Ring Fever III

Now sometime just before the Fellowship Of The Ring movie was due out, we happened to be in shopping and came across the VCD of the cartoon (yeah, VCD's were the main format then!). Of course, it looked a decent effort (based on, well, the front cover art and the screenshots shown on the back of the casing). So we got it and watched it.

In retrospect, it was a good thing that we bought it and watched it before the movie ever came out.

It's an old cartoon, mind, made in 1978! We made allowances for limitations of effects and such (although we wouldn't forgive lousy artwork), and we were surprised at some of their efforts. For instance, there was quite a fair bit of live-action sequences blended in with the animation! Sometimes, like in the beginning of the show where a narrator summarized the forging of the rings, we saw silhouettes of actors behind a red canvas and thought that it was rather lazy. Others, like in the Inn of the Prancing Pony, live action was used to model for animation and blended very well.

But what got our goat was that the show only showed up to somewhere near the end of Two Towers! It wasn't the whole show nor was it just up to Fellowship Of The Ring!

Still, is was a good effort and we forgot about it soon after.

Then we were stunned by the movie. We guess quite a number of people were. The designs, the cultures, the music, the scenery...and the jarring changes of part of the script from the book. But the bit we LOVED the most about the whole movie? The Nazgûl. Their dressing really showed them to be things to be feared about, and the choral bits gave a lot of depth to them.

Throughout the movie, though, we had this sense of deja vu...as if we'd seen that scene before. Even if it was the first time watching the movie! Then we realized that we probably seened it from the cartoon, and decided to go watch back the cartoon to compare.

It was. Effing. Painful.

Here, let's put up a comparison that we found superbly painful. Our poor Nazgûl. Here's how he is from the movies, to refresh your memory.



Youtube link here.

And here's him from the cartoon - just fast forward to the 7-minute mark. Unfortunately we had to source YouTube for the clips, and the best was this long clip. If we had some form of free video editing tool we would have clipped off just the required scene from the VCD.



Youtube link here.

Mind you most of the cartoon is still good! Only some portrayals could have been much better that, watching it now it wouldn't have us cringing.