"...to judge from the reactions of two preview audiences, this line is remembered, loved and looked forward to by the millions who have read this new American classic."
Reminds me of going to see the kids' flick On The Right Track, about a child with precocious gambling skills who bets money on behalf of his city, in the early 1980s. At one point, the mayor, who has betrayed the child's trust, is told by another adult "You know, Mr. Mayor, you really are an asshole."
The kids' in the audience, myself included, reacted as if that was the most hilarious thing they'd ever heard.
I read somewhere (citation required) that Monty Python were in dialogue with the British Board of Film Classification and were told that if they took out some (but not all) of the fucks they would be less restricted. I never understood why hearing a word once is OK but twice is not.
I think constant use can often add the level of ambient menace, violence etc, as well as making it seem normalised within the context of the film.
Maybe rather than have the ratings be based on age, they should be based on content? There could be an S rating for sex, a V rating for violence, N for nudity, and an L rating for language/profanity.
A single S would mean sexual conversations and situations, as well as brief sex scenes without nudity. SS would mean extended scene/s of simulated sex.
V would mean about the level of violence you see in your average police drama on TV, whereas VV would mean Game of Thrones or Horror Movie type violence and gore.
N would mean nudity that features female breasts or anyone’s buttocks (I know it’s not fair that men can show their pecs as much as they like). NN would be full frontal nudity.
L would be a few uses here and there of profanity up to and including the F and C words. LL would mean extensive use of profanity like you often see in adult comedies.
And I think we could bring back the X rating for explicit depictions of non-simulated sex.
Any child of any age would be allowed to attend any movie with their parents/legal guardians, except for X rated ones. Any child over 13 can see a movie that is rated a single S, V, L, or N without a parent or guardian.
That way, the parents could decide based on the specific content of the movies and not a vague rating what they wanted their kids to see.
It must have been 1972 when we saw Fritz the Cat in New York, said to be the first X rated cartoon film. Some scenes were truly funny, and some vaguely pornographic without really being erotic. I mean - anthropomorphic cartoon animals - not really a serious turn-on. It was memorable, but not a great film. We were accompanied by a responsible adult - my then-fiancée's father, who would never miss a new and controversial film.
It must have been 1972 when we saw Fritz the Cat in New York, said to be the first X rated cartoon film. Some scenes were truly funny, and some vaguely pornographic without really being erotic. I mean - anthropomorphic cartoon animals - not really a serious turn-on. It was memorable, but not a great film. We were accompanied by a responsible adult - my then-fiancée's father, who would never miss a new and controversial film.
As I recall, the sex scenes are few and far between, and don't seem very explicit, though they might be a little more shocking if you think to yourself "Okay, but what if it was human actors doing this?" But that means you have to mentally translate animation into live action, which kinda defeats the shock-effect of "X-RATED CARTOON!!"
Overall, what stands out more for me about FtC is the politics, and the climax condemning New Left terrorism. I guess Bakshi figured that having appeased his audience of horny teens and twentysomethings with anatomically accurate orgies in the bathtub, he had earned the right to lecture them on the need to reject violence and work within the system.
(It strikes me as interesting that, at least as far as the American film-industry goes, adult-oriented[in the sense of themes appealing to an older audience] animation never got lucrative enough to sustain the career of more than one major director, and even Bakshi more or less quit after the early 1990s.)
There's been plenty of adult-oriented animated TV shows though.
I really stopped paying attention to TV after moving to Korea in the early 2000s, but yeah, The Simpsons, Southpark, Archer etc. I specified movies for a reason, and I meant feature-length.
Some genres thrive better in some mediums than in others. I suspect that for adult moviegoers back in the day, it might've seemed odd to plan a big night out to see a two-hour cartoon, whereas watching a thirty-minute one on TV while channel-surfing would seem somewhat more acceptable.
And if I'm not mistaken, the demise of Bakshi's career more or less corresponded to the rise of cable and later the internet, both of which really helped revive adult animation.
The Ship might be a good place to ask if anyone remembers how popular the 1978 Lord Of The Rings was. I was too young to get a full impression.
I do remember thatWizards used to get re-shown at the grungy semi-arthouse theaters in the early 1980s, but I don't recall that it was anything my peers wanted to see. Some of them were fired up about the semi-animated Pink Floyd - The Wall around the same time, probably because it was connected to a popular album, and both the style of the animation and the content were VERY adult.
The Ship might be a good place to ask if anyone remembers how popular the 1978 Lord Of The Rings was. I was too young to get a full impression.
I remember it. Had the poster in my room and the soundtrack on LP, too. I’d say its popularity was meh. The animation style was . . . different, and in my opinion, a little weird and distracting.
The fact that the movie made money but that the sequel was never made (the movie ended somewhere around the middle of The Two Towers) indicates, I think, something about how it was received. People flocked to see it, but having seen it weren’t necessarily keen to see more.
I remember it. Had the poster in my room and the soundtrack on LP, too. I’d say its popularity was meh. The animation style was . . . different, and in my opinion, a little weird and distracting.
The fact that the movie made money but that the sequel was never made (the movie ended somewhere around the middle of The Two Towers) indicates, I think, something about how it was received. People flocked to see it, but having seen it weren’t necessarily keen to see more.
Basically lines up with my memories and later conjecture.
I had never heard of LOTR before the cartoon came out, but afterwards it was a regular fixture in my cultural consciousness. I don't think too many of my fellow students in junior-high read the books, even among the gamers, but the main gaming shop in 1980s Edmonton was called The Hobbit Shop, so I guess there was a local following.
The animation style was...different, and in my opinion, a little weird and distracting.
I remember reading a Time magazine review of American Pop in which the writer, intending to disparage the animation while praising the soundtrack, said of Bakshi "the man might not have an eye, but he has an ear". Struck me as a rather damning thing to say about an animator.
The animation style was . . . different, and in my opinion, a little weird and distracting.
Which animation style? I remember there being one for the good guys and another one for orcs and Nazgul. (Who therefore never appeared in the same shot as the Fellowship.)
The fact that the movie made money but that the sequel was never made (the movie ended somewhere around the middle of The Two Towers) indicates, I think, something about how it was received.
AIUI Bakshi intended to film the whole thing and then when it took too long and got too expensive he just had a voiceover say that after winning the battle at Helm's Deep Gandalf and friends were able to sweep away all the remaining evil armies. So aside from dropping Frodo's plot thread and the ending being a bit sudden the film declares that the story is complete. If you only saw the film you wouldn't be surprised to learn it finished half way through the book but you wouldn't know that.
I remember there being one for the good guys and another one for orcs and Nazgul. (Who therefore never appeared in the same shot as the Fellowship.)
Just watched my first-ever footage from Bakshi's LOTR, of the Nazgul chasing Frodo on horseback. Yeah, they do sometimes appear together at the same time on screen, though Frodo seems to have been superimposed on/spliced into the scenes. At one point, they do manage to get him riding between columns of Nazgul, rather than just away from them or off to the side.
Bakshi did something similar when he took over the Spider-Man cartoon in the late 1960s, and inserted the older seasons' images of the guy into his more psychedelic backgrounds. See Revolt In The Fifth Dimension on YouTube(*).
(*) As you can probably guess from the title, Bakshi's episodes just put the Spider-Man character into exotic sci-fi narratives that had little to do with the Marvel universe.
The animation style was . . . different, and in my opinion, a little weird and distracting.
Which animation style? I remember there being one for the good guys and another one for orcs and Nazgul. (Who therefore never appeared in the same shot as the Fellowship.)
The unusual, and in my opinion not enjoyable to watch, use of animation overlayed on live-action footage.
The fact that the movie made money but that the sequel was never made (the movie ended somewhere around the middle of The Two Towers) indicates, I think, something about how it was received.
AIUI Bakshi intended to film the whole thing and then when it took too long and got too expensive he just had a voiceover say that after winning the battle at Helm's Deep Gandalf and friends were able to sweep away all the remaining evil armies. So aside from dropping Frodo's plot thread and the ending being a bit sudden the film declares that the story is complete. If you only saw the film you wouldn't be surprised to learn it finished half way through the book but you wouldn't know that.
The film was originally intended to be distributed as The Lord of the Rings Part I. Initially a trilogy was planned, but this was revised to two planned films because of the limited budget. . . . According to Bakshi, when he completed the film, United Artists executives told him that they were planning to release the film without indicating that a sequel would follow, because they felt that audiences would not pay to see half of a film. Bakshi stated that he strongly opposed this, and agreed with the shocked viewers who complained that the film was unfinished. In his view, “Had it said ‘Part One,’ I think everyone would have respected it.”
Although UA found that the film, while financially successful, “failed to overwhelm audiences,” Bakshi began working on a sequel, and even had some B-roll footage shot. The Film Book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings, published by Ballantine Books on October 12, 1978, still referred to the sequel in the book's inside cover jacket. Indeed, in interviews Bakshi talked about doing “a part two film picking up where this leaves off,” and even boasted that the second film could “pick up on sequences that we missed in the first book.” . . .
Bakshi found the two years spent on Rings immensely stressful, and the fan reaction scathing. He took comfort in talking to Priscilla Tolkien, who said she loved it, but got into an argument with [producer Saul] Zaentz and refused to do Part Two. Reports vary as to whether the argument had to do with the dropping of the “Part One” subtitle or Bakshi’s fee for the sequel.
Bakshi said he was “proud to have made part one” and that his work was “there for anyone who would make part two.” In interviews leading up to the year 2000, he still toyed with the idea of making the sequel. . . .
Warner Bros. (the rights holder to the post-September 1974 Rankin/Bass library and the Saul Zaentz theatrical library) first released the film on DVD and re-released on VHS in 2001 through the Warner Bros. Family Entertainment label. While the VHS version ends with the narrator saying “Here ends the first part of the history of the War of the Ring.,” the DVD version has an alternate narration: “The forces of darkness were driven forever from the face of Middle-Earth by the valiant friends of Frodo. As their gallant battle ended, so, too, ends the first great tale of The Lord of the Rings.”
As for the score, it’s good enough, but in my opinion it doesnt hold up well, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Howard Shore’s scores.
Mad Magazine did a musical parody of the 1978 LOTR, which ended with Gandalf informing the Fellowship that they would soon be gathered together again, this time as Ben Kenobi, Luke Skywalker etc.
A chronologically problematic joke as far as the order of the movies goes, but works if the deeper insinuation is that Star Wars was ripping off the novels(*).
(*) A joke pretty typical of Mad's urgent crusade to inform kids that the pop-culture stuff they love so much is really just manufactured dreck.
@stetson No admission was charged to see the film at the Convention, because the people in the hall had already paid to be at the convention, and once they were through the door, everything was free.
@stetson No admission was charged to see the film at the Convention, because the people in the hall had already paid to be at the convention, and once they were through the door, everything was free.
This brings to mind my 2 year old's plan to play "killing babies" with his baby sister "like in the video." I had a moment of shocked disbelief and horror than my wee boy had somehow seen a video about "killing babies" until he said "I'll be King Herod and wee sister can be the baby"
This brings to mind my 2 year old's plan to play "killing babies" with his baby sister "like in the video." I had a moment of shocked disbelief and horror than my wee boy had somehow seen a video about "killing babies" until he said "I'll be King Herod and wee sister can be the baby"
Yup, he'd seen the Storykeepers Christmas video.
After learning about the 10th Plague in Grade 2 religion class, my friends and I played a game of tag in which I was the Angel of Death, and the people I tapped were purportedly killed.
(Except that due to an underdeveloped sense of poetic juxtaposition, I called myself "the Devil of Death", because I thought that sounded more eviller.)
Comments
Reminds me of going to see the kids' flick On The Right Track, about a child with precocious gambling skills who bets money on behalf of his city, in the early 1980s. At one point, the mayor, who has betrayed the child's trust, is told by another adult "You know, Mr. Mayor, you really are an asshole."
The kids' in the audience, myself included, reacted as if that was the most hilarious thing they'd ever heard.
I think constant use can often add the level of ambient menace, violence etc, as well as making it seem normalised within the context of the film.
A single S would mean sexual conversations and situations, as well as brief sex scenes without nudity. SS would mean extended scene/s of simulated sex.
V would mean about the level of violence you see in your average police drama on TV, whereas VV would mean Game of Thrones or Horror Movie type violence and gore.
N would mean nudity that features female breasts or anyone’s buttocks (I know it’s not fair that men can show their pecs as much as they like). NN would be full frontal nudity.
L would be a few uses here and there of profanity up to and including the F and C words. LL would mean extensive use of profanity like you often see in adult comedies.
And I think we could bring back the X rating for explicit depictions of non-simulated sex.
Any child of any age would be allowed to attend any movie with their parents/legal guardians, except for X rated ones. Any child over 13 can see a movie that is rated a single S, V, L, or N without a parent or guardian.
That way, the parents could decide based on the specific content of the movies and not a vague rating what they wanted their kids to see.
As I recall, the sex scenes are few and far between, and don't seem very explicit, though they might be a little more shocking if you think to yourself "Okay, but what if it was human actors doing this?" But that means you have to mentally translate animation into live action, which kinda defeats the shock-effect of "X-RATED CARTOON!!"
Overall, what stands out more for me about FtC is the politics, and the climax condemning New Left terrorism. I guess Bakshi figured that having appeased his audience of horny teens and twentysomethings with anatomically accurate orgies in the bathtub, he had earned the right to lecture them on the need to reject violence and work within the system.
(It strikes me as interesting that, at least as far as the American film-industry goes, adult-oriented[in the sense of themes appealing to an older audience] animation never got lucrative enough to sustain the career of more than one major director, and even Bakshi more or less quit after the early 1990s.)
I really stopped paying attention to TV after moving to Korea in the early 2000s, but yeah, The Simpsons, Southpark, Archer etc. I specified movies for a reason, and I meant feature-length.
Some genres thrive better in some mediums than in others. I suspect that for adult moviegoers back in the day, it might've seemed odd to plan a big night out to see a two-hour cartoon, whereas watching a thirty-minute one on TV while channel-surfing would seem somewhat more acceptable.
And if I'm not mistaken, the demise of Bakshi's career more or less corresponded to the rise of cable and later the internet, both of which really helped revive adult animation.
I do remember thatWizards used to get re-shown at the grungy semi-arthouse theaters in the early 1980s, but I don't recall that it was anything my peers wanted to see. Some of them were fired up about the semi-animated Pink Floyd - The Wall around the same time, probably because it was connected to a popular album, and both the style of the animation and the content were VERY adult.
The fact that the movie made money but that the sequel was never made (the movie ended somewhere around the middle of The Two Towers) indicates, I think, something about how it was received. People flocked to see it, but having seen it weren’t necessarily keen to see more.
Thanks. Can you remember if they charged admission?
Basically lines up with my memories and later conjecture.
I had never heard of LOTR before the cartoon came out, but afterwards it was a regular fixture in my cultural consciousness. I don't think too many of my fellow students in junior-high read the books, even among the gamers, but the main gaming shop in 1980s Edmonton was called The Hobbit Shop, so I guess there was a local following.
I remember reading a Time magazine review of American Pop in which the writer, intending to disparage the animation while praising the soundtrack, said of Bakshi "the man might not have an eye, but he has an ear". Struck me as a rather damning thing to say about an animator.
AIUI Bakshi intended to film the whole thing and then when it took too long and got too expensive he just had a voiceover say that after winning the battle at Helm's Deep Gandalf and friends were able to sweep away all the remaining evil armies. So aside from dropping Frodo's plot thread and the ending being a bit sudden the film declares that the story is complete. If you only saw the film you wouldn't be surprised to learn it finished half way through the book but you wouldn't know that.
Just watched my first-ever footage from Bakshi's LOTR, of the Nazgul chasing Frodo on horseback. Yeah, they do sometimes appear together at the same time on screen, though Frodo seems to have been superimposed on/spliced into the scenes. At one point, they do manage to get him riding between columns of Nazgul, rather than just away from them or off to the side.
Bakshi did something similar when he took over the Spider-Man cartoon in the late 1960s, and inserted the older seasons' images of the guy into his more psychedelic backgrounds. See Revolt In The Fifth Dimension on YouTube(*).
(*) As you can probably guess from the title, Bakshi's episodes just put the Spider-Man character into exotic sci-fi narratives that had little to do with the Marvel universe.
That was an addition to the DVD. Per the Wikipedia article on the movie,
As for the score, it’s good enough, but in my opinion it doesnt hold up well, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Howard Shore’s scores.
A chronologically problematic joke as far as the order of the movies goes, but works if the deeper insinuation is that Star Wars was ripping off the novels(*).
(*) A joke pretty typical of Mad's urgent crusade to inform kids that the pop-culture stuff they love so much is really just manufactured dreck.
Thanks.
Well, I think @Hugal's point is that there usually ISN'T other criteria, but maybe there should be.
Yup, he'd seen the Storykeepers Christmas video.
After learning about the 10th Plague in Grade 2 religion class, my friends and I played a game of tag in which I was the Angel of Death, and the people I tapped were purportedly killed.
(Except that due to an underdeveloped sense of poetic juxtaposition, I called myself "the Devil of Death", because I thought that sounded more eviller.)