Editing The Lord of the Rings (section)

===Old School===
There had been some talk about a film adaptation through the 50s through the early 70s (including with ''The Beatles'' trying to be the Hobbit quartet!), but it largely did not go anywhere. Mostly because doing it justice in live action was waaay beyond what could be reasonably done in 1960 (large-scale Medieval battles were one thing, but unless you fancy the thought of a claymation Balrog, the more fantastical elements would have never looked good).

[[Ralph Bakshi]] made an animated film based off the Fellowship of The Ring and the first half of The Two Towers, which was released in 1978. The resulting film was trippy, to say the least. It has a lot of weird animation with massive amounts of [[wikipedia:Rotoscoping|rotoscoping]], although it does work from time to time. It also decided to make adjustments and stay faithful to the text in the oddest ways. Many lines of dialogue were taken from the books word for word, with enough cut out so that you don't know what they are talking about and it does not come across as natural conversation; for example, Saruman declares himself Saruman of Many Colors without explaining the name change, but they decide to make a prince of Gondor (the largest and greatest civilization in Middle-earth at the time) dress like a Wagner opera viking. While it does have some good points here and there the end result both leaves you both weirded out and bored unless you are really into that era of animation.

It's worth noting that, despite his reputation, some of the weirdness of the movie is not actually due to Bakshi. Executive meddling was ''rampant'' during the production, one of the most infamous examples of which is with Saruman. Midway through, execs decided that Saruman sounded too much like Sauron and would confuse audiences, so they went behind Bakshi's back and had the VAs start referring to him as "Aruman" instead. [[derp|Without redubbing the lines that had already been recorded up to that point]]. Bakshi didn't find out until it was too late to fix, and as a result characters throughout the movie alternate between Saruman and Aruman. In spite of it's shortcomings it did do reasonably well at the box office ($33.7 Million at the box office for the US, UK and Canada against it's $4.5 million budget) which if nothing else got some film and tv execs to think "okay, maybe there is some money in these fairy-tales-for-grown-ups".

Rankin Bass produced a Return of the King animated film in 1980, a made for TV movie which didn't have near the budget. It traded in most of the trippiness (even if it does have Orcs transforming into Coutimundis) for being more mundanely bad and getting pushed into the animation age ghetto, since again, it was made for TV not theaters in an age when censorship ran strong. They couldn't even allow for people getting hit with swords onscreen. That's not even mentioning how much they cut, up to and including ''entire characters'' (like Legolas and Gimli), and giving Theoden one of the lamest deaths in animation movie history.

However, even though it's hard to deny the movie as a whole is objectively bad, there are a few gems in Rankin Bass's  Return of the King that rival, or are arguably even ''better'' than the Jackson movies. Sam's portrayal in particular is very good (certainly ''leagues'' better than in the Bakshi version, as low a bar as that might be), showing him as a strong and fearless friend, and one of the only people in all Middle Earth ''ever'' to hold an awakened One Ring in his hand, in Morder where it's at its most powerful, took the best shot it could hit him with, [[awesome|and told the Ring to fuck off]]. The portrayal of the Ring itself is also quite good, with it having a much more active malign influence than it does in the Jackson films. The Ring doesn't just passively corrupt people, it ''tempts'' them, feeding those who hold it visions of all the things they could do with it, all the power they could have, and it even delivers a taste of that power, with a weakened and exhausted Frodo able to stand strong and confident just by holding the Ring, enough to even scare the shit out of Gollum.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr_rb_pitHk If you are curious about the Bakshi film and have an hour to kill, Dan Olson has a pretty good video essay on the subject]