S02E11 — The Hobbit

SPOILER ALERT: This episode and transcript below contains major spoilers for The Hobbit

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Featuring hosts Timothy Haynes, Donna Haynes, Rebekah Edwards, and T. Josiah Haynes.

Let’s be honest, The Hobbit movies could have been one movie. But because we love you, baby listeners, we watched all three!Check out our review of the book-to-film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original take on the world of Middle Earth, and let us know what you think.

Final Verdicts

If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, we recommend waiting to read our verdicts. (But you’re probably grown, so do what you want!)

We dove into The Hobbit and all three movies that tried (and mostly failed) to stretch one charming book into an epic trilogy. Between missing songs, extra orcs, and way too much gold, we’ve got thoughts — and probably too many opinions about dwarf hair.

Tim: The book was better. Overall movie series score: 7.5/10.

Donna: The book was better. Overall movie series score: 5.5/10.

Rebekah: The book was better. Overall movie series score: 7.5/10.

Josiah: The book was better.Overall movie series score: Movies 1&2: 56/10, Movie 3: 2/10

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Full Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] TJ: Over the, the Misty motions. Go Misty. We must go the way to there Misty. We mountain to Dungeons Deep and CA’s old. We must. It was Air Break Break Day to find Hour Long Forgotten Gold. Gold.

Okay, 

[00:00:39] Donna: that’s one of the best. Interesting 

[00:00:42] TJ: far over the Misty Mountains. Cold to dungeons deep and caverns old. We must away. Hey. To find our long. Forgotten gold.

[00:01:23] Rebekah: Hey, welcome to the book is Better Podcast. Hi, yes, I need some hype here. Podcast. Yeah, 

[00:01:30] TJ: podcast. 

[00:01:32] Rebekah: Thank you. Hype. That was not much hype. Uhhuh Uh, we are a family of four and we like to talk about books that have been made into films and insult them or love them or whatever we do. We talk about them respectfully, love them today and insult them respectfully, love and insult them.

Uh, today we’re talking about The Hobbit, which you could probably see in the episode title. So I’m gonna give you a spoiler alert. We will do major spoilers for the entire Hobbit book and all three films by Peter Jackson that came out on this film. We will definitely also be spoiling stuff from the Primary Lord of the Rings series.

So if you’re reading The Hobbit and listening to this episode before reading the trilogy, you know, maybe figure that out if you wanna do that. Today’s fun fact that we’re gonna use to introduce ourselves is what is the most fun trip you have ever been on? I feel like I probably have a lot to choose from.

Um, I’ve been to some interesting places. Um, the one I just always go back to is when Josh and I just kinda went really spur of the moment on a cruise that went outta Miami and we stayed in Miami like 36 hours on either end. And after we returned from the cruise, we like got a rental car and drove down into the keys and it was like, it was pretty cool.

We had been on a couple of little vacations before and we’d been to Miami for a week the year before, but on like a really, really strict budget. And so that time we got really, really great rates. On like a balcony cabin in the ship. And it was just, it was really cool. And that was in 2019. Um, and that we have not gone on a fun vacation since then.

So maybe I’m just naming my last legit long vacation. But that was a pretty fun trip. And who are you? Oh, I’m Rebecca. I’m the daughter slash sister of the podcast. 

[00:03:22] TJ: Well, I’m Josiah, I’m the brother son of this company. You could call me the burglar ’cause I’m the main character. Ah, yes. Uh, well you’re coming to my 

[00:03:31] Rebekah: house soon.

Do I have to hide stuff now? If you’re the burglar? 

[00:03:34] TJ: Oh, not ’cause I’m the main character I was gonna, no, I’m always the main character. My do well, I only burgle from dragons. Maybe I’m a dragon. Do you know? Ah, have you checked? I thought you were a high elf. 

[00:03:47] Rebekah: Mm, no, I think I’m like a half elf high. Elves are too pompous for me.

Hoity tot, if you will. 

[00:03:53] TJ: Oh, that does sound right. So I And 

[00:03:56] Rebekah: what is your role? 

[00:03:57] TJ: Think that my role is 20, I got a Nat 20. 

[00:04:02] Rebekah: Nice. Good job, 

[00:04:04] TJ: uh, for having a fun trip. And when I rolled in that 20, I got to go on a cruise with my family back in 2011. Yay. That’s one of the most fun trips I’ve ever been on. Mm-hmm. I, I, yeah.

You don’t really 

[00:04:18] Rebekah: take a lot of 

[00:04:18] TJ: vacations. No, I never do my, I mean, my next thought was, I guess like I hung out with you guys last summer at Rebecca’s house, 

[00:04:28] Rebekah: and we’re about to do that again. We’re 

[00:04:29] TJ: about to do that again. Not the Ozarks trip. That was great. I mean, I’ve been to New York City twice. Those were, those were nice.

Oh, 

[00:04:36] Donna: and you and Evan went out in the Midwest, didn’t you? 

[00:04:39] TJ: To the Ozarks? Yeah. That’s what Dad, yeah. Yeah, that’s what dad was 

[00:04:41] Donna: talking about, was mentioning 

[00:04:42] TJ: or whoever. I, he has not introduced him, so I don’t know who it is. Who mentioned Will. Yeah, he could be a stranger. We don’t know. 

[00:04:47] Tim: I am the dad slash the husband slash dad.

My name is Tim. Um, and my, I’ve had several fun trips. I really enjoyed the cruise that we went on as a family. Uh, that was our anniversary cruise and our 25th anniversary. But I think one of the fun trips that is very memorable as well, is when I went, uh, on a choir tour from Trevecca for the men’s choir, and we visited the Oki Fki Swamp, where I learned that alligators can run for short distances up to 45 miles an hour, reminding me that if I see an alligator, he can catch me and eat me.

Oh, that’s terrifying. I can’t run more than 45 miles an hour. Dad, this is a family podcast. 

[00:05:34] TJ: That is terrifying. What’s that location again? 

[00:05:37] Tim: Oki Nokie. Watch your mouth swamp. 

[00:05:40] Donna: Uh, my name is Donna and I’m a wife slash mom of this group of Dros, which is the word for ppl, the plural word. According to Tolkien, the real historical plural of dwarf is dros.

[00:05:59] Tim: Hmm. Although he calls them dwarfs. I may reject that. Uh, listen, 

[00:06:05] Donna: his editor probably, he’s telling you what. Tolkien and said, and this is his work and we need 

[00:06:10] TJ: to be he’s king. 

[00:06:11] Donna: Faithful to it. He is the canon. So 

[00:06:14] Rebekah: you’re right, the book is Canon always. What was your favorite trip you’ve ever been on, or the most fun trip you’ve ever been on?

[00:06:20] Donna: Well, the times that anytime we get together. I mean, we have fun. I enjoy them. I love them. I, we don’t have to do anything in particular, but we can, it’s just enjoyable to be around you and experience life with you. Aw. Um, I did go on a trip when I was 19 to, uh, Mexico, and we went to a w to Peck, which is about two hours out of Mexico City, up a mountain.

And it’s where they had held a, uh, summer Olympics not long before that. And we stayed on the Olympic Village, uh, complex. Mm-hmm. And I went on a, it was a youth conference for the church. And, um, a lot of profound things happened that week that changed the course of my life. 

[00:07:09] Rebekah: Alright, so Josiah, why don’t you start us off with a summary of what happens in the Hobbit.

[00:07:16] TJ: Sure. Mix one. Leisure loving halfling with one busy body trickster and a dozen gold and raptured miners. And what do you get? You get an unexpected. Party with unwanted guests. A confederacy of moody male troubadours, a baker’s dozen of FD ponies, A party of fun loving elves, A trio of bloviating foodie trolls, A throng of greedy orcs, a sushi eat sociopath, a pack of scheming wolves, a convocation of enlarged eagles, a cantankerous skin changer, a clutter of ri orach.

Its an intolerable gaggle of divisive elves and a dozen barrel ride and gut punched angry little people. And that’s just halfway through the. Fantasy adventure book and film that is the Hobbit. There’s a disheartened man’s city on a lake. That’s not a city.

That’s not a city in the shape of a man. It’s a city filled with the race of men well. Oh, thanks sir. Uh, so there’s a disheartened man’s city on a lake, an orating, thick-skinned monster, obsessed with other people’s possessions. A black arrow, wielding, warrior fire, ice, and water. You find gold mixed with exasperation, misunderstandings, murderous mayhem, and the clash of count them five armies.

And finally, we’re left with a pivotal golden trinket, lifelong friendships, unmatched riches, and a yearning for more adventures in middle Earth. And, 

[00:09:01] Rebekah: um, Josiah, just for those who think more concretely than poetically, could you just tell me what actually happens in this movie 

[00:09:08] TJ: before the more concrete thinkers among us?

Bilbo Baggins, A reluctant Hobbit is recruited by the Wizard Gandalf to join a company of dwarves led by Thorn Oaken Shield on a quest to reclaim their homeland and treasure from the Dragons Ma along the way. They face trolls, goblins, elves, in a deadly encounter with mog. While Bilbo acquires a mysterious magic ring from the creature goum, it’s probably not important.

No, no. After Sam slain a conflict over the treasure leads to the battle of Count ‘EM five armies, where Thorn parishes and Bilbo quietly returns home forever changed by his adventure. 

[00:09:57] Rebekah: Okay, so today I wanted to split our changes up. Slightly differently. They’re still gonna fit in our three categories of setting characterization, and then plot timeline changes.

However, a lot of the actual plot changes have to do with the fact that characters were changed a little or a lot. So before we get into changes to setting character and plot, uh. Mom, why don’t you give us just a broad overview of the structure of the films versus this book? 

[00:10:26] Donna: I sure will. The most fundamental change is that the adaptation stretches a single 300 page book into three lengthy films.

This required adding a lot of plot material and rearranging events. The timeline is extended and in some places re-sequenced. For example, the book story is continuous, but the films create cliffhangers and break points. An unexpected journey ends with the Eagle Rescue, which is about a third into the book.

The Desolation of smog ends dramatically with smog leaving for Lake Town, which is roughly two thirds into the book, and the Battle of the Five Armies covers the final few chapters in. Great, and we mean great detail. The narrative is less linear due to intercutting with side plots. For example, cutting away from Bilbo’s group to show gandalf’s doings, which never happens in the book.

[00:11:27] Tim: Yeah. I think part one and part two would’ve been a wiser choice. 

[00:11:30] TJ: A lot of people would agree with that. I think the original plan was a Guillermo del Toro directed. Mm-hmm. Do all and. It is debated why this or that happened, but there, there was some sort of studio drama, probably I would call it, studio interference, that eventually led to the studio saying, yeah, we want this just to be another Lord of the Rings trilogy, even though it’s, that’s not gonna be good.

And Guillermo wanted it to be something unique. 

[00:12:04] Donna: What you’re saying concurs with what I’ve read, and there’s tons of material out there on this. Mm-hmm. And the wine, uh, Weinsteins were involved at some point, and then they weren’t. Did you ever watch the 

[00:12:17] TJ: Lindsay Ellis trilogy? On this. 

[00:12:20] Donna: I didn’t, I didn’t. 

[00:12:21] TJ: I think I might have showed Dad years ago maybe, but one of the things she says is that, okay, he, okay, here’s the thing.

Here’s what she said, because it’s not official, it’s not officially known. Why they split it into three films other than just general greed. Uh, I, ii General Greed, she. Had seen some things and kind of made some of her own hypotheses. Lindsay Ellis did that. The rights deals that new, I wanna say new line cinema mm-hmm.

Had with all these different studios meant that if you made one Hobbit movie, the profits were shared between like five different studios. Okay. But if you made a second Hobbit movie or a third Hobbit movie, it would only be shared between like one or two studios. And so they were incentivized to make more than one movie.

And I think that they said, well we’re, we’re not gonna make any money off the first one. So we, I don’t what are we just gonna have one? We gotta make two of these things. Yeah. 

[00:13:26] Donna: Uh, I think there’s also some issues. A New Zealand actor’s equity received from the film’s producers a sample of contracts. It was offering actors agents, and the, this actor’s equity group rejected the contracts is not conforming to the voluntary standard.

And then this led to a big brew haha, where union got involved. And this, that’s when, so I think this was in 2010, it said it would subject actors who work on the film to possibly being expelled from the union if they did it because of differences. And so in response, Warner Brothers and New Line consider taking the production elsewhere.

And Jackson mentioned the possibility of going to Eastern Europe. And I mean there was tons, I mean, we could do a podcast on the, on that, which we don’t need to, but, and put that together. And then you added like. So much stuff. You added the whole love triangle. There’s a whole 

[00:14:25] Tim: bunch added. Yeah. 

[00:14:26] Rebekah: So as we get into the few changes in setting with all of this in mind, the setting of Middle Earth in the Hobbit book has a fairytale quality, which I enjoyed with Hidden Valley Feast.

Talking creatures and playful magic like Gandalf’s Fireworks and the elves teasing the dwarves with songs, the movies Tone down the whimsy for a more epic, serious atmosphere consistent with the Lord of the Rings films, for instance, nearly all of the songs from the book are removed in the films except the dwarves song in Bobo’s House, which changes the mood of places like Rivendale or Goblin towns with no singing goblins.

The Merck Wood Elf feasts. Disappearing means we lose that magical mischief element of the forest overall. The visual representation of settings is grand and detailed in the films, but this sense of a children’s tale setting gradually gives way to a dark adventure setting. By the third film, the Lonely Mountain area is a full war zone with massive battle.

CGIA far cry from the quaint forests and trolls of the early chapters. 

[00:15:27] Donna: I literally was waiting for for Harry Potter and. Voldemort to jump into the sky. 

[00:15:33] Tim: The Hobbit novel stays entirely in the lands that Bilbo himself traverses. But the films introduced new locations beyond Bilbo’s knowledge, including dol Gour, the Tombs in the High Fells, where the nine ring rates were supposedly buried and gun to bad, an ORC stronghold far to the north.

This gives a more panoramic, war torn impression of all of Middle Earth, whereas the book feels like a contained adventure until the very end. 

[00:16:04] Donna: Like with the Lord of the Rings films, the breadth of the world is shrunken down to shorten several travel distances in the films such as armies traveling in less than a Day distances that would’ve taken several days or weeks in the original Maps of Tolkien’s world, which I get you gotta, they can’t walk around for literal days on screen.

I, I see that. 

[00:16:25] Tim: Yeah. I find that very interesting. As you go through that, in order to make it work for a, for a film, you shorten all of that so that you don’t have these long journeys. Uh, but in mm-hmm. In the book, you still have long journeys. Oh, we, we traveled through the forest of mer wood and day after day, and we didn’t have anything to eat, and we didn’t have anything to drink.

And the days went on and the days went on. And so you get that kind of, uh, despair. You lose that part when you squeeze it all together into, Hey, we entered the forest and one of the first things that happens is that we get sleepy and then we fall asleep, and then yeah, everything begins to happen.

[00:17:02] Rebekah: To be fair, they kind of.

Replace the despair you feel from the long travel and wondering if we’re ever gonna whatever. By making the films dark like it, they feel a lot darker and more intense than like the kind of more charming and whimsical children’s film. So charming and whim, 

[00:17:18] Tim: whimsical is what I always loved about the Hobbit book.

It is very, very different from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So well, there are some characterization changes. A couple. 

[00:17:29] Rebekah: Yes. As a reminder, we’re gonna cover almost a couple dozen, all dozen of the major things through this list. Yeah. Like we would normally do in plot timeline this. 

[00:17:36] Tim: This will show why there are so many differences in all the plot lines and things like that.

Billbo Baggins in the book, Billbo starts off more timid and often survives by luck or stealth. The films make Bilbo more proactive and heroic early on. For example, he suggests. Stalling the trolls until sunrise. A trick Gandalf pulled in the book and even jumps into fights to help sooner. The one ring’s.

Corruptive influence on Bilbo is also more prominent in the movies. The book treats the ring as a simple invisibility trinket, but the films show bilbo becoming momentarily aggressive or possessive under its influence, which foreshadows it as the one ring and makes it feel, you know, more like a prequel, I guess.

[00:18:21] Rebekah: I think that’s a big theme through the whole, like, we’ll talk about this in. So many different ways, but I know obviously the book was released before the trilogy, but they released the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies prior to the Hobbit movies. And so much of this just has to do with, let’s make this feel like a true prequel.

Like let’s do a lot of foreshadowing, let’s do a lot of things that like connect it to the other trilogy. So like the ring thing, you know, it’s 

[00:18:48] Tim: really funny though because. When Tolkien wrote it, he wrote it as a children’s book. And then, and then nearly 20 years later, he wrote The Lord of the Rings trilogy and picked up pieces, bits and pieces.

Uh, it’s kind of the same kinds of things that we talked about in some of the other movies. Do you think the author knew they were gonna do this in the seventh book when they introduced it in the first or second book? Probably not. At some point they looked back and said, Hey, I think I can use this. And he definitely did that.

Here’s a standalone book, this fairytale still what he called it, and I’m going to make something bigger of it and see what comes of it. So it’s a little bit odd. Yeah, he 

[00:19:28] TJ: gardened. He didn’t necessarily, he didn’t plan it all out. I, I’d be, I didn’t have time to to look this up, but I feel like the first edition of The Hobbit is not compatible with Lord of the Rings and he had to go back and edit it.

[00:19:42] Rebekah: That is correct. That’s in one of our later changes, actually. 

[00:19:45] TJ: Okay. I would love to read it’s specifically 

[00:19:47] Rebekah: about Gollum. Yeah. I would love to read the 

[00:19:49] TJ: riddles in the dark chapter as it originally was to see what the differences were. Hmm 

mm-hmm. That would be, 

[00:19:55] TJ: we know another big character, probably a second main character, Maine Dwarf is Thorn Oken Shield book.

Thorn is a noble leader of the company of dwarves, but the film alters his personality to be both more brooding and heroic. Sort of like, uh, AOR from the original trilogy. Uh, who is not a dwarf, but they really de dwarfed thorn to make him look like you look very 

[00:20:22] Rebekah: un dwarf. Like. Yes. Yeah. He, 

[00:20:23] TJ: I 

[00:20:23] Tim: don’t think he, he had the thick fingers.

Uh, he did have the thick boots on the 

[00:20:29] TJ: mm-hmm. Big white boots. Mm-hmm. Well, he’s a grander hero in the film than the book shown in scenes like his jewel with Azo, who we’ll talk about in a second, how he was expanded. The movie’s add thorn’s, deep mistrust of elves streaming from a film only scene where thr, who we’ll talk about, refuses to help thorn’s people during SMUGs original attack.

This grudge is not in the book thorn’s, dragon sickness. Gold lust is portrayed much more dramatically on screen. With Thorn nearly losing his mind to greed and even threatening bilbo’s very life when he finds out the hobbit hid the arkin stone, whereas in the book creep out. Yeah. Thorn’s. Stubborn obsession with the treasure is present, but less of a surreal mania.

Little more realistic. Perhaps you’re, 

[00:21:24] Donna: if you’re going to make him along the lines of aragorn. Yep. 

[00:21:29] TJ: Yep. 

[00:21:30] Donna: You cannot make him. Yep. Bitter and gruff and Sal mm-hmm. Saucy all the time. It’s like, Ooh, that doesn’t work. That’s not what drew the audience to Aragorn in the first movies. 

[00:21:44] TJ: The trilogy is just so much of, they wanted to have, they wanted to look at their pretty cake and eat it to, 

[00:21:49] Rebekah: well, the company of Dwarves, that is basically the main kind of group of folks that we travel with throughout most of the book, Tolkien’s 13 Dwarves, are not very individualized in the text, aside from the elder Bain’s kindness, bombers, weight, et cetera.

The films flesh out each dwarf with distinct costumes, looks, and quirks. For example, Killian Philly are younger and more human looking than their book counterparts, even lacking the long beards of Tolkien Dwarves to make them more identifiable. So essentially in the book, they were kind of a, a uniform group of dwarves that were all pretty similar with Thorn was.

Kind of the representative dwarf, whereas in the movies, they made them all different people. I mean, thank God it’s three years long. So 

[00:22:32] TJ: I think in, I think in the first movie they tried to do that and in the second two movies, they really didn’t care. Besides, was it Keely or Keely who fell in love with Reo?

Keely Keely, besides Tho and Keely, I would argue that in the second and third movies, they’re like, do we even have to keep hiring? Do we have to keep paying these actors? 

[00:22:52] Tim: They still gotta be there. Lumber needs to be extra fat. 

[00:22:55] TJ: Other than that, you know, they’re just, can we, can we hire just a, a fat suit to take his place?

He do. We have to have a human underneath it. An AI 

[00:23:02] Donna: fat suit, that’s, 

[00:23:03] TJ: yeah, exactly. 

[00:23:04] Rebekah: I guess now you could do that. 

[00:23:06] Donna: Another characterization change I wanna mention is about Gandalf and the white council. In the book, Gandalf remains a wise, mysterious guide who disappears on business for long stretches. Only later do we learn that he was actually combating the Necromancer.

The films expand Gandalf’s character by showing his involvement in the white council with El Ron Grio and so on. Oh, 

[00:23:35] Rebekah: I don’t think Josiah like that. Oh, 

[00:23:37] Donna: that must see. And directly depicting his investigation of do Gur. Gandalf’s scenes with the white council are entirely new since in the book we never witnessed council meetings or Gandalf side missions.

They’re only summarized later on. This means. Characters like Galadriel and Soman who do not appear in the novel, da, da, da, are given cameos and dialogues in the film adding Gravity to Gandalf’s role. He is still the kind wise wizard that we know from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, though they don’t change that part.

[00:24:14] Rebekah: His personality is the same as I would say, his personality is pretty similar to the Lord of the Rings movie Trilogy and Lord of the Rings, the Book and The Hobbit, the book like, I don’t think they changed his personality as much as they just like added all these. Things that he did. I was 

[00:24:29] Tim: bothered by the fact that if he’d known that it was Sal Ron, I just don’t think he would’ve waited more than 50 years to Nope.

To say, you know what? That ring that you have might be the one that we knew about before. Well, it’s not interesting 

[00:24:43] Rebekah: because they made so many decisions to set this up as the prequel. Mm-hmm. But then a couple of things were like, you actually make it make less sense by adding something that wasn’t in the 

[00:24:53] Tim: book.

Yep. Mm-hmm. It was, it was unnecessary. I just felt like the whole white council was outside of the whole scope of the film, of the book. It just, it just looked strange. It. Mm-hmm. It was Harry Potter 

[00:25:07] Donna: and Voldemort flying through the sky. Yeah. It’s like, 

[00:25:10] TJ: so, and we loved it the first time. Right?

[00:25:13] Donna: Oh yeah. 

[00:25:14] TJ: Okay.

How did you guys feel about. Saw him on 70 some year old Christopher Lee fighting off the ring rave ghosts along with 

[00:25:26] Tim: El Rand and mm-hmm. E Lari Elm. Yes, Lord Jesus with unconscious gandolph. Yeah. That was that, just that really, it just looked like a scene that was like, okay, we’ve got this person that has a role in the previous set of films and everybody liked them, so let’s bring them back.

And this person who had a really big role. Everybody hated them ’cause they were a turned out to be a bad guy. Let’s have them all come together and do this strange thing that just is this, it just feels like it just doesn’t fit. 

[00:26:00] Donna: Okay. I had an amazing little piece of trivia when Galadriel picked up Gandalf in the battle and she picks him up and carries them all.

Mm-hmm. Kate Blanc is actually holding a dummy of Ian McKellan. Okay. Newsflash. If anybody thought she picked up Ian McKellan now have some land out in Iowa, she 

[00:26:22] Tim: pay him off. She’s not a real wizard. Yeah, she’s a just a person, even an actress. 

[00:26:28] Donna: Even on the call sheets of the script, the dummy was named Michael Gaon because he and Ian McKellen are often confused for one another.

[00:26:41] Tim: And 

[00:26:41] Donna: I think this scene and had 

[00:26:42] Tim: a little bit of conflict in, you know, early years. We said something about that in our series, and 

[00:26:47] Donna: once I found that out, I think this scene might have been Gambon’s best acting of this film. Oh. And all his work as Double DOR and Harry Potter. Wow. So I’m just gonna say that, but I’m not saying he can’t act, I’m just saying you’re just 

[00:27:02] TJ: saying he’s bad at it.

He is not a good double 

[00:27:05] Donna: door. Yeah. But I just, I, I found that to be so funny because. They asked, uh, McKellen about playing Dumbledore when Richard Harris passed away and he said being Gandalf was probably one superhero enough for him. Plus superhero, huh? 

[00:27:23] TJ: One wi one Wizard. 

[00:27:24] Donna: Well, just being a super character.

Like a, a super character. Yeah. He thought that was probably enough for one lifetime. Of course, 

[00:27:32] TJ: he went on, but then he played Asparagus, 

[00:27:34] Donna: the 

[00:27:34] TJ: cat, 

[00:27:35] Donna: but he also went on to play Magneto, so I’m not gonna make a big deal about that. But I just thought it was funny ’cause he and Gaon had a little bit of back and forth.

So when that, when I saw that they put that in the call sheets, I thought that was a total hoot. 

[00:27:47] TJ: Very funny. I think that it’s a travesty of studio interference. And fundamental offensive misunderstanding of what audiences want this re the white council scenes read as fan fiction in so many stupid, stupid ways.

I, I guess there, there’s so many things to say about it, but I’ll try, I’ll restrict myself to saying if Saron Gandalf Gala Gladi Elron, if they could fight like this. 50 years prior, why didn’t they do any of it 50 years in the future slash if they knew all of this? What, what? Like what was, if they knew all of this, like Dad was saying, why didn’t they do anything for 50 years?

Maybe they were so 

[00:28:34] Rebekah: tired from the fight. I don’t buy the like, oh, well it was on a really long time scale. That’s why they let it go that long because the things were happening in the thousands of years. It’s like, okay, sure. Maybe things wars last for thousands of years, gosh, in this world. Oh my gosh. And like all those things.

But like, I don’t know. I don’t buy that. If you know that that’s happening, that’s, and you have the power to stop it, you would do something about it. Also, Josh pointed something out interesting to me today. ’cause we watched the third film this morning and he looked at Glad’s thing where she like had her big dark power thing going on.

Yep. And he said, now I wanna know where they’re putting her, gaining that power into the overall like cannon of the, the stories. Because in rings of power, the lari is present. And she’s not powerful in like, she doesn’t have that ability. So 

[00:29:26] TJ: Oh, what a, what an offensive fan fiction travesty of quote unquote creativity.

And I, I thought Lindsay Ellis. I think said something about how sad it made her that Peter Jackson and Christopher Lee, who plays Soman, made up after Peter Jackson cut Solomon’s ending from the theatrical release of Return to the King and Christopher Lee hadn’t forgiven him for it. They made up so that Christopher Lee would reappear in the Hobbit films, and it was for this.

It was like, you’re like, it was like his last film. That’s sweet until you realize it. 

[00:30:02] Donna: And, and knowing the background makes it even worse because Christopher Lee could not travel to New Zealand because of his health. He just, he was not recommended for him to travel. So they filmed everything in London.

They filmed all his scenes in London and everything you see with the other two actors is all body double. So it was like, oh, 

[00:30:22] Tim: so they weren’t even in the same studio. 

[00:30:24] Donna: So he didn’t do any of that physical stuff, which did I really think he did. No, in no more than I thought she picked Gandolph up. Well, it looks like he was like in some 

[00:30:32] Rebekah: other random stuff, like some Henry, it was his final 

[00:30:34] TJ: role released while he was alive, but his 

[00:30:36] Rebekah: final Well, so he voiced Soman for the War of the Roim, which none of us still have seen.

Oh my God. 

[00:30:44] Rebekah: It was out for like anime. 

[00:30:45] Donna: Oh yeah, that’s, we saw a little bit of it and just could not get it. I keep, oh, interesting. Yeah. I kept trying to 

[00:30:50] Rebekah: be like, oh, I should, I should do that. And so, I don’t know. I assume that they used previous stuff ’cause he passed away in 2015, but it is kind of crazy. So rad, aghast, the brown was in the Hobbit movies.

Tolkien only mentions rad aghast in passing in The Hobbit. The films introduce Radiast as a full character, a quirky, eccentric wizard with a rabbit sleigh who discovers dark forces. In Merk Wood, he helps Gandalf by reporting the looming threat of the Necromancer Sauron. This is a significant character addition.

Radiast has an entire subplot investigating dol gour rescuing hedgehogs and the like. That has no equivalent in the book, aside from the fact that he existed in Tolkien’s lore. I think he’s just, 

[00:31:34] Tim: it was one of the Council of the Wizards. Mm-hmm. 

[00:31:37] Rebekah: Yeah. He just like. Is that quirky, whimsical kind of character that I find really fun.

He’s the Tom Bombadil kind of character. Yeah. Put in, honestly. Fair. 

[00:31:47] Donna: Peter Jackson knew you were gonna be upset because Tom Bombadil wasn’t in the word. That’s so he had to do something to make me happy. Yes. 

[00:31:54] Tim: Yeah. I think if I, I think part of Red’s story was a little bit strange. However, I really liked the character and I think if they, he just found out there’s some, there’s some force that’s making things change, you know?

Mm-hmm. Some people have called him the necromancer. I think if the storyline had kind of ended there, Hey, there’s this question. We just don’t know what’s going on. And I’ve inve, you know, I’ve learned enough to know that he’s called the necromancer. Yeah, I think that would’ve been enough. Without Soman, without El Ron.

Without g Lari. Well, here are two that I could have done without, um, Azo and Bold were or chieftains in the book. Azo is a goblin chief Long Dead before Bilbo’s Journey slain by Dane Iron Foot 150 years earlier. Um, this was 

[00:32:49] TJ: just like a little bit, yeah. Just like briefly before. And his 

[00:32:52] Tim: son Bul leads the orc goblin forces in the Battle of the Five armies.

However, in the film, Azo is alive and Hunts Thorn’s company across all three movies is also Yay. Bul is also present, but Azo is the chief villain until the final battle, giving Thorn a specific nemesis in the movies rather than the more impersonal enemy of the goblins wars. I struggle with this one. Not only was he out of place, he was the un killable kind of villain that I just don’t care for.

He cut off Thorn’s father’s head, and in the process, Thorn’s dad, I think it was Thorn’s dad. It might’ve been Thorn himself, cut off his arm. Okay. You’ve probably gotten rid of him. Oh no. He just. Jab, some kind of sharp object up through his arm, and now he has a prosthetic and he just continues to go.

It’s just, he’s just a character that I think is, yeah, really weird for the lightness of this book. 

[00:34:00] Rebekah: Well, but something like the Azo character feeling un killable and stuff, it’s almost like taking a day of six macina and making it the reverse of that, where it’s like. Impossible to do anything about this thing, and like why even bother?

You know what I mean? Yeah. And so that’s what popped in my head as you were kinda describing that I 

[00:34:17] Tim: it, that it was a villain that was supposed to carry, you know, carry through all of the movies. But there are plenty of bad guys. There are bad guys at every turn. 

[00:34:27] Rebekah: The concept of giving you specific people in a movie versus in the film or in the books where it’s kind of like, it makes a little more sense to have a faceless but evil group of people.

Like, I don’t mind that part, but I don’t know if it really worked, like the way they did it, if it really worked and I 

[00:34:46] Tim: was create a real villain. I never cared for Bold in the movie. Um, his character is, it was difficult to look at his, his mouth is, all his lips are torn flesh. It’s, it’s just, it’s like a zombie movie character.

So. 

[00:35:04] TJ: Hey, I didn’t mention earlier about Thor and Oaken Shield. Did you guys know him, know that actor from anything else? 

[00:35:12] Donna: He looks familiar, but I don’t know why. I’ve seen, I’ve seen his face. Um, I’ve looked 

[00:35:14] TJ: at some things. 

[00:35:15] Donna: He’s, Dawn Che’s love interest in mm-hmm. The last seasons of the Vicar of Dly. 

[00:35:21] TJ: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:22] Donna: Richard Armitage. Mm-hmm. 

[00:35:24] TJ: That’s, that’s the thing. I know him best from. He’s been in other stuff, but interesting from those, interesting from those from the last two major Christmas specials of Vicar of dli. He played a, a vital role and he was very charming in them. Mm-hmm. 

[00:35:38] Rebekah: For those of you who are not into, uh, into British obscure British sitcoms, obscure British comedy, it is ly is a, a good one I would recommend.

Mm-hmm. If you’re looking to get into that, 

[00:35:49] Tim: not for 

[00:35:50] TJ: your family. 

[00:35:51] Rebekah: Yes. Probably not. Not family if you’re 

[00:35:53] TJ: adults. Yeah. Well, you know, speaking of family, family, family. Strand. The Elvin King? Yes. Is Legless his father. Oh wow. 

[00:36:06] Rebekah: Leg legless wasn’t in his book. 

[00:36:09] TJ: Th Elvin King, fairly minor character in the book. He’s proud and suspicious of the dwarves, but he is mostly reasonable in the films, which is a cool name, gets a much more pronounced personality and a personal subplot.

He’s shown as regal, but cold and even cruel at times. Hinting at the death of his wife, which is also a film only edition. To explain his hardened demeanor, he’s also greedier in the films he seeks, uh, white gems from Thorn’s hoard to satisfy his personal 

[00:36:42] Tim: greed. Do you know where this actor has also worked 

[00:36:48] TJ: recently?

Well, I know what I know him from, but I don’t think any of you have seen Pushing Daisies. 

[00:36:53] Tim: Nope. But he is the Emperor in the Foundation series. Um, oh, I saw, I saw that. He 

[00:37:00] TJ: was 

[00:37:00] Tim: that, 

[00:37:00] TJ: but I didn’t see the foundation 

[00:37:01] Tim: yet. And he plays a very self-centered, greedy empire leader. So, 

[00:37:10] TJ: um, that’s funny because in pushing Daisies, he’s the lead character and he’s like a.

An awkward, shy, romantic interest who bakes pies and raises people from the dead on accident. Interesting. It’s one of my favorite. It’s one of my favorite ever shows. It’s just two seasons. 

[00:37:31] Rebekah: All right. Let’s move right along to the next relevant person who is Legless Greenleaf Legist. The son of Thil is not mentioned in the Hobbit novel at all.

No. The films insert Legist into the story during the Mer Wood imprisonment and thereafter expanding the role of the Mer Wood elves. His characterization is similar to his appearance in Lord of the Rings, but he is a little more hotheaded and brash suggesting there was some maturity that may have developed before the events of Fellowship.

This edition seems to exist specifically just to tie the events of the Hobbit into the larger trilogy. So what do we think about Legless being part of this? I mean, we’ve said a little bit about how we feel. I mean, 

[00:38:10] Tim: that’s terrible. I didn’t even like his makeup. 

[00:38:13] Donna: I didn’t get the point. No, he looks, I just didn’t understand.

[00:38:16] TJ: He looks hideous. It looked fake it. He looked fake. Yeah, he looks hideous and he doesn’t do anything in the movies. He’s a waste of space and time and matter. 

[00:38:25] Donna: Interestingly enough, Orlando Bloom is seven years older than the guy that plays his dad in the field. That’s interesting. And I thought it was interesting when you said his makeup bad.

My own grandpa. Grandpa. You said he grandpa. I am my own grandpa. Oh my gosh. We’ve really gone off. So related to Legist. In fact, one reason Legist was brought into this whole set of movies is because of Ariel and Keely. Well, specifically we’re gonna talk about Ariel, but. She is an entirely film invented character, A female wood elf warrior, captain of the Guard in Merck Wood.

There are no female characters in the adventuring party of the book, and no hinted cross species romance, huh? In the films Arielle’s compassionate personality and her Forbidden Romance with the dwarf Keeley form. An entirely new subplot have the best subplot of the whole thing. This affects Keeley’s characterization too, giving him a flirtatious romantic side that is not in the book.

For instance, Keeley’s injury and Healing Rio using Elvis medicine and their affectionate moments are all film only additions. So a little bit of trivia I found about this. Said that it’s recorded that Jackson met Evangeline Lily or Evangeline Lily after he had filmed Lord of the Rings, and he was so impressed with her.

He promised her apart in the next Middle Earth movie, if one was to be made. Thus, the character of Tarelle is created. 

[00:40:06] Tim: One article that I saw on Song on Collider, uh, makes the comment, ignoring the fact that Taral didn’t exist in the book. Nothing about her makes sense. Lo Wise, she’s too young to be captain of the guard.

When Ual has plenty of more experience, soldiers and her healing skills seem better than El Rons, who’s supposed to be the best at it, one of the oldest elves in Middle Earth. Who’s. So good at it. Her love story with Keely and Legless is also overdone. And was something actress Angeline Lilly tried to fight against?

According to SI didn’t, I was gonna mention that. 

[00:40:44] Donna: Yeah. I mean, what everything I read suggested the whole purpose of bringing legless, uh, bringing Orlando Bloom bike was to put them in this love triangle, which it totally isn’t needed. Um, the love triangle between Aragorn a Oan and Arwin is such a. It’s there, but it is very side plot where this is like, and, and none of the three of them, there was no one that was suggesting they shouldn’t be together.

But there was a constant overtone in this, that tar. And Keely, you shouldn’t be. It just didn’t, everything was, it was just very contrived. Maybe. That’s 

[00:41:24] TJ: very, oh, that’s an un, the understatement of the month. It was a contrived love triangle. Yeah. And I think, dad, you touched on it. I heard that Evangeline Lily agreed to do the movie on the condition that she wasn’t in another love triangle after she was in lost.

Mm. Yeah. She 

[00:41:43] TJ: did not want to be typecast as the love triangle lady. And then they made her be in a love triangle. 

[00:41:51] Tim: And Randy will, it’s really strange ’cause Randy will had said to her before Legalist comes in, you are the wrong class to, to be connected to my son. The next Elvin King. So, 

[00:42:05] Donna: which even made him worse.

And then, 

[00:42:06] Tim: you know, so this love thing you’ve got with him, you can forget it ’cause you’re never gonna be that person. Yeah. And then he is all upset about the, the Keeley thing. Well the whole edition of Legless and Tarial creates several new plot threads that aren’t found in the book. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, and since there’s so many of them, we’ll go through them quickly, but one at a time, uh, Ariel Disobeys du Ill to help the Dwarves creating more mistrust between the Elvin King and dwarves and tension.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Between Lego and his father. When Legos chooses to defend Ariel. 

[00:42:40] Rebekah: Tell me how you feel about it, Josiah. Oh my gosh. 

[00:42:42] TJ: You know, in the second film, Keely is wounded by a mortal arrow from bold during the barrel escape. This injury leads some of the dwarves to stay behind in Lake Town for Keely to recover.

So, you know you have some dwarfs in Lake Town way. The other dwarves go to the Lonely Mountain where their quest is leading them. Oh, sorry, that this love triangle means that half the main characters can’t go to where the plot is. So while injured, Keeley is in Lake Town, Tario comes and heals him using King’s foil, which deepens their bond 

[00:43:21] Rebekah: legless pursues bulk to Aven TA’s injury in an extensive action sequence in Lake Town with Orks versus elves, which again, that’s legis.

[00:43:30] Tim: It seems to have been created just for a ride at an amusement park. Here’s the, is that real? No, it just seems it should have been. Oh, it just feels that way. I see what you, it feels like it was, Hey, here’s a great idea. We’re gonna do this thing that’s not really in the book, and we’re gonna make this so wonderful that you’ll want to include it in your, you’ll wanna ride it again and again.

Rings Middle earth special ride. Oh, it’s just crazy. He’s jumping from on heads and from one to the other in the book. That particular thing, Bilbo gets the dwarves to hide in those barrels, and they are in the barrels, contained in the barrels with the lids down until they come out with the lake people.

I mean, in this whole sequence, they’re bouncing out, falling out. Bomber rolls out and rolls back in. It’s just. Oh, it’s just strange. 

[00:44:30] Donna: It’s the goblet of fire, second task, or first task when Harry flies through the air with the dragon that nobody would ever do. Allowing the dragon to break free. Right. It could kill everybody in the stands.

Go all the way 

[00:44:42] Rebekah: around Hogwarts. 

[00:44:44] Donna: Yeah. 

[00:44:45] Tim: It doesn’t make any sense unless you happen to be the person that’s imagining this and you’re thinking, this would just be so wonderful. This would be so awesome. It would be strange and awkward, but you know. Yeah. Awesome. 

[00:44:59] Donna: Ariel holds up her sword to threaten R Wheel during the third movie and is backed up by legless who turns against his father and offers to accompany her to the battle, but his mother loves him.

[00:45:12] TJ: During the Battle of Five armies, Ariel and Legless have their own mini arc. Thank a goodness. They go to gun deba. Return fight in Dale. Fight on Raven Hill, legless. Duals with bowl on a collapsing tower and defies physics. Jumping up, falling stones and tar confronts bold. Oh my gosh. And grieves Keely, who dies.

Aw. In the book, bold is killed by Beorn. Almost off page. In the film, Bo’s Death is a dramatic fight scene involving Legalists. And I definitely know the difference between Bold and Azo. 

Hmm. 

[00:45:56] Donna: And I’m telling you, bold is the 

[00:45:58] TJ: one with the 

[00:45:58] Tim: ragged lips. 

[00:46:00] Donna: You said it. The thing, him jumping up the stones. I only watched that and I was like, really?

I just rewatch it. I didn’t notice how bad 

it was. 

[00:46:10] Rebekah: Well, let’s talk about a character that I love. He’s in my favorite scene of all of the three movies. He does appear 

[00:46:16] Tim: in the book. 

[00:46:17] Rebekah: He does appear in the book. So Bard the Bowman, he’s a real boy. He’s a real boy. Uh, in the book, Bard appears only when smog attacks lake town.

He’s introduced as a grim voiced archer of the town guard and slays the dragon. Almost immediately upon introduction, the movie introduces Bard much earlier as a Bargeman who helps the dwarves sneak into Lake Town and develops him as a family man and a reluctant hero distrusted by the master of Lake Town, who we’ll talk about briefly.

By the time he kills smog in the film, the audience knows and likes him, whereas in the book, his heroism comes almost out of nowhere and is pretty brief. Um. I had never seen these movies until this week. Um, I just wasn’t into Lord of the Rings that much. And so when they came out, it wasn’t that big of a deal for me and whatever.

And so I’ve only, the funny thing is I’ve only seen the scene at the beginning of, uh, the Battle of the Five Armies where Bard kills smog. I’ve seen it because my pastor likes to use it in a sermon illustration and man, and now you get to 

[00:47:21] Tim: tell him that it’s not even in the book. 

[00:47:22] Rebekah: Yeah, for real. Um, but thinking of that scene where Bard has this.

It’s not an air. What is that like silver thing called that he’s able to, it’s the black arrow. The black arrow. Okay. It is called an arrow. Okay. I can’t remember the name or the 

[00:47:35] Tim: like term, but in the, in the film, they introduce it at the, the arrow fits into this Elvin, uh mm-hmm. Winged wing, something that’s supposed to shoot this specialized kind of arrow in the book.

It’s just. A black arrow. Like 

[00:47:50] Rebekah: it’s a special arrow. It’s a special arrow. 

[00:47:52] Tim: Yeah. But it’s, yeah, 

[00:47:53] Rebekah: well, just that whole scene where he has to rest the arrow on his son’s shoulder. And in the midst of this, like, you know, everything is literally burning and like smog is looking at him and taunting him and who are you to whatever me, you know, to challenge me or whatever he says.

And he, he just, his son tries to look back and he just says, no, look at me. Like, oh my gosh, that is the most spiritually relevant thing. I just, it is so beautiful. I cried seeing it again. I watched the scene with mom and dad earlier in the week and then cried seeing it when I watched it today. And I love that scene.

Bard, I mean mm-hmm. I think he’s a great character addition. I personally did not mind them expanding him. Um, he’s the aragorn. 

[00:48:35] Tim: Yeah. 

[00:48:36] Rebekah: Yes. 

[00:48:37] Tim: I don’t think he needed to be the Bargeman though, because in, in the book, he is introduced when the Hobbit opens the barrels. Mm-hmm. And the dwarves come out. I mean, he’s, he’s kind of in that story pretty quickly.

Um, but I don’t think he had to be the bargeman because he was actually the. The leader of the guard, which is why he was so good with the arrow, but somehow they wanted him to be the, uh, the, oh it’s embarrassed is not the word, but he is the heir of the man who missed the, the dragon years before Oh yeah.

When smog first came in. Uh, and you know, it’s just, it’s just kind of strange, some of the parts about it. I think he’s a very good character to expand his role a bit. Yeah. His pre five Army’s role, ’cause the rest of it, he does have an expanded role in the book. 

[00:49:30] Donna: I think he’s just a kinder, gentler thorn.

And in fact, I had trouble, like I had trouble telling them apart. And a lot of times I’d see one and think, well wait, where, who are we? Where are we right now? 

[00:49:41] Rebekah: Side by side. I felt like they were definitely hard to tell apart, even personality wise until Thorn kind of lost his mind about the gold. They seemed so similar.

But I agree, I think Josiah said it like, honestly, he made a better aragorn foil to me, and I kind of wish they’d let Thorn be different. 

[00:50:00] Donna: Another couple characters that, uh, they put together here for the master of Lake Town and Alfred in Tolkien’s text. The Master of Lake Town is a greedy but relatively realistic bureaucrat who survives the dragon’s wrath only to later abscond with some gold and dive starvation in the wilderness.

The film portrays the Master, which is played well by Stephen Fry, I think as a thoroughly comical villain. He’s vain, he’s corrupt. He’s cowardly who meets a more. Uh, immediate karmic end, and he, he’s killed during smogs fiery attack and he is buried under the falling dragon or escaping on the boat That smog destroys.

The film also introduces Alfred, the master’s sycophantic aid Grandma. Hello. As a source of comic relief, Alfred does not exist in the book at all. His antics like dressing as a woman to escape battle and right, I tolkien. And seriously, the woman dressed, man dressed like a woman. I don’t particularly think he would’ve loved that.

Come on. And the Masters exaggerated portrayal changed the tone of the lake town subplot, making it more overtly satirical than the straightforward treatment it receives in the book. 

[00:51:16] Tim: Now, in the book, the Master does stay back with the women. When Bard takes the people to Dale, uh, at the foot of the mountain, he says he’s gonna stay.

Safe in Lake Town with the women. Yeah. And so there is, there is some, well, I’ll just, I’ll just stay with the women kind of thing. It’s a little, little bit in the book, but a lot more in the film. Then we have Bjorn, which when we first started watching it, before I’d gotten to this point in the book, we were watching the first film, the first of the Hobbit films, and I was thinking, wait, are you talking 

[00:51:53] Rebekah: about the one we watched together?

[00:51:54] Tim: Yes. I was thinking that was the second one, wasn’t it? Oh, was it second? Oh, it was the first one. It should have been the first one. They, no, they hadn’t gone Me. I, I watched that. You and I watched that 

[00:52:03] Rebekah: Mom wasn’t home. Okay, I gotcha. Good. Sorry. They had not gone into 

[00:52:06] Tim: Merk Wood yet. Uh, it’s just before Merck Wood.

We get Bjorn, whom I thought was actually Tom Bombadil. 

[00:52:14] Rebekah: Oh, he said that. And I was like, this does not seem like the same guy, but I’ll see. He seems like a strange way

[00:52:19] Tim: to, to have Tom Bombadil. Well, he’s not Tom Bababa. He’s Bjorn. And, uh, his character is similar in the films in the book, but some of his book appearances, uh, and gentler side, such as his Love of Animals and long conversations with Gandalf are downplayed and eliminated in the movies.

Uh, during the Battle of Five Armies, the book Bjorn Dramatically Rescue You rescues Thorn and Kills Bog, whereas film Bjorn has only a blink and you’ll miss it. Appearance. He leaps into the battle from the back of an eagle, but we don’t see his full REM page. We see him down below. As he takes the form of a bear, but we don’t see very much of it.

So he’s there, but he’s a little different. 

[00:53:04] Donna: So now we’ll talk a little bit about Gollum. The famous riddles in the dark scene between Gollum and Bilbo is relatively faithful in dialogue, but the tone of his character is subtly changed. For the film in the book, Gollum is initially quite polite because in the 1937 edition, he intended to give the ring as a prize.

Yeah, but Tolkien later revised this. The film uses the revised more ominous version. Goum never plans to give up the ring, and he immediately becomes murderously hostile when he loses it. This is a smaller difference than many of the other characters have since Tolkien’s. Later editions of The Hobbit also characterize it.

Uh, Gollum as in the film, 

[00:53:49] Tim: I think the animated Bass Rankin version of The Hobbit is much more true to the book character. Yeah. Uh, that Tolkien wrote. 

[00:53:57] Donna: Yeah. 

[00:53:58] Tim: Mm-hmm. And I 

[00:53:58] Donna: did, I did think the exchange between Goum and Bilbo was fascinating. I did think that, um, the whole, I thought it was well done in the film.

Yeah. And I, I liked it. I liked the scene in the book as well. I liked listening to that and kind of listening to them banter and that it, it did show you, it showed you some of Bilbo’s very quick wit and, and ability to, you know, just come up with things on the fly and he could, he could think quickly and, and things like that.

So it really built it, it built his character for me 

[00:54:28] TJ: in the book, the Great Goblin of Goblin Town is a short-lived villain. He interrogates the dwarves with some threatening songs, very hobbit like. Then Gandalf kills him almost immediately. The quote being Thorns sword, or Christ gleamed, and the great goblin fell dead.

Now the film expands this character for comic effect. The Great Goblin portrayed with a grotesque, humorous tone, lectures the dwarves at length and has an over the top personality complete with chin, wattle and quips. His death is played for a laugh. He mutters. One last joke after Gandalf slays him. This shift from a brief menace to a cartoonish foe is a tonal characterization change.

Though the plot point, his demise by Gandalf remains the same. I thought the Great Goblin might have been the best change if you’re gonna expand the source material. The Great Goblin was. Quirky, corny, songy. He had songs. There’s so many songs in the Hobbit book. I think there’s so many good, I don’t understand why this wasn’t the climax of the first movie.

The climax is them on a tree and Bilbo has to bum rush bowel wrong or whatever his name is. 

[00:55:46] Rebekah: The book finally features several intelligent animals who do speak the Ravens. For instance, Roach who carries messages, the thrush that communicates Smogs weakness and the Eagles who have dialogue. The films deliberately.

Oh, and the spiders too. 

[00:56:02] TJ: Yes. Me the spider. True. Yeah. 

[00:56:03] Rebekah: The films deliberately avoid animals speaking English. Well, wait, the spiders talk in the film, right? 

[00:56:08] Tim: Yes. The spiders talk, so no, no. The spiders do not talk. In the film, they talk in the book and really, and. Yes. Uh, I 

[00:56:15] Rebekah: thought I heard, maybe I’m going 

[00:56:16] Tim: crazy.

Billbo can understand them. 

[00:56:19] Rebekah: Yeah, so the films deliberately avoid animals speaking English, for instance. The thrush is present but only knocks, and the raven never speaks in the novel. The Eagles converse and are characters in their own right, but in the films, they’re essentially silent saviors that come and go.

This choice does also remove someone’s whimsical personalities from the story. Grounding the world in a slightly more realistic tone. Kind of again, going back to that for the 

[00:56:43] Tim: fairytale. 

[00:56:44] Rebekah: Yes. Removal of the fairytale parts of the fairytale, if you will. 

[00:56:48] TJ: Yes. Don’t remove the fairytale parts. Uh,

[00:56:50] Rebekah: so in general, we’ve covered almost all of the major stuff in terms of plot changes, uh, already.

So now we’ve got just a few items in the plot and timeline that are a little broader than just one or two characters at a time that we wanted to go over. 

[00:57:05] Tim: Alrighty. The films inject a lot more dark foreshadowing of the events of the Lord of the Rings from showing the evil of the ring, gradually taking hold of Bilbo to hinting its Ron’s return.

Making the Hobbit films feel like a true prequel trilogy mm-hmm. Rather than a standalone story. Mm-hmm. As it was originally written. The book written for a younger audience keeps the tone lighter and only retroactively connects it to Lord of the Rings. Thus scenes like Galadriel and Soman discussing the enemy or Legist being sent to find young Aragorn or even Ballen mentioning visiting Moria in the extended edition are all additions that alter the narrative’s focus.

They serve to link the plot. To the larger middle Earth saga, whereas the Book’s plot is self-contained. These movies spend more time than the book on setting up future events, as in the Ring is ominous in the film. Whereas in the book it was a convenient magic, magic ring with no hint of its dark nature.

I felt like this was all awkward. These things that, that have to make it connect. It was supposed to be a standalone and it is okay that it’s a standalone and it has little pieces that connect to things we know from the Lord of the Rings. It’s not genuinely a prequel. 

[00:58:24] Rebekah: So sort of related to that connection point, uh, the first Hobbit film.

Begins in the moments just before the fellowship movie starts even featuring Frodo briefly while Bill, bill Baggins is working home at home. On his memoir, time jumps back 60 years to the beginning of the events of The Hobbit. The book simply starts quote, in a hole in the ground there lived a hop end quote and goes from there.

No time jumps nor flash forwards. The ending of the film. Trilogy also ties back into the fellowship of the ring. Old Bilbo receiving Gandalf just as Frodo is about to arrive on the day of his 11th first birthday, whereas the book ends. With Bilbo’s perspective shortly after returning home, these structural additions make the plot try to feel like part of a larger saga.

Now I do agree with some of the opinions about, you know, it’s supposed to be a standalone, and this was kind of a frustrating change that they tried to build it in how I actually like this because people going to see the Hobbit have seen the Lord of the Rings films. So as much as, sure it can feel like a standalone and maybe a lot of the plot changing to make it like set up the one ring and all that, um, as a prequel didn’t work.

I did kind of like this. Just as a, like, as a little mechanic to connect you in with the films that you love. I don’t think that the rest of it was necessary, but I did like this. I, 

[00:59:45] Tim: one tiny piece of trivia in connection with this tolkien’s thought for the whole world of Middle Earth, was simply a note that he was grading papers and thought this and put it on a note and set it aside for a while was a note that said in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Mm-hmm. And set it aside and then came back to it and, and built the whole story from that. That I think it’s always funny to, to know that there are people that one thing was what they saw or, you know, and it’s like, okay, that’s where the whole thing came from. I thought that was interesting. 

[01:00:21] Donna: But the beginning and the ending were literally just a few moments.

Yeah. I’m okay. They didn’t take it off into some other wild thing. Exactly. So they Yes. To connect the movie only. Viewer and things like that. Some of the things that they did, literally creating at least a full movie that didn’t have to be created just seemed odd. Anyway, I. 

[01:00:44] Tim: Yeah. Greedy. Mm-hmm. Connecting them was fine.

Um, the way they had to desperately connect them with so many different things just seemed wrong. 

[01:00:54] TJ: It was just all plot cul-de-sacs, I think. I mean, okay, I can see that. Here’s a big, here’s a, here’s a big one in the novel, Billbo plus Smog. Bilbo has two fairly quiet conversations with smog using riddles and flattery.

On his second trip, he steals a cup, then discovers the weak spot. In Smogs natural armor, enraged smog flies off to attack lake town Almost immediately. The dwarves never directly confront the dragon they hide inside the mountain. Probably the best chapter in the book, possibly the best scene in the movie I, I think that Bilbo Golum and Bilbo smog are the two best chapters in the book, and they’re the two best scenes in the movie as well.

Well, you know, the film greatly expands this bilbo smog sort of interaction. Bilbo’s initial encounter is similar about, but after he flees, the dwarves do not simply huddle safely. Instead, they engage Snog in a prolonged CGI action sequence through AOR halls, they split up to lead the dragon on a chase, ignite the forges of aor, and attempt to kill a fire breathing dragon by drowning him in really.

Really good looking. CGI molten gold. It really looks good. And of course, you know him being a fire breathing dragon. I’m sure he is not immune to heat or anything like the dwarves are when there’re floating down rivers of molten gold on like a shield. Yeah. And they’re not themselves being cooked alive.

This sequence is entirely invented for the movie to add a climactic battle at the end of the second film, perhaps one of the worst offenders for splitting two movies into three. ’cause thi this, this is not a scene if it’s just two movies. This is, this is the, this is something that doesn’t happen to make a.

Second movie climax. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because it is a plot, cul-de-sac, none of it matters. They try to kill smog and they fail. He was already angry enough to go burn down Lake Town. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Smog tries to hunt down the dwarves one by one, and the dwarves throw cleverness and courage fighting back.

That was kind of nice. Kind of, ’cause it’s something the books Thorn and Company never had the chance or need to do at that point. SM ultimately survives and decides to destroy Lake Town. Anyway, flying off as in the book and the second film ends and, and when I saw for the first time, I kind of liked the ending mm-hmm.

Of the second film. It was kind, it’s kind of the, I think it’s my favorite movie, even. Like, they’re all bad, I think. But which one is 

[01:03:30] Rebekah: your favorite of the three that you, sorry. The second 

[01:03:32] TJ: I think is the most, I think the first one is the most tonally consistent, but the second one’s the most exciting in all lot of ways.

I think the second one, 

[01:03:39] Rebekah: from what I’ve seen. Seen and heard people say is the one, a lot of people like the best, so that makes sense. 

[01:03:44] Tim: Oh, the best. Yeah. I’m not, I’m not sure, but still, um, Bilbo Bilbo’s riddles with smog is what causes him to go and burn down Lake Town because he mentioned something about the barrels in barrel, barrel rider, barrel riders and smog gathers from that, that the people of Lake Town were involved somehow with getting him to steal SMGs gold.

And so that’s mm-hmm. That’s the reason for going to Lake Town, the movie. I’m not sure the movie gives a lot of reason to go to Lake Town. 

[01:04:16] TJ: No. Why? Why would he leave Where the dwarves are? Yeah. Stealing his stuff 

[01:04:22] Tim: so they don’t care about Lake Town. Killed the people of Lake Town. Yeah. Yeah. It, it is a little strange.

Like I said, I’m, I’m, I still believe that it was a two part film and they could have cut out a lot of the things that even would’ve made it two parts, but, 

[01:04:37] Donna: so Rebecca, what would you think is one of the most significantly altered events? 

[01:04:41] Rebekah: I think that the Battle of Five Armies, or the Battle of the Five Armies, I don’t remember how it Five Armies, the actual battle is one of the most significantly altered events.

Primarily because the book gives. Pretty sparse details, uh, which I’ll you’ll explain in a second. Uh, whereas the film devotes almost its entire final installment, oh my gosh, to this fight. So we’re gonna go over just several disgusting about the battle of the five armies that change significantly 

[01:05:09] TJ: horrific.

[01:05:09] Rebekah: Um, in the book, 

[01:05:11] Donna: Billbo Spins the battle knocked out for the most 

[01:05:15] Rebekah: part 

[01:05:16] Donna: in the, which is why you don’t read a lot about it in the book, in the film, he’s conscious for most of the battle and is knocked unconscious o only briefly near the end of the battle with a glancing blow. 

[01:05:31] Tim: Well, another thing, the presence of the trolls bats and wear worms that eat holes in the caves.

In the mountains, in the OR armies. Those are all film additions to make Make it bigger. 

[01:05:43] Rebekah: Sorry. Are those not just from Dune? 

[01:05:46] Tim: Yeah. 

[01:05:47] Rebekah: When they put 

[01:05:48] Tim: That is exactly what I said. When I was watching that, I said, okay, if that’s in the book, ’cause I hadn’t gotten to that point. I said, if that’s in the book, then Dune is borrowed from this book.

From The Hobbit. Yeah, from The Hobbit. If that was not, then it’s borrowed from the story in Dune. Ah. 

[01:06:07] Rebekah: To be fair, maybe he didn’t know that they would make a good Dune movie. 

[01:06:09] Tim: Uh, well the, it was already a series of books was already by the time the movie, 

[01:06:14] Rebekah: and it wasn’t Movie Jackson. It wasn’t movie, but it wasn’t a good movie.

And maybe Peter Jackson just assumed that everyone would forget

[01:06:21] Tim: that nobody would ever remember this. And then somebody made a big 

[01:06:23] Rebekah: Dune movie and now we think about it,

[01:06:25] Tim: worms that eat through ground. Right. 

[01:06:28] Rebekah: But 

[01:06:28] Donna: not Timothy Shala. Me. 

[01:06:30] Tim: Hmm. 

[01:06:31] TJ: So the, the book’s battle is described in a few pages. It’s like half a chapter.

This battle that they draw out into a three hour film. The film draws it out with multiple phases and set pieces. There’s, uh, you know, the initial clashes outside AOR Street fighting in Dale, side plot, thorn and a few dwarves are mounting a charge to Raven Hill to kill Azo. There’s individual doles. Yes.

Oh, yes. Azo is back. The timeline is extended this battle, which, I mean, battles are, can be big, but I don’t know how often they. Cover, you know, go from day in to night. It was, it’s a very long battle. Bilbo in the film, of course, remains conscious much longer. He actively participates, uh, in a few different way.

I mean, he, you barely see him, but he is awake for the battle, but he’s barely in the third movie, it, it becomes Thorn’s movie frustratingly.

[01:07:23] Rebekah: It is weird that he like it genuinely. He’s not the main character anymore. It’s weird. He’s 

[01:07:27] TJ: the hobbit. Oh my gosh. And Martin Freeman’s great. Right? Martin Free’s amazing.

I love him. Oh my gosh. Probably the best part of the film. And they just, they keep relegating him to the backseat, so, yeah. Yeah. Uh, Billbo tries to warn Thorn only to get knocked out near the end of the battle. He’s not wearing a helmet. The helmet is what saves him in the book. That’s right. Yes. In the book, he, he wears a helmet and it saves him, but in the film, he is not wearing a helmet.

It’s just a glancing bullet that knocks him out. Who cares, whatever. A lot of different phases there’s Oh, you know, there’s also that dwarf cousin who’s unexplained, who also unexplained is why he is made of CGI. Is that Dane? Yeah. I don’t know. I just know that the actor, I think is Billy Boyd was No, no, he doesn’t appear.

No, no, no. He doesn’t appear. Who is, he sings the song. Let me see. Billy Connolly. 

[01:08:22] Donna: Yeah, Billy another. 

[01:08:23] TJ: Billy. I, I don’t know why CGI, Billy Connolly just appears because Billy in the battle, because real life in the book, it explains it. 

[01:08:32] Donna: But real life, Billy Connolly was very ill, but they somehow, he ended up still doing it, the voicing and whatever.

Um, I did read something about that, 

[01:08:42] Tim: but he couldn’t do, he couldn’t do motion capture. I 

[01:08:45] Donna: don’t know. ’cause 

[01:08:45] Tim: he was sick. 

[01:08:46] Donna: I don’t know. I, I don’t remember. I didn’t boy spend a lot of time in the section, but I remember yeah, reading something about it. Sadly, thorn Feely and Keely are all killed in the battle in both book and film.

Instead of the three dying together in a last stand against the goblins as it is in the book, the film shows all three deaths happening as individual personal fights. Feelys capture and execution in front of Thorn is a shocking moment invented for the film. Thorn’s, final words with Bilbo are still included in the movie to preserve the poignant ending.

Hmm. But the context is that Bilbo comes to a dying thorn on the ice battlefield, whereas in the book, Bilbo only learns of thorn’s. Last words later, since Bilbo was unconscious during Thorn’s final moment, had to wake him up. Mm-hmm. Need to wake him up. You haven’t been in much of this movie, but let’s make you, let’s wake you up so you can cry with Thorn a little bit.

[01:09:47] Tim: Yep. Mm-hmm. In the book, the Eagles arrive when all seems lost in order to turn the tide. Bjorn in Bear form shows up unexpectedly to rescue the wounded thorn and to feeding bulk the ripped. Lip Orc. The film shows the Eagles arriving at the end, two ridden by Radiast and Bjorn. Uh, but their impact is glossed over quickly.

Instead of the last minute rescue of the book, the film focuses instead on Thorin v Azo and La Legist v Bog as the battle’s climactic moments. 

[01:10:23] Rebekah: Yeah. In the Hobbit. Where that dwarf and then the, the, the elf fight, the egs 

good. 

[01:10:31] Rebekah: The resolution part of the book is fairly truncated, though the main points are kept, though mentioned off screen.

In some cases, thorn is buried with the ark and stone. Dane becomes king under the mountain, and Bilbo accepts a. Small share of treasure before traveling home with Gandalf, though the latter is the only one show showed on screen in the theatrical version, the one major edition is Thre Will Telling Legalists to seek out, uh, Aragorn.

He calls him Strider again to tie into the Lord of the Ring story. Uh, the film skips the details of Bilbo’s Journey home from the book, which was long, leisurely, and involves celebrating IDE with Bjorn and Spring in Rivendale. Instead, we see him leave the mountain and return to bag end to find his belongings distributed, uh, rather than of the books ending where Gandalf and Bain return to the Shire a few years later for a chat with Bilbo.

The film then fast forwards back to the Shire as the fellowship timeline begins tying the end of this trilogy to the beginning of the next, and resolving that perspective of the movies being a retailing of Bilbo’s memoir just as the first one began. Alright, how much do you love that? Hmm. 

[01:11:42] TJ: Oh my gosh, how dare they make a three hour film and they don’t even show who’s king under the mountain at the end.

Yeah. Think it’s like, 

[01:11:49] Rebekah: is it mentioned, I think they mentioned it in passing or something. I know 

[01:11:52] Tim: when you just told me, oh, that that was who was king of the king under the mountain. Because, because Philly and Keeley were his nephews. They were the in line for the throne. They were all thorn and both of them were killed.

And so at the end of the movie, I didn’t know who ends up King under the mountain. 

[01:12:08] Rebekah: I think that the actual, yeah, I think his, uh, coronation is in the book. Right. Or some, I dunno if this is coronation, but you know what I mean. 

[01:12:17] TJ: I think the real life king under the mountain Yeah. Is Dane. 

[01:12:22] Tim: I appreciated the, the things that happened once Bilbo got back home.

Uh, the things with the Sackville Baggins and the people mm-hmm. Selling all of his things. I think 

[01:12:34] Donna: he satisfied the fans that said Yeah. Where was Lobelia? Yeah, 

[01:12:37] Tim: lobelia. There she is with her really weird hat. Yeah. Stealing his silver spoons that he takes back. Mm-hmm. 

[01:12:44] Donna: Little 

[01:12:45] Tim: nod the spoons back to the other movies.

[01:12:47] Donna: But again, those were just little seconds that he put in to tie them to the other story. It wasn’t this contrived, crazy thing. So these movies made some money that they did somehow. Um, I, to save my breath a little bit, I’m going to call them Journey Desolation and Battle. So the book release was September 21st, 1937, almost 20 years before the Lord of the Rings.

And also we talked today, that would have been before, uh, world War ii. And I think we had mentioned before when we were covering the Lord of the Rings, um, a lot of people said that a lot of the Lord of the Rings. Was written along the thought lines of the war, and Tolkien says, no, they were not. He, he continued to say it was a story.

It was not based on the war. I was not making a comment on the war. Um, but this 

[01:13:44] TJ: Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say. Yeah. 

[01:13:46] Donna: Tolkien, uh uh, but this was written before that occurred. Uh, movie releases journey was released at the Embassy Theater in Wellington on the 28th of November in 2012, and then in the US and the rest of the world.

Two later, uh, on December 14th, uh, desolation was released at the Dolby Theater in LA on December 2nd, and then nine days later on December 13th, it was released in the US and Worldwide. Then Battle was released December 1st, 2014 at ODN Chester Square in London, and then in the US and Worldwide on December 17th.

[01:14:30] Tim: I do find it interesting that they were able to release them. A year apart from each other. Yeah. 

[01:14:36] Donna: That’s, that’s, did they film these together? Yeah. 

[01:14:39] Tim: Parts of them. 266 

[01:14:40] Donna: days. 

[01:14:41] Tim: Yep. 

[01:14:42] Donna: Uh, now there was some pre and post production that Sure. That they don’t count in that, but the major filming was that, uh, the book rating on Good reads is 4.29 out of five.

I guess I agree with that. I, I did enjoy the book. Um, we’ll get there later. Rotten Tomatoes, the tomato meter for journey was 64% and for desolation, 74%. And then for Battle 59. So, 

[01:15:07] Rebekah: well, no, what I’m saying is I asked a few people that I know are like Lord of the Ring slash Middle Earth fans and all of them said the same thing.

The first one was, okay, the second one was my favorite. The third one was trash. That was like how they described them. Also, Seth 1, 2, 6 said that specifically he was one of the people, he’s our super fan. He discord, listen to every new episode. So, 

[01:15:30] Donna: and it looks like, I mean, honestly it looks like our stats are, are proving this out.

Uh, even though it’s still a lot of money and a lot of views, it’s still that third one fall, the third movie falls off. Mm-hmm. Um, IMDB rated journey at 7.8. It also rated desolation at 7.8 and battle at 7.4, which I thought was interesting. It wasn’t too high. Yeah. Uh, the Flixter audience score journey was.

83% desolation, 85% battle, 74%. So that, that was a bigger drop. That was more of the drop I was would expect to see. Production cost journey was 180 million. If you remember the first two Lord of the Ring, uh, all three Lord of the Rings were like 94 to 96 million. Double journey was 180 million desolation, two 30 million and battle 250 million.

Lord Jesus. Uh, opening weekend journey was 85 million. Desolation, 74 million, battle 55 million. 

[01:16:34] Tim: I’m going to bring up this point. In the midst of that, that statistic. I am a Hobbit and Lord of the Rings fan. I watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies, then watched all of the extended versions of the movies.

I never watched the third Hobbit movie. We never saw. Oh my gosh. We saw, I, we watched it. I said, I’ve never seen any of this. Oh, wow. Yep. That’s crazy. 

[01:16:59] TJ: Lord of the Rings fan here. Yep. Big. What? Hey, that’s, that’s what it, that’s what it comes down to. It was, I assume when it came out you were tired. You were tired of having to watch.

It wasn’t mediocre films. Yeah. That didn’t have the same passion as the originals, but we’re trying to pretend like they did. Yeah. 

[01:17:19] Donna: So that was opening weekend. The USA Canada gross Journey, 303 million desolation 258 million. So losing, losing 50 million there and then battle 255 million. That’s interest think interesting 

[01:17:33] Tim: because the numbers went opposite directions.

They spent more on each consecutive film. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And made less on each consecutive 

[01:17:42] Donna: film. Yeah. They still made 

[01:17:43] Rebekah: their budgets back. Oh, they did? Oh, yes. Just barely by the time you get to the third one. Yeah. 

[01:17:47] Donna: The international totals Journey 714 million, desolation 700 million and Battle 701 million.

To me that says 

[01:17:58] TJ: 1 million more to 

[01:17:59] Donna: me that says. People, for the most part, people said, we better go ahead and finish the three, whatever I, I mean, sunk 

[01:18:06] TJ: cost fallacy. 

[01:18:07] Donna: Yeah, yeah. Um, then the total combined journey, 1 billion, I think it was 1.012 or something like that. So just over 1 billion desolation, 985 million.

Battle 956 million with a total of all three movies of 2.94 fricking billion dollars. 

[01:18:29] Tim: Nearly $3 billion. Lord Jesus. And you, and then you understand why they took a 300 page book and made it into three movies? Yeah, because ’cause we paid for it. We couldn’t make the money. 

[01:18:42] Donna: Yeah. Uh, all, all films were PG 13.

They were filmed in Wellington, stone Street Studios in New Zealand, which is Peter Jackson’s studio. Uh, there were some other undisclosed locations around New Zealand. I don’t know why it was undisclosed as well as in London where they filmed the stuff 

[01:19:00] Tim: with sour on. Yeah. 

[01:19:01] Donna: Christopher Lee, as I said before, could not travel to New Zealand.

So they were filmed, uh, his scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios. As were all the scenes involving Ian Hol as Old Bilbo because he also did not want to travel. And then the shots of Sawman filmed in New Zealand, uh, used a Body. Devil 

[01:19:20] Tim: Jackson continued. The Alfred Hitchcock, uh, is it Alfred Hitchcock that appears in his movies, I 

[01:19:26] Donna: think.

Yeah. Yes. 

[01:19:27] Tim: I think that’s the tradition where that kind of, kind of thing comes from. Mm-hmm. Uh, he continued that in this set of films in Journey. He is a dwarf running from Era Go Arab bore after smog invaded the mountain. So he was under the mountain in the first one. Uh, the Desolation movie. He reprised the role of Albert dreary, the carrot eating man in, uh, at the prancing pony.

And then in battle, he was the father of Bilbo in the portrait of Bilbo’s parents hanging over the fireplace in back end or at the end of the movie in the floor that he hung back on the wall. 

[01:20:08] Donna: Yeah, I thought that was interesting. He made physical cameos in, I did know all the movies. And then the 

[01:20:13] Tim: last one I did not know.

[01:20:14] Donna: The last one is like, did they get to the end? And he goes, oh, crap, I wasn’t in this. Oh, put me on that. See, I’ll be that picture. Picture. 

[01:20:22] TJ: Yeah. Hey, there were several ideas. Of how the 

[01:20:24] Tim: project should be told. I was not, however, asked for mine. 

[01:20:29] Rebekah: No one asked us. It 

[01:20:30] TJ: was so rude. But there were still, I know I had some good ideas.

There were several other ideas from, from people who weren’t us. Unfortunately, the Hobbit was originally made as a two part film. You know, we’ve talked about this. But in July of 2012, Jackson announced plans for the third movie that would supposedly make use of the tales from the appendices written by Tolkien to support Lord of the Rings published at the end of a Return of the King, along with the titular story of the Battle of Five Armies, a significant amount of unused footage from the first and second movies was integrated to make the third and final installment.

This is a little 

[01:21:05] Tim: strange to me. Mm-hmm. Does that mean that they actually, I read that in two different sources made, they actually made the first two films. 

[01:21:13] TJ: Yeah, I checked. I checked as well. ’cause it sounded unbelievable. 

[01:21:15] Tim: Yeah. And before the, before they released the first two, they had decided to also make a third one.

That, that sounds, he came out strange. I mean, mean the battle because the battle is so small in the book. I, I could imagine that it, that it would just be, you know, big CGI thing and they wouldn’t have to do all of the individual battle parts. But it does seem strange that they kind of got maybe Frodo bilbo 

[01:21:37] TJ: stuff 

[01:21:38] Tim: from the end.

Yeah. I mean, they, let’s cut from the first one they got into the movie into making it. Mm-hmm. When they decided, eh, let’s do a third one. 

[01:21:47] Donna: Okay, so weird. I guess there’s late towel stuff that 

[01:21:49] Tim: could have been filmed 

[01:21:50] TJ: for for movie two. Yeah. 

[01:21:51] Donna: But another part of that is at the end of the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson had achieved like God status as a director and a creator in this way.

Okay. He did something that nobody thought could be done in such an amazing way, and he created this thing, little gee God. Yes, yes, of course. Um, sorry, Lord, you totally knew what I was saying. Um, and then to make this decision and end up with a movie that, yeah, they made money, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody say that they liked the trilogy or they could tolerate the second one.

The first one was, okay. The third one was, that’s what I hear, like across the board from people when I read, you know, opinions and listen to, to different reviews. And so I, I don’t know, it just slays me. 

[01:22:38] Tim: Um, before, before he made the Hobbit movies though, he had had. At least one movie that didn’t hit the Mar.

Um, there’s actually King Kong Kong, couple, two of them, king Kong and the Adventures of 10 10, uh, 2005 and 2011. Um, before, before he did the, the Hobbit movies. So he had been, you know, he made the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Everybody loved it. So amazing. Uh, and then he did King Kong, which the movie was big.

[01:23:10] Donna: So before Jackson made the call to wait, uh, to wait it out for Freeman. ’cause they had actually started, like they were into pre-production stuff and, and they wanted Freeman, but before. He decided to make this call and, and say, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna wait and get him. Several other famous actors were considered to play or auditioned to play the part of Bilbo.

And so I found this so interesting trying to imagine strange each of these people, Daniel Radcliffe. Thank you, Jesus. That did not happen. I think I would’ve died mentally for every moment I was watching that Shya LaBuff. Can’t say that. Josh Whi. Oh my 

[01:23:53] TJ: God. Okay. Does anyone know him besides people who have watched Taskmaster?

[01:23:57] Donna: I mean, people in Britain? I don’t, yeah, I don’t think, I dunno, maybe. Yeah, true. He’s, I think he’s got a decent following there, but No, but I mean, yeah, Eddie Redman, he won the first season of Taskmaster. 

[01:24:07] Tim: He could have done it. 

[01:24:08] Donna: Yeah. Yeah. Eddie Redman, Jamie McAvoy,

[01:24:10] Tim: perhaps. 

[01:24:11] Donna: Perhaps, uh, Adam Brown, who eventually plays, he, he was cast as Ori uh Aaron.

Oh, 

[01:24:16] TJ: famously? Yeah. 

[01:24:17] Donna: Aaron Akin, which I looked this guy up and I, I Adam, not reckon Adam Akin son. I don’t know, possibly. And Alan Arkin and then Toby McGuire. So I thought that was interesting just to even. Martin Freemans are so perfect and Kobe McGuire. Man, that would’ve been bizarre. Yeah, 

[01:24:34] Tim: it would’ve been.

Initially, Martin Freeman turned down the offer to play Bilbo due to his scheduling conflicts with the series Sherlock. Uh, in October, 2010, a news piece on the BBC quoted Jackson to say quote. Despite the various rumors and speculations surrounding this role, there has only ever been one bilbo baggins for us.

Uh, there are a few times in your career when you come across an actor who you know was born to play a role. That was the case. As soon as I met Martin Freeman. He is intelligent, funny, surprising, and brave, exactly like Bilbo, and I feel incredibly proud to be able to announce that he is our. Hobbit end quote.

[01:25:16] Donna: Uh, every moment he was on the screen. I enjoyed him. I do it Really? I thought really loved Martin. I thought 

[01:25:22] Tim: it ab He was absolutely perfect. Yeah. Yeah. For the role, 

[01:25:25] Donna: unfortunately. Yeah, whatever. 

[01:25:27] Rebekah: My only, honestly, he’s like, he’s great. My only problem with Martin Freeman, he looks so much like Marian Pippin because of the way his hair was identical and like all of those kinds of things, it’s, it’s partly just costuming and hair, but, oh my gosh, I remember like when I had, they aren’t supposed be relatives.

This is not a joke. When I saw like previews and things for The Hobbit, I thought, oh, it’s kind of weird. Why would they use Marian Actors? Can’t you find a different actor? Like, I literally thought it was one of the same people. So 

[01:25:58] TJ: yeah, Martin Freeman, somehow his portrayal somehow. Honored the original source material.

Yeah. And Ian Holmes Yes. Character from the original tri movie Trilogy. Mm-hmm. And somehow also made it his own in a special, appropriate way. Yeah. Yeah, 

I 

[01:26:15] TJ: agree. 

[01:26:15] Rebekah: True. I would say that’s true. Andy Circus completed the one scene where Gollum appears during the first week of production, but because of his connection to Jackson and his keen understanding of the Lord of the Rings lore, he stayed on to be the second unit director.

So ladies and gentlemen, when you are wondering how to make yourself invaluable to the people that you’re around use, get involved your abilities, get, get play ball, play gom and be world 

[01:26:42] TJ: famous. Yes. Be 

[01:26:43] Rebekah: world famous and play Gollum in the start of the ring, God the next time. And, and then offer to read or least offer on audio book.

[01:26:53] Donna: Perfect. Yeah. Um, there were two wizards names. Of which Gandalf states, he can’t remember when he’s, he’s calling out the Five Wizards. Okay. The five Great Wizards. Okay. Look, I don’t know why he wouldn’t be able to remember them. That makes no sense. But 

[01:27:11] TJ: I mean, it might’ve been thousands of years since he’d seen them.

Gandalf actually couldn’t remember. Yeah, he says he not the actor. 

[01:27:17] Donna: No. Gandalf states he can’t remember their names in the film. So, uh, any idea what those names were and any idea why he could not say them, 

[01:27:26] TJ: saw ’em on and rat aghast. I have a feeling that’s not it. That’s probably the two he remember. Two.

Yeah, those 

[01:27:33] Donna: are the two with him. Uh, okay. Was 

[01:27:34] TJ: one of them called? Melchior. 

[01:27:38] Donna: Mm. That would’ve been a good one. I genuinely have no idea. I’m sorry. Guess that’s okay. Uh, I wouldn’t have known. I’ve known, I think 

[01:27:43] TJ: that’s, so Ron’s master, 

[01:27:44] Donna: um, their names were Al, avatar and Polando, and he 

[01:27:49] TJ: Oh, Rebecca, you knew that Al.

[01:27:50] Donna: Avatar and pal. Yeah. Yep. Ando. He could not say their names because they only appear. In the Tolkien book, unfinished Tales and Warner Brothers couldn’t secure the rights to them names, so they couldn’t use names. So the names couldn’t say the names. Wow. So they 

[01:28:07] Tim: had to come up with a line. There’s two others of us.

Why even, I can’t remember now. 

[01:28:11] Donna: Why even mention it? You rewrote the entire book, but for some reason you’ve gotta put a line in there. Yeah. Yeah. Where A Wise Wizard, the Greatest of All Wizards, can’t remember the names of two of his fellow Great Wizards. 

[01:28:25] TJ: It’s, well, it’s like the Rings of Power TV show doesn’t have the right to this.

Rights to the Silmarillion. Yeah. So they have to base all of their stories off of the appendices at the end of return of the king? Yes. Oh, really? Well, that’s interesting. Why 

[01:28:36] Rebekah: don’t they have the rights to that? They have unlimited money. 

[01:28:39] TJ: Uh, yeah, they do have unlimited money, don’t they? $3 billion from these three.

[01:28:47] Rebekah: Can I just say that Money? Well, that

[01:28:48] TJ: was Warner Brothers money. This is Amazon now. Okay. Money 

[01:28:52] Rebekah: amounts have ceased to have meaning To me, when you start putting, 

[01:28:56] Tim: I just, I can’t, we’re talking about with millions. Yeah. It’s, 

[01:28:59] Rebekah: yeah. Between stuff happening in the government and trying to follow that between the movie budgets and the amounts of money things, I literally just have no concept of money.

Like I, I feel, I just, I don’t, I don’t get it. 

[01:29:12] TJ: I, I read a tidbit on JR r Toki in’s Wikipedia page that when he died in the. Seventies, I want to say his estate was estimated after inflation to today’s money to be worth about $5 million 

[01:29:29] Donna: Tolkien. 

[01:29:30] TJ: Yeah. Doesn’t that seem like a thousand times too low? Yes. Uh, no, because his was just, well, it was just the book.

It was books at the time. It was just the books. 

[01:29:40] Donna: I’ve never like poor mouthed our life. We’ve always, we’ve always had what we needed. We’ve made small amounts of money, we’ve made larger amounts of money, whatever. But when I started working, where I work now, I work in corporate accounting. Um. It’s thrilling, I assume.

Huh? 

[01:29:57] Tim: You see more zeros than we ever see. Yeah. When 

[01:30:01] Donna: I, I had, I made a mistake one time and, uh, uh, an error at one point. I can’t believe that’s true. And I was all distressed and I don’t know what it was, it might have been 10 or $20,000, something that was fixable. Okay. Whatever it was. And when I went to the, the lady to, to ask her the right way to correct this, and, and it’d been the first time I’d done something exactly like this, she was like, how much was it?

And I was, I don’t know, 10, 20,000, whatever. But it was, it was between 10 and 20, somewhere in there. Yeah. She, she was like, Donna, I. Move billions of dollars around in the course of a period from a division to a division or from this call center to that one or whatever. She was like, 10 to $20,000 is literally not even an amount of money to me.

And so I had to start wrapping my head around that because 

[01:30:53] Rebekah: yeah. 

[01:30:53] Donna: Like you said that, what does it mean if somebody handed me 

[01:30:55] Rebekah: $20,000 in one sitting right now? Yeah. And I’m not poor. Right. But do you know how much help that would be to like 12 different things in my life right now? It’s crazy. John Reese Davies was asked to reprise the role of Gimley during the Hobb, which would’ve been awful.

Which would’ve been awful. But he turned down the offer due to his severe allergic reaction to the makeup, as we have discussed in our previous episode. Yes. 

[01:31:22] TJ: He threw the mask into the river or something at the, 

in the literal. So 

[01:31:26] TJ: done. They burned it. Yes. 

[01:31:27] Rebekah: To take up the suffering of Davies. Benedict Cumberbatch literally ripped his vocal chords while voicing smog.

By the end of filming his throat was bleeding. That was terrifying. 

You would 

[01:31:39] Rebekah: think that a, like an experienced person doing voice acting would know how to not do that. But he like, he like went, he went sicko 

[01:31:46] Donna: mode. He went to a couple of different, um, like aquariums and zoos to study these creatures and listen to them and do all this to try to come up with a convincing voice 

smell 

[01:31:57] Donna: talk, and it, it tore him apart.

So he listened to Dragons talking zoos Realty 

[01:32:01] TJ: talk. Yeah, I know. Well, Rebecca, I think mom and Dad knows, but Rebecca, do you know that Benedict Cumberbatch did the motion caption for Schmo? No. That’s pretty cool. You should look up the mocap videos of him slithering along the ground with mocap that all over his life.

And it is very funny. While 

[01:32:20] Donna: you’re watching the video, should listen to somebody pronouncing his name wrong and listen to one of those things. Thunder snatch, 

[01:32:26] TJ: cumber. And 

[01:32:27] Donna: yeah, Buffalo CU Bath is still my favorite. So TJ what? There was one dwarf, not in the movie, but what about these one? There 

[01:32:34] TJ: was one df not in the movie, but what about these dwarfs?

Okay, so every dwarf in the movie had a fat suit. There’s three kinds of fat suits. I can say fat suit ’cause I wore a fat suit in high school to play Edna Turnblad. So three kinds of fats. There was a muscle fat. Hmm. Which seems 

[01:32:53] Donna: right 

[01:32:53] TJ: a little, but 

[01:32:55] Donna: that’s what they called it is bizarre. 

[01:32:56] TJ: Hmm. The standard fat standard and the, and extreme fat.

That was only for one dwarf bomber. Poor Stephen Hunter who played bomber. Not only does he have to wear the only extreme fat suit in the trilogy, but he has to wear it silently. He only has three lines in the three movies. One in the first, one in journey. No, none in desolation and two lines in battle.

Wow. That was special right there. 

[01:33:28] Tim: Well. I’ve got another only one from the Dwarfs. The wig Worn by Richard Armitage was the only one of the dwarf wigs to be made entirely of human hair. I thought we left the wig drama after Hunger Games in the Twilight Saga. 

[01:33:44] Rebekah: Three of the actors in the Hobbit films were alive when the book was first published in 1937.

Wow. Sir Christopher Lee, sir Ian Holm and Barry Humphrey, who played the great Goblin King. Sir Ian McKellan missed this release by two years, being born in 1939. To put that in perspective 

[01:34:05] Donna: of our lives, all four of your grandparents were born before 1937, 

[01:34:10] Tim: right before, I think it’s all four of your grandparents predated.

[01:34:13] TJ: Which is 

[01:34:14] Donna: interesting and it has nothing to do with anything, but I just thought it was interesting. 

[01:34:17] TJ: They were all children I guess, right? 

[01:34:19] Donna: Yeah, 

[01:34:19] TJ: they were all in their born in the early to mid eighties, 34, 35, and 

[01:34:22] Donna: 36. 

[01:34:24] TJ: Um, hey, in token’s, original draft of the Hobbit, did you know that Thorn’s name was Gandalf and Gandalf’s name was not?

Thorn Blotter Thin, bladder Thin Thank 

[01:34:37] Rebekah: well Blade Thank He changed that blade thin. That’s my guess. Better. I’m gonna say Blain. I would’ve read it. Bladder thin. All of those are better than bladder thin. 

[01:34:51] Tim: Listen, when I was reading the books originally it was smog. S-A-S-M-A-U-G is smog. And when I’ve heard people say it since then, smog.

It just how you AAU and not Go Owl? 

[01:35:07] TJ: Oh. That’s very German. 

[01:35:09] Donna: Oh, auger. 

[01:35:10] TJ: Well, Rebecca say one English word where au is al. Smog. Smog. 

Jesus. Smog. Okay. Oh my gosh. 

[01:35:20] TJ: I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was thinking about what words sound like al with au tau for no reason, for fun smog. That’s what I do in my brain for fun.

Mm-hmm. 

[01:35:32] Donna: Um, bag end in the Shire was rebuilt for these three films, but this time they used permanent material so that it could become a tourist attraction after the, and we’re, we’re 

[01:35:45] TJ: still planning on going there sometime, right? I certainly hope so. So 

[01:35:48] Donna: I hope so. Yes. I think there were, let’s planning to go there in six years.

I think there, um, there were a number of, of, uh, buildings or structures of whatever different. Purposes, um, that when they, when they used them for this film, they, uh, made them permanent. So they could be, they kept several, 

[01:36:04] Tim: the, the, there are also several that are just the entrances, but still they turned it back into the Hobbit Village.

Mm-hmm. Which is really interesting ’cause we’ve watched a couple of, of the interview programs where characters or actors from the original trilogy, uh, talked about going to Hobbiton and, and the interviewer and said, you know, that that’s not a real place, it doesn’t exist. Right. And they’re like, it’s like, well actually it does.

You know, they’ve remade it. It is a real place. Hobbits don’t live there. Yes, I get 

[01:36:33] TJ: that. But in the second film, the Arkansas is said to represent dwarf kingship, but in the novel it was. Simic family, heirloom, McGuffin, anyone? A McGuffin is an old storytelling device that makes a relatively insignificant object.

More important to move the story along. 

[01:36:55] Tim: Thank you. Smile. 

[01:36:57] Donna: Before we give verdicts, I thought I would give us a little, a little quiz for the other three members of our, uh, group of our troop that would, uh, lighten the mood a little bit because we have had some serious issues with this movie. Can you name the five actors from the Hobbit Trilogy who portrayed five villains in the MCU?

[01:37:19] TJ: Okay. I know one Martin Freeman. 

[01:37:21] Donna: No, he wasn’t a villain. He 

[01:37:23] Rebekah: was, he was an FBI 

[01:37:24] TJ: agent. He villain he was, he was against, he was like a hero villain, eh? Yeah. He’s not one of my, I’ve. He was a likable Okay. Pro antagonist in 

[01:37:33] Rebekah: these were McKellens. 

[01:37:34] TJ: Okay. Was in McKellen. ISO was, no, no. Even though, usually that’s not really the MCU official, the MCU, but Magneto was mentioned in Deadpool versus Wolverine, which was, which was the movie that brought the X-Men into the MCU.

So I’m counting Magneto as a six. 

[01:37:49] Rebekah: Okay. They’re six. So Andy Circus is one of the other ones that I know. Oh, Andy Circus. Yes. ’cause he was in the one, the Black Panther movie. Right. 

[01:37:57] TJ: He plays T Lost his arm 

[01:37:59] Rebekah: and Altron. Yeah, he was, yeah. 

[01:38:00] TJ: Oh, he 

[01:38:01] Donna: he was in both. Okay. 

[01:38:01] TJ: Yeah, he was in those two. I know Lee Pace, who played Frange Wheel.

He was like, Ronan the accuser. 

[01:38:09] Donna: Good. That’s good. That’s three. 

[01:38:10] TJ: Yeah. Oh, that’s right. Okay. Three 

[01:38:12] Donna: of six. You’re right. I don’t know any of the others. 

[01:38:14] TJ: I just looked through the list. Okay. Ian McKellen? Uh, Martin Freeman doesn’t count 

[01:38:19] Donna: one of these. I did not know. Absolutely did not realize. But 

[01:38:22] TJ: what, is it one of the dwarves, or was it eventually, we’re not gonna know that.

It’s 

[01:38:25] Donna: one of the, it’s one of the dwarfs. That’s one of them. 

[01:38:27] TJ: Yeah. I don’t know that one. 

[01:38:28] Donna: Richard Armitage Armitage was Hans Kruger. Oh, who did he play from? Captain America the first Avenger. 

[01:38:33] TJ: Wow. Oh, I did not know that. I didn’t realize 

[01:38:36] Donna: that. 

[01:38:37] TJ: I can’t even think about that. I can’t even think of it now. And 

[01:38:40] Donna: then, um, you, you just said Evangeline Lily, but she was not.

Oh my gosh. 

[01:38:44] TJ: Elron Elron is the Captain America villain as well, 

[01:38:48] Donna: Hugo. And he’s 

[01:38:49] TJ: the red skull. Mm-hmm. 

[01:38:51] Donna: Yes. And then the last one, the weaving. This will help you. It’s a female. There’s 

[01:38:56] TJ: only like 

[01:38:57] Donna: one and we know it’s not Evangeline. 

[01:39:00] TJ: Yeah, it’s the bal. What would Kate Blanchet have 

[01:39:02] Tim: done was in the mcu was she was the bad woman, the sister of Thor and his hella.

She was hella got success. Wow. It took me forever to figure out that’s who it was in the movie that was. Mm-hmm. Because it looked so strange with the body suit and the whole headpiece on her. Mm-hmm. 

[01:39:20] Rebekah: Well, and the dark hair when she has hair down, throws me off then. That makes sense. ’cause glad obviously has blonde hair.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you did good. I’m so proud of you. Yeah. Other than 

[01:39:31] TJ: good job 

[01:39:31] Rebekah: us 

[01:39:31] TJ: and I didn’t, 

[01:39:32] Rebekah: I knew couple of cognize Richard Armitage. I never know the trivia answers. Only Josiah does. 

[01:39:38] Tim: What was, what was Arm? Which character did he, he was Hines, I gotta look it up. 

[01:39:43] Donna: Hines er from Captain America. The first Avenger as opposed to Hines ketchup.

He was not that. 

[01:39:48] Rebekah: He was not Heinz’s ketchup? 

[01:39:50] Donna: No. Okay. So that’s John Carey’s wife. So 

[01:39:53] Rebekah: that’s completely different as we Yes. 

[01:39:55] TJ: Oh yeah. That doesn’t look like him at all. 

[01:39:58] Rebekah: Okay. As we do our final verdicts, I would ask that in addition to telling me if you prefer the book to the trilogy of films. Which I think I know the answer.

Uh, I would also like a very quick review. Maybe gimme an out of 10 how you feel the movie Trilogy would like, you would rate it for your own self. 10 being the best 

personally. Mm-hmm. 

[01:40:19] Rebekah: Okay. Personally, so my personal feeling is I do think the book is better obviously than these three films. That’s a pretty popular opinion.

I liked this book a lot better than reading the regular Lord of the Rings trilogy. I dunno that I’m gonna read it again, but it was less difficult, um, for me in general and I liked it. Uh, I would actually 

[01:40:43] TJ: more whimsical. 

[01:40:44] Rebekah: Yeah, it was more whimsical, easier to follow. There was still a lot of walking, but it does, it did feel a little tighter in terms of like, it’s a lot of 

[01:40:51] Tim: walking.

Yeah. Yeah. She loves that. It felt, 

[01:40:53] Rebekah: it felt tighter in terms of the plot moved along pretty quickly and like I didn’t feel like I was just constantly waiting for something to actually happen. So, uh, I would say though, I think I’m probably in the small minority, I would give these like a six and a half outta 10.

They were like entertaining to watch for me. ’cause I wasn’t really committed to the Hobbits plot like I am with a lot of the books that we read. Um. It wasn’t as like, distressing to see the changes. And so I, I don’t know. I might put ’em on in the background. Mm-hmm. Like, I probably won’t like sit and engage, you know, but I didn’t hate the movies that much.

Like I think maybe they got a little worse of a rap than they deserved, at least from the people I know that have told me how much they hate some of them. Yeah. So 

[01:41:40] Donna: I enjoyed, uh, reading the book as well. It was. It was easier to follow. And I get he wrote it as a children’s book, so I don’t want that to sound, oh, I can only understand Children’s book.

Mm-hmm. I know, I, I hated that say, do too 

fiction. 

[01:41:54] Donna: But I, I, uh, I did enjoy the book. I did not mind watching the movies. I still think, I still think I’ll pick the book over the movies. Uh, I did not mind the movies. I, uh, kind of agree with Rebecca. I will say that the first movie Martin Freeman really captivated me.

I was just impressed with how he just portrayed Bilbo and how he just made the, the race of the hobbits that much more important and. Awesome to me. Um, I don’t know if you said 6.5, is that what you said? Mm-hmm. Um, I’m gonna be somewhere around there, 5.56 some, uh, somewhere around there. I did see several, like I did see several things that reminded me of stuff I mentioned before, the Harry Potter flying scenes that had nothing to do with anything, but they made for.

Supposedly good theater, you know, whatever. Good film. I saw several things that reminded me of that, and that kind of turned me against what was going on, even though I didn’t have a, a whole lot of problems with it. So, but I, I’ve definitely enjoyed the book more. 

[01:43:05] TJ: Okay. How can you rate a movie that has good parts?

It’s hard, but also has world breaking problems. Mm-hmm. I guess you just take the average. So if I was averaging these movies, I might give. Uh, separately book. I think movie one and two are about a six, and I think movie three is a two outta 10. I think it’s actually one of the worst big budget movies ever.

But like, at the end of the day, it’s not about how many good parts were there versus how many bad parts. For me, it’s like, at its core, was it a movie that had a story, that had setups and payoffs and character development, and it just didn’t, for the most part, it just, it didn’t fulfill that basic need of a story.

Now their, their better, better cinema, they’re better visual cinema than they are stories. I think Rebecca, you could put it on in the background and that is the most valuable it will ever be is. Silent images in the background. I, I definitely liked the book more. The book was good, first of all, and, uh, so I, I definitely prefer the book to the, the movies that’s obvious.

I think Rebecca, if, if you ever have any interest, I, I would check out Lindsay Ellis’s trilogy on the Hobbit films. It’s, it’s a twist. 

[01:44:35] Rebekah: Are they’re long video. Long, okay. 

[01:44:37] TJ: Yeah, they’re lengthy. They’re video essays. I mean, they’re probably 45 to 60 minutes each. The twist, I, I’ve ruined a twist for you. The twist is, it looks like it is part one of two and part two of two.

And then at the end of part two, she says, surprise, just like the trilogy, there’s a part three to my videos essay series. Part of two’s, part three of two is what the video’s also called. So I, I, I would watch those. I think there’s just so many little things. I’ll, I’ll 0.1 thing out from her video essay, uh, in, in my verdict at during the bum rush scene at the end of movie one, when he tackles.

The orc, she mentions two primary things. This being added as the climax of the first film. Obviously it, it doesn’t, it wouldn’t need to be there. If it weren’t three films, it would be cut if it were two films. Mm-hmm. Um, part of the rush rushed nature of making this into three films was what is Bilbo’s character?

He is the Hobbit. He’s clever, he’s the burglar. He has a different perspective from the dwarves. He’s also lucky. So how does, he’s also lucky. Mm-hmm. How does he solve the situation with the orcs? He tackles one. Oh yes, definitely. Showing how Bilbo is 

[01:45:54] Tim: different than the 

[01:45:55] TJ: dwarf is the, is different than the dwarves.

Yeah. So that’s that. On one hand it’s like, that doesn’t further bilbo’s character. And on the other hand, whenever the ORC is being scary and then Bilbo is, or Thorin, one of them is like marching and he is getting ready to fight. Azo. This, there’s a song playing from the original trilogy. You recognize the song, it’s,

you know, this song, uh, and it’s like a poem. That was put to to music. And Lindsay Ellis is like you. That song means something. That’s about the ring raves. You made a song where it was a poem about the Ring RAs and in the original trilogy you made a song to ay the Ring raves. Mm-hmm. And you know how I know that because I watched the appendices of the original trilogy when you actually cared about what you were making, that you did this beautiful thing to represent the ring raves.

And then when you had to make two movies into three, you didn’t quite have time to compose a new piece for the Azo fight. So you just threw something from the original trilogy that didn’t belong. ’cause it’s like, eh, that sounds vaguely climactic and scary. It’s just so Dish. So much of the trilogy is dishonest.

[01:47:14] Tim: I am a big fan of. The book. However, although I don’t like the films, there’s a lot that I don’t care for about them. I would probably end up giving the films about a 7.5. For one reason Martin Freeman makes. Bilbo Baggins come to life. 

Mm-hmm. 

[01:47:37] Tim: And the character of Bilbo Baggins is the story of the Hobbit, the five, the battle of the five armies is incidental.

The gold in the mountain is incidental. The elves in Mer Wood and the elves that aren’t in Merck Wood and all of that is incidental to the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins. And. Martin Friedman nailed his character, and so I would, I would, that’s, I would give it 7.5 saying him, it was him in the movie. The rest of it, there’s a whole lot of things that I wouldn’t like.

Um, and I thought the other day as we were talking about doing this and watching these movies again, um, I thought, you know, I’d really, I’d really just, just for my own pleasure, my own, you know, entertainment. I would like to take these three films and turn them into two, edit them to, to what I think the two movies should have been.

And I think that would be just kind of fun 

[01:48:38] TJ: and then give it to Guillermo Deltoro to see what crazy crap he comes up with. Yeah. 

[01:48:43] Tim: Yeah. Well that’s not the worst idea. That’s his name attached to it. I was a little, um, surprised. I didn’t remember that. He was attached to the films. 

[01:48:50] Rebekah: If you enjoyed us talking about The Hobbit, please leave us a five star rating or review.

Please. Please. All we are recording this in between the week between Joss and Rebecca, my birthdays and as birthday gives to us. It would help us so much if you would give us advice. Yeah. Did you advice give us anything else? Uh, exactly. We’re now live on Patreon. We would love to have your support as a free subscriber or part of a paid tier.

You can also find us on X Instagram and Facebook at book is better pod to send feedback, ask us questions to answer on future episodes or just have fun with the hosts. Join our free Discord server at the link in the episode description. We’re fun. Oh, and last announcement. Our website is finally live and actually finished and actually all current and up to date.

Woohoo. We’re so cool. So until next time, in a hole in the ground, they’re lived. Ba hoed

[01:49:48] TJ: free. Thank you everyone. 

[01:49:52] Donna: Thanks everybody. Love you baby listeners. 

[01:49:54] TJ: Love you, baby listeners.

The great goin fell. Dad, great grin, but Gandalf had killed him. Oh, great grin. 

[01:50:09] Tim: Yes. Now we’ve introduced grins into this. Yes. 

[01:50:13] TJ: Grin was a book only character. The film expands the great goblins. The grins are a podcaster for comic only character.