An Alternative Vision of The Hobbit that Never Was, Thank Heaven
In that ancient era before the creative mind behind Meet the Feebles, Dead Alive, and Bad Taste was handed the keys to brilliantly adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth into an Oscar winning trilogy of films, there were already three adaptations of Tolkien’s stories that an interested fan could experience and yet another that almost was. The two most commonly known adaptations approached the source material from a different perspective. The same is true of the lesser known film adaptation of The Hobbit and the unrealized John Boorman screenplay. In all, we have four distinctly divergent visions of Tolkien’s creations, but the Gene Deitsch’s twelve minute long version is both the weirdest attempt and the one that most exemplifies the challenges of adapting literary properties to film.
In 1977, Rankin/Bass Productions released a version of The Hobbit that was adapted by Romeo Muller and was animated by the Japanese animation studio Topcraft which filed for bankruptcy in 1985 only to have its assets purchased by Hayao Miyazaki and his business partners. This version of The Hobbit leaned heavily into Tolkien’s use of songs in his writings and was an animated musical version of the story and very much aimed at children. The cast is excellent with Orson Bean (whose tragic death in February 2020 was an omen for how bad the year would be) charmingly capturing Bilbo Baggins and John Huston’s performance as Gandalf set the bar very high for future performers. Director Otto Preminger played the Elvenking, Richard Boone (Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel) played Smaug, and American Folksinger Glenn Yarbrough played the balladeer whose songs tied everything together. It’s a wonderful film, but clearly aimed at children and it plays a bit fast and loose with the overall story due to this focus.
The Ralph Bakshi’s (1978) film The Lord of the Rings adapts The Fellowship of the Ring and parts of The Two Towers in a mixed presentation that alternates between brilliant and financially expedient. There are moments of beautiful traditional animation interwoven with simple washes of filmed live action footage that had been solarized to create a dark and haunting effect. When the techniques are combined, the results are mixed but they have grown on me over time. As with the Rankin/Bass version, the voice actors are stellar with Christopher Guard providing a solid Frodo and William Squire maintaining the high bar as Gandalf. The real standouts though are John Hurt as Aragorn and Anthony Daniels as Legolas. André Morell, who played Dr. Watson in Hammer’s The Hound of the Baskervilles that I recommended yesterday, played Elrond and Peter Woodthorpe is still my favorite Gollum…”Sneakin!”
In what is only one of the many odd elements of the pre-Peter Jackson adaptation era, Bakshi’s film stops at the Battle of Helms Deep. Bakshi intended to make two-films, but the film was a financial failure (in part likely due to what I discuss below) and so he never got to finish. However, Rankin/Bass did finish the tale told in The Lord of the Rings with a version of The Return of the King. Let’s just say that watching the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, followed by Bakshi’s film, and bookended by the final Rankin/Bass production gives you a complete version of the film, but it’s one that is tonally chaotic.
The screenplay is written by Chris Conkling and fantasy author Peter S. Beagle and it manages to capture the feel of Tolkien very well. United Artists initially wanted Bakshi to use a script by John Boorman as the basis for the movie, but Bakshi refused to use it even as Boorman was paid $3 million for his script. I’m pretty sure I can write a script that no one would use, and I’d charge a little less than $3 million.
Speaking of John Boorman’s screenplay, Boorman did attempt to get a live action version of his script produced by Mike Medavoy but it never saw the light of day. Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who has a really cool show coming up soon, loves to share excerpts from the script from time to time to highlight how unique Boorman’s vision was.
When reading Zack’s posts, I am reminded that not only was Boorman the director of Excalibur, the best adaptation of the Matter of Britain ever captured on film, but he was also the director of Zardoz, the singularly most gonzo 70s fantasy film ever made. His adaptation of The Lord of the Rings falls somewhere between these two other works thematically, but I think it has some potential as a film…just not a Tolkien film. The thought of Aragorn wielding the two halves of the broken blade as he fights on the Pelennor Fields sounds pretty epic, but it doesn’t sound very Tolkienesque. Neither does the weird love triangle with Arwen, Boromir, and Aragorn, but you can read it all for yourself.
As strange as Boorman’s script is, it is far from the most bizarre adaptation of Tolkien’s mythopoeic creation. That title goes to Gene Deitch’s quickly produced short 12-minute adaptation of The Hobbit. Prior to the explosion of fandom associated with the American release of The Lord of the Rings, The rights to make an animated Hobbit film were purchased for an extremely low price by producer William L. Snyder who wanted Gene Deitch to write and direct an animated adaptation. The film languished in development hell for quite some time and Deitch planned to work with Jiří Trnka, but that changed when Snyder discovered that The Lord of the Rings had become a huge success and that he could sell the rights for a pretty profit, but only if he had already made a theatrically screened animated film. It’s a story that echoes the lore around the Roger Corman Fantastic Four film where people still debate whether it was made as a serious attempt or merely to ensure control of the rights for resale.
Two things strike me about this truly bizarre adaptation. The first is how much the animation style reminds me of the Ballantine edition of The Lord of the Rings that my parents had lying around the house. The second was how little the illustrations captured the feel of the fiction for me. I never felt that the Ballantine covers truly captured the magic of Middle Earth. They were dynamic covers, but they were too faux surreal and angular for my young tastes. The Fellowship cover, above, captures neither Hobbiton nor Rivendell for me. This isn’t to say that those places might not look surreal, just that these images fail to capture my vision.
The same holds for the animated film. It’s adaptation of Thorin and the insertion of hearts into the costuming of various characters seems bizarre, though I do like the angular Gandalf who has a darkness that the other characters lack. That doesn’t even cover all the name changes and shifts in plot.
I’ll let you judge for yourself. What do you think of Deitch’s The Hobbit?
Ha, I'd never heard of this little animated Hobbit! This is aawesome.
Fyi on the Boorman script: they bought it for $3M in order to "kill it", aka make 100% certain no one else could ever make it. The first episode of Seth Rogen's THE STUDIO cover this practice, when Rogen buys the latest Martin Scorcese screenplay about the Jonestown Massacre so that the content ("drinking the kool-aid") won't ever cast a pall over the studio's attempt to make a famiily friendly Kool-Aid movie.
It's been decades since I saw the animated Hobbit or LotR, but I've learned that my nostalgia brain is best left with what it remembers, rather than trying to relive some of that stuff. (Six Million Dollar Man does NOT live up to what it's been in my head since those years.)
Now you've got me wondering what other things John Boorman could do, as he's still alive; imaging what he could do with an adaptation of some fantasy like LITTLE BIG. Then again, he's earned his rest; going to IMDB, I'm floored I'd never realized just how broad and wild his filmography is, and he'd be one helluva movie night just in showing Zardoz and Excalibur, let alone throwing Hope & Glory or Deliverance in there...