download the last version for ios The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

So Rankin and Bass needed to tone down everything Bakshi made too dark for television, and with less money and less time than he had. Exciting but not super scary adaptations, with a helluva lot of Glenn Yarbrough on the soundtrack. The Rankin/Bass modus operandi is to make movies for kids. Bakshi covered The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers novels, and the movie he put out was violent, weird, and scary. Rankin and Bass were tasked with the unenviable job of following up on Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, which had come out in theaters a year earlier in 1979. and Jules Bass (their powers combined, they are Rankin/Bass Productions, most famous for their stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer specials). This TV-movie was directed by Alan Rankin Jr. And find the rest completely incomprehensible.

Were I still the naive ’80s child and had just saw The Return of the King, I’d guess I’d have been delighted by the movie’s color and animation.

And certainly no idea that halfway around the world, a teenage Peter Jackson, who had by now seen the animated trilogy, was getting an idea, that maybe it’d be up to him to tell Tolkien’s tale on-screen better than this. Inured on arcades and football, I have no concept that the cartoon is the conclusion to a larger story. So let’s say we are all very young again and there is The Return of the King playing in the VCR in my living room. You have no choice but to watch whatever makes its way to your home. The Return of the King is exactly the kind of tape ol’ pops would have brought home to his kids, whenever he could remember that he’d already checked out Encino Man a million times before. People who were kids in that decade know the scenario: your parents come home in the evening, one of them grabbing a random VHS from the rental store.

This was done out of practicality - The Return of the King DVD was the first used copy I found in the area - and also to attempt recreating the ’80s home movie experience. I watched the last movie of the animated Lord of the Rings trilogy first for this article. On this edition of “Watching Series,” we take a look at the three loosely connected animated Tolkien movies from the late 1970s: The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), and The Return of the King (1980).

Download the last version for ios The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers