Wow–someone else who knows the Rankin-Bass version! I have it on tape. I always get a bit teary-eyed at the end when Bilbo, Frodo and Gandalf are sailing away (“On a white ship will I sail, watching shadows part for me.”)
As with so many others here, I guess my favorite character would be Sam. I’m just disappointed that Peter Jackson didn’t take the time to develop the Faramir-Eowyn subplot. know, it’s hinted at in the extended version DVD of “Return of the King”, but if he had shortened some of the battle scenes, he could have fit it in. (If you see one Orc bite the dust, you’ve seen them all.)
Yes. ‘Tis a shame though that Rankin-Bass’ adaptation gets no respect amongst many Tolkien fans; it is more widely known as the adaptation that gave us “
Where There’s A Whip, There’s A Way” or the one which botched up the chronology rather badly (Sam and Frodo inside Mount Doom “for many days?” Frodo’s succumbing to the temptation of the Ring is actually indirectly responsible for Theoden’s death?), which is understandable given that Rankin-Bass made the – rather unwise – decision to only get the filming rights for the third book.
Since they only got RotK, technically they could NOT include other stuff from the other two books, which explains the absence of Shelob and Legolas and Gimli (though Legolas’ absence may also be due to
how they made Thranduil and the Silvan Elves look like in The Hobbit), and the messed-up chronology among other things.
One credit that I will give to RB’s RotK though is the way that Denethor
is actually shown with a palantír (notwithstanding the gross misidentification of it as “
the stuff of Wizards; a crystal ball to see the future”) and that it was the cause of his madness. PJ dwelt so much on Sauron and Saruman communicating with each other using the palantír of Orthanc that he could not show Denethor using one, lest many in the audience think that he is in league with Sauron.
The little details also count: such as Aragorn wearing the Elessar and the Winged Crown of Gondor at his coronation, and the banner of the Stewards being “
bright argent like snow in the sun, bearing no charge nor device”, as in the books (the Peter Jackson films seem to be too concerned that audiences would not identify anything as Gondorian if it did not have the White Tree in it
).
