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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Sunday, January 13, 2002
22:39 - These People Don't Get It...

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Okay... lately I've been seeing a lot of people's reactions to the Lord of the Rings movie like "All this plays like a giant game of Myst, with Ring's mythical characters never making the leap from virtual reality to real" and "It's still for teenage boys" (the Dec. 24 People magazine that I found in the seat-back of my homeward flight) and "It's like a 'Dungeons & Dragons' game, with your archer elf and axe-wielding dwarf and block-headed swordsman" (paraphrased from various reviews and friends' reactions).

Well, duh, Einstein. Tolkien's books were published in 1954-5. Where do you think D&D and Myst and every other fantasy incarnation came from? Did you think LotR is unoriginal because it doesn't take such ideas to a dramatic new never-before-seen level? What, were you expecting them to add hip-hop songs and trans-dimensional vortexes leading Aragorn and Gandalf into the worlds of Star Trek and the Matrix? Gyeesh. I'm just waiting for someone to accuse it of being ripped-off from The Sword of Shannara.

LotR doesn't need to apologize for being what it is. Just because it's been endlessly copied, imitated, followed-up, expanded upon, and used as the inspiration for pretty much the entirety of fantasy fiction in the modern post-Shakespearean world doesn't mean that it needs to be updated to outdo its louder imitators that made it to the big screen or the PC gamer shelves first.

But then, these are people coming to Tolkien's world with little or no background. They could care less that Tolkien had been dead for over ten years before Willow was made (which, by the way, has been marketed in a DVD release as "Before there were hobbits..."). They have no idea, nor do they want to, of who was first to market, as it were. It's all about market appeal and merchandisability. Isn't this always the way? The first crack at something is pure at heart, idealistic, and captures a cult following-- but then it's the bastardized, efficient imitators with the marketing know-how that grab the public eye and dollar. It happened with VHS vs. Betamax. It happened with Windows vs. the Mac. And now it's happening with Tolkien's descendants vs. Tolkien.

Geez, it's weird how these few topics I tend to cover regularly keep intersescting with each other, huh?

In any case, the only two complaints I've ever heard from more than one person about the LotR movie are that (a) "It's too long!" and (b) "It just cuts off in the middle of nowhere!" Well, duh. Okay, maybe it wouldn't have killed PJ to put in a little "Thus ends Part One of The Lord of the Rings; stay tuned for Part Two" message at the end. But come on, folks. I know it's asking a bit much of people to expect them to have read the books before they see the movie-- that defeats the entire purpose of making a movie (it's to bring the story to a new medium so it can exist independently from its parent medium). Bakshi made the mistake of gliding over important plot points because he figured most people in the audience knew the story already-- and we can't expect that. Not in 1977 when "Frodo Lives" grafitti was still showing up in subways, and certainly not today in the Phantom Menace-ized, Harry Potter-ified, in-dash-gadgets-to-read-you-your-e-mail world where nobody has time to read anything thicker or more frivolous than Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But damn... we're talking about the greatest story ever told here. It gets chopped up, cut down, rearranged, shuffled, and subtitled for our discerning 21st-century tastes, and still we're not satisfied. We marvel at the movie, but it's too damn long. We're a society that would complain about an adaptation of the Arthurian legend because that stuff about the sword in the stone wasn't believable enough or took too long or only appealed to teenagers. So cut out that Lórien crap, or that Caradhras scene, or that whole nonsense about the Second Age. Yawn. Boring. Tell me what happens; I'll be on my cell phone.

Nah, I've got a better idea. Let's just tell people about how the DVD director's-cut edition of Fellowship will probably be well over four hours long, and the fans for whom it's intended will gobble it right up. This is our movie, thanks. Go watch some MTV videos. We'll be with you in five hours.

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