You Won't Be Needing Those Childhood Memories!

Being enough of a Tolkien fan to have written a few blog posts about the good professor's work, I have assiduously avoided seeing any of Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" films. To quote the blurb from the back of the parody Bored of the Rings (which I love, not being a rabid fanboy):


"Those who have any respect for a certain living author won't touch this turkey with a ten-foot battle lance"


Yeah, no "Hobbit" movies for this guy... I didn't particularly care for Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies to begin with, and I viewed Jackson's expansion of a relatively slim novel to three films a crass pass for the brass. Regarding the movies, I'd heard some tidbits which convinced me that I was right to avoid these movies. The first movie had too many "roller coaster" type scenes, probably setting up action sequences for video game adaptations. The second movie had a character added to the story which looked suspiciously like a Mary Sue (She's an orphan! She rose quickly from a common birth to a lofty position! She's even a redhead!!!). I am certainly not complaining about the addition of a female character to the movie, but I think that several of the dwarfs should have been female... Melissa McCarthy as Bombur FTW!!! The problem with the "hawt elf chick" insert is Hollywood's insistence that every female character be a Daphne, with nary a Velma onscreen. The third movie was seen as soulless. I didn't watch any of these movies, so why am I writing about them? I don't do the guest-post thing, but I am going to bring in a special guest-star for this post, a friend and co-worker who is a devout Tolkien fan. I warned her that she would hate the movie, but she went ahead and saw it anyway. She sent me a text-message to wish me a merry Christmas, and I asked her the fateful question:


You see that hobbit movie yet?

Oh... worse than you can imagine. I died a little inside

Give it enough time and you'll come to hate Jacko's LotR movies too. I think he just wanted to make a big budget remake of "Hawk the Slayer"

I don't hate him. Just really disappointed. To be fair, I didn't have high hopes for this one.

Just think of the movies as a big budget "Hawk the Slayer" remake and you won't be so disappointed. The end of "Hawk" did leave room for a sequel.

Lol I'm currently watching the "Die Hard" movies in between cooking

Did Jacko at least include Thorin's dying speech to Bilbo? The "child of the kindly west" speech?

Not all of it but most of it. Thorin dies not on the battlefield, but on the mountain fighting Azog. Two words: war pigs

Peter Jackson can eat a bag of dicks. I can't wait until the novelization of the movie comes out, written by that Salvatore guy. Why couldn't Jackson just call his movie "Warhammer: Dwarfs vs Orcs" and leave the beloved children's classic alone?

True! *twitches at the mention of Warhammer* I'm a Warhammer widow ya know. My house has little painted men EVERYWHERE


Anyway, Peter Jackson's not going to poop on my childhood memories of the beloved classic (hell, did his movies even give the eponymous hobbit more than a few scant minutes of screentime?). No need for me to watch his three-course serving of pure CGI cheese. It seems that even my spoofy Ayn Rand/Hobbit mashup was more faithful to the books than these movies.

That being said, I'd watch the hell out of Peter Jackson's big-budget sequel to Hawk the Slayer, and he can add all the "Mary Sue" characters he wants!

But Who Knows What He Tweeted to the Darkness?

It's disconcerting to see Trump's Twitter stream and see that the guy seems to be sleeping only four hours a night. I imagine he's under a lot of stress as his longtime Chief Financial Officer has just been granted immunity by prosecutors and New York State is going after the Trump Organization, which could lead to prosecutions of Trump family members which Trump has no authority to pardon. It's no wonder that Trump seems to be in a tizzy. I am reminded of a quote from Tolkien:


“But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?”


Could it be that Trump, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, thinks that all his life seems shrinking, and the walls of his bathroom closing in a about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in? His Twitter activity seems to suggest it.

As an aside, I am on the record writing that I didn't like any of Peter Jackson's loose Tolkien adaptations (though I liked his early, low-budget films), and one of the major reasons is that he gives one of Gandalf's best lines to fucking Wormtongue. Ugh, Jackson's LotR, to crib another bit from Tolkien, seemed fair and felt foul, but I would probably watch the hell out of a Peter Jackson movie about the downfall of the Trump family.

A Faithful Custodian of His Father's Legacy

Today's bummer news concerns the death of Christopher Tolkien at the age of 95. Young Tolkien was the custodian of his father's literary estate and the creator of the Middle Earth Phenomenon out of his father's copious notes. I'm a Tolkien fan, but I'm not a completist by any stretch of the imagination, so I 'tapped out' after The Silmarillion, when all of the interminable 'Unfinished Tales' and 'Whole Middle Earth Catalog' volumes started hitting the shelves. By then, the Good Professor's prose had prepared me to read the Eddas and Kalevala, which is what I believe the Good Professor intended. Still, the massive body of work Christopher Tolkien assembled from his father's copious notes is the perfect model for anyone interested in fantasy worldbuilding, dubbed subcreation (PDF) by the Good Professor, down to the various languages he invented for the inhabitants of his world. Almost as much as his father, Christopher Tolkien was responsible for the creation of Middle Earth, even down to drawing the left-justified fantasy map (WARNING: TV Tropes, serious timesink danger) which has passed into cliche status.

I was tickled pink to read that Christopher Tolkien wasn't a fan of Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movies, dismissing them as juvenile puncho-puncho-run-run: “They gutted the book, making it an action movie for 15-25 year-olds, and it looks like The Hobbit will be the same.” My take on the movies is that they looked fair but felt foul, and that Peter Jackson's real intention was to make a big budget remake of Hawk the Slayer.

Christopher Tolkien was a faithful custodian of his father's legacy, and the intellectual property which, perhaps not for the better, codified the 'Epic Fantasy Industrial Complex' for a myriad of lesser writers. While collating and editing his father's notes, he managed to release the contradictory writings which demonstrated how his father's 'canon' was shaped and re-shaped. Mythology is a messy business, even when written by Just One Guy. The hunger which the reading public received the body of work which went ever ever on is a testimony to the power of that creation, and the need for escapism in a world as callous as ours. Christopher Tolkien lived well, he served his family well, and he served the reading public well... without him, would his father's legacy have achieved such eminence?

A Glorious Helping of Cinematic Cheese

Inspired by the learned Doctor Noisewater's post on "Shitty Miracles", I have decided to put up a post about one of my favorite "so bad it's good" movies... not quite a shitty miracle, but a glorious hunk of pure cheese.

I was introduced to the movie Hawk the Slayer by Chuck of Tuck, a classmate of my older brother Sweetums. Chuck was a fixture at our house, one of the rotating cast of characters who would drop in regularly in the sitcom of our family life. Like most of our family friends, he was a goofy brainiac who reveled in nerdy pursuits. To give a perfect example of Chuck's personality, he was a big "Smurfs" fan while in high school- one day, he was watching T.V. and his father paused to ask him what he was watching:

"Charlie, what are you watching?"
"The Smurfs and the Magic Flute."
"The Magic Flute? It's nice to know you're getting some culture."
"Ummm... yeah..."

Anyway, one day, my siblings and I were hanging out at Chez Chuck, and he introduced us to the incredibly cheddarific Hawk the Slayer, a wonderfully daft movie starring a scenery devouring Jack Palance as a Darth Vader knockoff, complete with a similar helmet and an all-black ensemble... come to think of it, the hero is a knockoff Jedi Knight. I like to think of Hawk the Slayer as a low-budget, ham-fisted take on The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, I view Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies not as a bad version of the Good Professor's novel (I wasn't a fan of the movies, finding them to, as the professor would put it, "seem fair but feel foul"... I mean, WTF, Jerky Jackson? Why would you give Gandalf's best line to fucking Wormtongue?) but as an overlong, bloated remake of Hawk the Slayer.

I actually prefer Hawk the Slayer to Jackson's "LotR"- it handles the "dwarf as comic relief" trope better and it doesn't have long, draggy stretches. Here is the film in all of its cack-handed glory. Watch it and bask in its handling of genre staples- it has an elf who is a bionic Vulcan, a fully automatic super crossbow, a hero who has a cheesy little "flute" intro every time he appears on screen (of course, this is super cheesy unless Ennio Morricone is providing the music), a loathesome hunchback slave trader who gets his comeuppance in spectacular fashion, the Rocky Horror Picture Show's Magenta playing a "strega ex machina", a plastic-y looking drop bear in a cheeseball haunted forest, and did I mention that the "comic relief" dwarf is actually funny? Plus, it has the great line, "The Iron Hills are no more." Whoa, an entire range of hills is gone? Did they get creamed by an asteroid? Did they fall victim to mountaintop removal mining?

Enough of my yapping, do yourselves a favor and bask, bask in the glory that is Hawk the Slayer:





As you can tell from the end of the movie, there was a setup for a sequel, which sadly never materialized. There is a proposed sequel that seems to be languishing in development hell, but we'll see if it ever materializes. They should bring back the surviving cast members of the first film and do a film called Hawk the Elder.

No Trip Like the Nostalgia Trip, by Which I Mean the Fantasy Trip

The Tor Books site has a fun post about the 1977 Television special presentation of the Rankin/Bass animated film of Tolkien's The Hobbit.

I recently watched the animated film< and I believe that it holds up well. The character design is inspired by the illustrations of Arthur Rackham, a personal favorite of mine. Here's the Rankin/Bass version of Thorin and Company:

They look similar to Rackham's depiction of Henry Hudson and his crew from Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle:

The animation in the film was done by Japanese company Topcraft, a precursor to Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli. The voice acting, featuring such Bastard favorites as Paul Frees and Don Messick, was excellent, with a standout performance by 'stand up tragedist' Brother Theodore as Gollum:





Yeah, not to badmouth Andy Serkis, who did a credible job as this creepy junkie analogy, but this is the real deal. Also, Peter Jackson put WAAAAAAAYYYY too much of this character in his movies.

Veteran actor Richard Boone also did a bang-up job as Smaug, perfectly portraying the arrogant, jaded dragon as a bully and a braggart playing cat and mouse with an unknown intruder:





The film, released in 1977, was a watershed moment in nerd culture, as the Tor piece asserts. A good portion of the kids viewing it ended up picking up the celebrated 1977 Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set and fantastic literature crystalized into a sub-Tolkienian orthodoxy... though it must be said that, judging from his gloriously purple prose, Uncle Gary was more of an A. Merritt fan.

Now, speaking of both nostalgia trips and fantasy trips, this year is seeing the resurrection of role-playing game The Fantasy Trip, which author/designer Steve Jackson was able to regain control over after it was killed off by an unscrupulous publisher who let the IP languish rather than sell it back to Mr Jackson at a reasonable price. This game, based off of a couple of skirmish-simulation microgames, was a favorite to play during short school breaks due to its speed and simplicity. I played quite a bit of it at school, and became adept at finding the more outré character builds while everybody else was stuck in that mighty sword rut... you see, I was also a big A. Merritt fan.

Forgive Me While I Indulge in Some Major Geekery

Today, I am going to majorly geek out about a subject I usually don't cover, but have addressed in a pair of posts which actually garnered a fair amount of hits... that subject being computer games. I don't engage in much "gaming" these days, with the one major exception being the free, beautiful Battle for Wesnoth (warning- major time sink!). Today, though, I am inspired by this post by Cerberus at the mother ship and a post (which I cannot find) excoriating Frank Miller and another comic book guy who wrote this about The Onion:


The Onion lost all credibility for me a while back when they did a “story” on the Hudson River cleanup GE was forced to do. As some of you may recall, one of my neighbors is a GE veep, and he was directly in charge of this, so from him I found out all kinds of details the press did not bother to pass along to the public. Since The Onion apparently gets its info from other papers, the story was full of inaccuracies.

What are they, Michael Moore?

Anyway, I stopped reading The Onion from then on.


At any rate, the post which I cannot find (I'll have plenty of time to hunt down a link when I work the midnight to eight shift on Saturday) compared Frank Miller and John Byrne to the eponymous antagonists in the classic computer game Myth: The Fallen Lords, former heroes who have been corrupted, and now fight to destroy the civilization that they once defended.

The Myth series of games involved simulation of squad-based tactical combat in a pseudo-medieval setting, a mash-up of world legends and Glen Cook's Sword & Sorcery novels. Medieval soldiers rubbed elbows with extras from Braveheart, fallen-samurai-turned-penitent-Mayan-curanderos, and Molotov-cocktail tossing dwarfs. It was a glorious mess, but it all played out swimmingly because the production values were so high. The soundtrack, by the talented Marty O'Donnell, and the narration were equal to anything that the film industry has produced recently. The action was fierce- the player had to fight a series of seemingly hopeless battles against multitudes of implacable foes, against a backdrop of a war for the very survival of humanity. The very fate of a shitload of code was at stake!

The game began with an animated introduction, as a lone Braveheart extra fights his way out of a ruined city with a mystical MacGuffin (WARNING: content may be offensive to members of the Undead-American community):





The game in earnest begins with an introductory episode, as a small squad of soldiers defends a small village against a bunch of not-so-fresh antagonists:





It's the narration, and the dedication to plot which really knocked the game out of the park, the gameplay and the vaunted physics engine notwithstanding. To cap it off, the haunting soundtrack lends a melancholy air to the proceedings, with the piece introducing the third episode, The Siege of Madrigal being particularly beautiful:





The Siege of Madrigal piece has appeared in Bungie studio's subsequent games, typically as an Easter egg for obsessive-compulsive fans to find. The song has appeared in all of the games in the Halo franchise.

Some enterprising (or totally obsessed) individual has posted videos of the entire game to Youtube- if you were fans of Peter Jackson's films loosely based on The Lord of the Rings (I'm not really a fan of Mr Jackson), these videos may be of some small interest to you. There's some amazing imagery there- a jolt as a monstrous trow advances on a small huddle of unsuspecting soldiers, a frisson of horror as a lost regiment comes upon a vast platform built out of skulls by a long-dead nightmare people. Of course, locating a copy of the game would be a better idea- just make sure your "dorf" doesn't blow up his comrades with a poorly-lobbed Molotov.

One feature of the game which lent quite a bit of pathos to it was that each of the units in your squad was named. If you screwed up, Cruniac or Balin would be killed, and you'd feel bad about his non-existent orphans, the bits and bytes that made up his grieving mother. It's just a pity that our politicians don't feel the same way about the real kids they consign to the meat grinder that I did about the named sprites I was responsible for.

The sequel Myth 2: Soulblighter, was another triumph of plot and gameplay, another desparate series of skirmishes as humanity seeks to defeat the remnants of the evil forces which it had fended off in the first game. The sequel has a couple of surprising plot twists in it- the players were assumed to have some familiarity with the background of the setting. The game was most noted for it's "modding" community- the source code was available online, and many variations of the game were created by fans. There is still a web presence for the community.

Yeah, forgive my supergeekery, people... now I have to see if I can run the games on my current machine. If there are no new posts for a month, you'll know the reason!

A Childhood Icon Gone

It was with sadness that I read of the death of Arthur Rankin, Jr, one half of the holiday special juggernaut Rankin/Bass Productions. Rankin/Bass produced numerous films using both stop-motion and traditional animation... some of Rankin/Bass traditional animation team in Japan eventually joined animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli. I can think of no better memorial to Mr Rankin than a selection of videos from his body of work.

Perhaps the best known Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated special was 1964s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Here's the poignant-yet-hilarious "Island of Misfit Toys" scene from the show:





Here's an interesting "psychedlic" number from 1970 "superhero origin tale" Santa Claus is Coming to Town, the clip is a mixture of stop-motion and traditional animation techniques... that mean Mitteleuropäische chap at the beginning of the clip is Rankin/Bass villain par excellence Burgomeister Meisterburger, portrayed by Bastard favorite Paul Frees:





In my opinion, the greatest song in the Rankin/Bass songbook was Heat Miser's paean to himself in 1974's The Year Without a Santa Claus:





From 1974's Twas the Night Before Christmas, here's Even a Miracle Needs a Hand sung (!) by Joel Grey:





Moving on to 1977, the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit played a huge role in my lifelong foray into nerdery. Peter Jackson can go suck eggs, this is the real deal (with bonus Thurl Ravenscroft content):





Oddly enough, while Rankin/Bass didn't get the rights to film the entire "Lord of the Rings", they did get the rights to film a woefully truncated version of the third book after Ralph Bakshi's total LotR cockup. Oddly enough, the 1980 cartoon version of The Return of the King has a much more nuanced view of the villains than Jackson's movies for "grownups" did. In this number, the orcs come across sympathetically:





Pity the music wasn't orchestral... I blame the disco era for that.

In the 80's the one standout Rankin/Bass production was The Thundercats, a sci-fi/fantasy mashup which featured a bunch of furries in fighting an undead antagonist straight out of a Robert E. Howard pulp story (without the gratuitous Howardian racism):





I wasn't aware of this, but in 2001 (after I'd given up my TV machine), Rankin/Bass produced a Christmas special with an African-American cast led by Eartha Kitt and Gregory Hines- Santa Baby. Nice to know that they made a show portraying a black family. Sadly, I haven't been able to find out much about it in this cursory retrospective. I could have included so many more great clips.

Thanks for the body of work, Mr Rankin... Christmas would not have been the same without you and Mr Bass.

Fellowship of the Bad Ex-Boyfriends

I figured I needed a change of pace from the All-COVID All the Time posting, a sort of funny diversion from the typical litany of awfulness. Last week, writer Alex Arrelia started a funny Twitter thread about the male (are there any other?) characters of The Lord of the Rings as bad ex-boyfriends:

Fuck it. I’m doing it: Men of Middle Earth as bad ex boyfriends who ruined your life:

— Alex Arrelia (@AlexArrelia) May 12, 2020

I shared it with several of my Tolkien nerd friends, and our general consensus was that it was hilarious, but that it was more about the movies. I am on record stating that I am not a big fan of the movies... I seriously think that Peter Jackson really wanted to make a big-budget reboot of Hawk the Slayer, but knew that no studio would greenlight it. At any rate, the LotR bad-boyfriends thread leaves out characters from the books that never made it to the movies. I figure that Tom Bombadil would be a good choice, but would end up just being 'Tim Benzedrine' from Bored of the Rings, plus some incel type tried to portray Bombadil as a good catch. Maybe Barliman Butterbur would be a better choice:

Forgets birthdays and anniversaries
Basement taken over by home-brewing setup
Inferiority complex with regard to tall, brooding types

I know Beorn was a character in The Hobbit, but he'd also qualify:

Sneaks out to bear bars at night
Questionable home decor
Tendency to take in large groups of weirdo wayfarers

The whole thread is a hoot, but the guy who elaborated on Shadowfax was the winner.

Make the Barrow Downs Great Again!

One of the fundamental laws of the universe is that you can hate or you can spell, but you can't do both. Something about hatred of one's fellow human beings tends to short circuit that part of the brain that processes spelling... either that or this individual is the Witch King of Angmar:





I confess to having an anti-wight bias... I mean level drain is a terribly 'metagaming' mechanic, sure to break versimilitude at the gaming table. Don't even get me started on these assholes (confession, I just downloaded Myth II: Soulblighter at 'My Abandonware' to kill social distancing time). Wights just aren't that appealing, they uneasily occupy that weird, liminal space between the corporeal and semi-corporeal undead worlds. Zombies are unambiguous, wraiths are unambiguous... wights really need to commit to one single state of corporeality. I mean, even that jerk Peter Jackson isn't into wights, I mean, hell, how can one make a drawn-out spectacle out of some hippie weirdo singing a song?