story didn't flow (felt more like a collection of scenes and key dialog), it was clearly intellectually targeted at children and the depiction of magic was still low-key - sometimes off-screen entirely.

I hold out hope that LOTR will do the job, but even if it is a masterpiece I'm afraid that it (and all fantasy) will continue to suffer from the same plague that comic books and animation are still fighting. I don't know about Europe, but here in the USA the mainstream seems unable to shake the conception that:

One has only to witness the (disgusting! sacrilegious!) Burger King and action figure commercials to see the truth of this. <sigh> It's terribly depressing.

Well, I first read the books in 7th grade. I actually read The Fellowship of the Ring as required reading, however afterwards I decided I needed to read the 2nd book. I bought the second book decided to read the 3rd. After the 3rd, I decided I needed to read the hobbit. After the hobbit, I felt I needed to read the triolgy again. Then came the Silmarillion, Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, and Farmer Giles of Ham. By the time I had reached 8th grade, I had read all of them (even if I did not fully comprehend everything I read), and I enjoyed every word. All this from one book which I didn't want to read (required reading) and procrastinated in doing. This also lead to other books, an interest in poetry, phonetics, languages, and history.

If those action figures will help one kid pick up the book and learn from it, then great! We all know the real rea$on$ the toys are there, but I do feel that it's affect can hold great degrees of goodness. It would be interesting to plan a study that could quantify it's affects.

I'm pretty doubtfull that action figures would result in any kid picking up a book, but it's more the presentation [in the commercial] that I object to than the existence of the figures themselves. Heck, I'm likely to buy some myself. But hearing a monster-truck-style announcer blare about how "Aragorn fights the evil orcs!" while small hands smash plastic depictions together in a sandbox makes me ill.

And just to prove the point I made above, the local FOX affiliate last night raised my irritation to amazing new levels when the anchor said; "First it was Harry Potter. And now another famous children's book has made it to the big screen." I could've reached through the TV and throttled the clueless moron. <sigh...>

I've got a twelve year old son who I tried to encourage to pick up The Hobbit over the summer. He showed no interest in it as he picked up his "The Simpson's" comic book. Now he's on to me to find where I've stored The Lord of The Rings trilogy so that he can read some of it before seeing the movie. This is a direct result of the BK hype followed by my suggestions.

I'm not saying that all this hype will result in trips to the library and a surge in readings of The Trilogy. What I am saying is that the hype combined with encouragement and suggestions will result in more interest in the books. Every little bit helps.

/me crosses his fingers and wonders about Terry Pratchett movies so the kids will get into satire...

Apparently tickets have been bought for me for a 2:15 showing tomorrow evening. Scotch Night attendees will get me in post-ring glow.

Larry: I agree that the hype about the movie (and thus the story) can be beneficial to getting a child to read the masterpiece that is the Lord Of The Rings. But I don't think that depictions of playing with 3-inch plastic figures 'with the Kung-Fu Grip^TM' has anywhere near the same influence/impact.

As for getting kids to read a particular book; I highly recommend reading it to them. That was my first exposure to LOTR. Although I'd seen (and loved) the [animated] movie The Hobbit and was already predisposed to fantasy, I'd never considered LOTR because it looked so big and complex.

You're never to old to be read to. I read LOTR to my wife (and thus created another rabid fantasy fanatic ;-) a couple of years ago, and we read the Harry Potter books to each other over the last year. It's an incredibly bonding and intimate experience, not matter your age :-)