open
Upgrade to a better browser, please.

Worlds Without End Blog

Hobbit Office – Saturday Night Live Posted at 4:09 PM by Dave Post

Dave Post

I think this speaks for itself.  Enjoy!

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Posted at 2:51 PM by Dave Post

Dave Post

To round out our trifecta of movie trailers we have The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Loosely based on The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, this is the third film to tell the story of Thorin Oakenshield and some other dwarves. Oh, yes. There’s a Hobbit in there somewhere too…

New Trailer for “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”! Posted at 8:03 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

Even Bilbo is impressed.

Teaser Trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Posted at 11:59 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

What do you think? Does this mark an improvement over the first movie, or will part 2 of the series be a Two Towers-esque slog? The movie trilogy is clearly a different animal from the novel, and I have to wonder if Desolation will be Peter Jackson’s sandbox for much of the new stuff he’s adding to the story.

New Poster for The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug Posted at 8:19 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

I don’t know if I’ll love the movie, but I do have to hand it to Jackson’s design team. They do impressive work. Click the poster for a high-res version.

(The Hobbit on WWEnd.)

The Desolation of Smaug

Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Posted at 1:41 PM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

While writing this installment of Hell is Adaptations, I briefly entertained the perverse notion of splitting this into three, and bloating it with a lot of sidetracks and irrelevant nonsense. I’m sure you can see where this is going, yes? Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings trilogy were serviceable, even though I think the material spiraled out of his control by the third movie, but with The Hobbit he stopped even pretending to respect the source material.

Jackson had originally pitched filming The Hobbit as the first part of a trilogy, with LOTR being adapted as the latter two parts. After a great deal of studio debate, New Line decided to fund a full LOTR trilogy, and The Hobbit got pushed onto the back burner. As it turned out, the LOTR films were a big hit financially, so talk about a Hobbit adaptation made quite the buzz even before the first trilogy had been fully released. Unfortunately for New Line, lawsuits concerning the earnings of the LOTR trilogy were filed both by Peter Jackson and the Tolkien Estate, causing the rights and financial prospects for the Hobbit film adaptation to be entangled by court intrigue for years.

j-r-r-tolkien-pipe

Burn, baby, burn.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit Cartoon Posted at 11:34 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

HIA: The Hobbit Cartoon

What has a running time of 77 minutes, was once called “execrable” in the introduction to The Annotated Hobbit, and received a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation but lost to Star Wars? That’s right, it’s the Rankin/Bass 1977 animated adaptation of The Hobbit! Loved by children and tolerated by critics, The Hobbit is a mix of cheesiness, hasty storytelling, and hippy ballads. And lest you think I’m exaggerating when I say hippy ballads, I give you this:

Many people might look back on this cartoon with fond childhood memories. They remember the dwarfs’ unexpected party, the sudden and electric appearances of Gandalf, the riddle game beneath the mountains, the trip down the river in barrels, the monstrous worm Smaug, the massive battle of the five armies, and think, “That sure was a great movie.” These people are wrong. Horribly, terribly wrong.

Time to suck your childhood memories dry, kiddos!

Time to suck your childhood memories dry, kiddos!

What makes this movie so bad? Let’s make a list.

Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Jackson Teases The Hobbit 2 Posted at 12:53 PM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

Not a lot of info in this one, but Stephen Colbert and Billy Boyd both make appearances, and Jackson teases some Mirkwood-related artwork for the second film.

If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out the first in my series examining the history of film adaptations of The Hobbit in “Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit!

Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit! Posted at 8:25 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

HIA: The Hobbit

Originally published in 1937, The Hobbit has been a perennially appealing source of material for films and other media. The book itself is an entertaining children’s story, episodic in structure, simple in tone and theme, inventively fantastic, and occasionally frightening, but generally acceptable to a broad audience. It is a widely read book, being long but never boring, and especially entertaining for its intended audience.

Insert poop joke here.

Insert poop joke here.

So obviously Peter Jackson would decide to change the tale into one of “epic” scope, filled to the brim with violent battles, portentous overtones, and car—I mean, sled—chases. But I am not yet concerned with Jackson’s ill-begotten films. His trilogy of films adapted (or perhaps “inspired”) by the novel is but the most recent example, and film rights to Tolkien’s breakout novel have been passed between studios like Hepatitis B for decades.

Once after receiving a script adapting his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien complained about the process in a letter:

I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.

j-r-r-tolkien-pipe

I cut my tobacco with the shredded remains of your script, punk.

Read the rest of this entry »

Six Clips from The Hobbit, Precious Posted at 5:17 PM by Dave Post

Dave Post

Entertainment Weekly has posted 6 clips from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey so you can spoil the movie for yourself if you like.

Thanks to TheOneRing.net for the links.