The Lord of the Rings trilogy is an epic milestone in cinema a truly astonishing achievement marriage of script, story, tech, and design. Whereas the Hobbit trilogy tried to duplicate that success by replicating that trilogy, instead of telling its own story. But we think there's one scene in each movie that shows exactly why one trilogy is an all-time great, and the other has Legolas skipping up falling stones like Mario.

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Written and Hosted by Ryan Arey (  / ryanarey  )
Edited by Harriet Lengel-Enright

#LordOfTheRings #Hobbit #ringsofpower

Now I don’t want to beat a dead horse on how bad the Hobbit is. Lindsay Ellis already made a perfect trilogy of videos where she went to New Zealand and extensively investigated these films. These videos are grar, you should watch them.

It’s not surprising that the Hobbit was so bad, because look at how many beloved franchises Warner Brothers has managed to screw up [montage].

What is extraordinary is that the Lord of the rings trilogy managed to be so good–so perfect, and was largely free form the same studio interference that hobbled its prequel. So the question for me is why. Why was the Lord of the Rings so good, and the Hobbit so…Hobbit? We could list off a million bad things about the hobbit [the joke about his trousers in Smaug] and great things about Lord of the Rings [you bow to no one].

But I think we can distill these movies into one very scene that sets the tone for each trilogy–one scene that shows why one of these movies was one of film’s achievements in technique and characterization that activated an international interest in Fantasy stories, and why the other movie was this.

First I want to give you a little background on the making of the Hobbit. Because, you may not be up on all the studio politics, or haven;t watched those Lindsay ellis videos I mentioned. So after Return of the King was released, the Hobbit was in development for years. This is because the rights to film were shared by about 5 different studios, who had all been trying to develop the property into a film at some point.

Guillermo del Toro was signed on to direct the Hobbit as one movie–and he moved his entire family to New Zealand for a year and a half, while he developed the movie.

Doug: Wow, Guillermo Del Toro doing the Hobbit, that would have been awesome!

I know, right? But Warner Brothers–wanted the movie to be very much like the look and feel of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Essentially, they wanted to give the audience more of the same. Del Toro had his own vision for the Hobbit that didn;t mesh with this, so he left.

Now Warner Brothers had a fixed release date, and they told Producer Peter Jackson that they would move the production form New Zealand if he didn’t step in to direct. So he did, because he wanted to keep those jobs in his home country. [they took our jobs!] So The first lord of the rings series took years to develop, as the crew created unique weapons and armor based on individual cultures.

Sets were meticulously created by hand. The pants in Hobbiton were grown a year in advance. But for this movie, Jackson was forced to hit the ground running. No script, no careful planning, no meticulous sets.

Doug: Is that why every background looks like a cartoon?

Yes, because everything was rushed, CGI. And warnbed brothers really flexed their muscles, forcing him to split the film into three parts, because they had to split the revenue of the first film with 4 other studios.

But I will say that part of this blame is on Peter Jackson. He may have been forced into making 3 movies, but each movie didn’t have to be three hours long. IN his efforts to transform the Hobbit into a new Lord of the Rings trilogy, he added bloat that only copied the original film. They need a hot king like Aragorn, so this dwarf becomes hot. They need a love triangle like Eowyn and Arwyn and Aragorn, so this dwarf and this elf, I guess [in my trousers, why does it hurt,,..it was real].

We don’t have black riders, but we have a rivalry with some albino orc, they lift random pieces of the score, and we even got a pointless gandalf side quest to mirror his time away form Hobbiton in the first film.

And if you’ve ever read the Hobbit, you know that it is no Lord of the rings. It’s a simple children’s tale. Not very violent, filled with songs and riddles, and we don’t even see the final battle because the protagonist is unconscious. It’s a sweet book that totally stands alone,a dn the movies are terrible adaptations of the story. Mostly…because they’re boring. [American Beauty you’re boring, text on faces]