I just thought I would share a link to the 1981 BBC Radio adaption of Lord Of The Rings for those who didn't grow up with the BBC, its one of the best adaptations ever made in my humble opinion and if you've ever wondered what Bill Nighy would be like as Sam Gamgee look no further..
For my money, the best adaptation of Tolkien in any medium. Great voice acting (Robert Stephens is the definitive Aragorn for me), excellent Stephen Oliver soundtrack, and a script by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell that's far closer to the book than the films would be (Christopher Tolkien approved it).
Like the movies, they left out the Old Forest, Bombadil and the Barrow-downs, but they went back and did them in 1992, in a very similar style but with a different cast. Michael Hordern, Gandalf in 1981, was the narrator this time.
Thanks for the link, I wasn't aware that existed, will have to check that out when I have some spare time!
Ditto on the Aragorn Casting
my mum read the entire book to me and my sister when we were kids(it took 9 months, we didn't have TV..) the radio series was my second exposure to the book so the voices kind of became definitive in my mind as to how they all would have sounded, tbh growing up in Rural Devon in the 1980s the world of Hobbiton was not that far from the cider drinking, pipe smoking reality I knew.(I should add I wasn't the one smoking or drinking..)
I still have the Radio Times from the week it launched đ. I also bought, and still have, the poster. My favourite adaptation. Ian Holm as Frodo, of course - it took me until very recently to spot that âBilly Mackâ was Sam. Bought the cassettes, which have almost certainly seized up, but also now have the CDs plus the missing Bombadil section (but the latter with a different cast đ).
BOOM! was reading a blog by Brian Sibley and he mentioned the following in the comments
"The blurb on the back of that poster was penned by Yours Truly. The Beeb said they couldn't afford to pay me anything for doing the job and then sold a zillion of them! A sharp learning curve!"
I need to do a post with photographs of the accompanying article in the Radio Times. Itâs funny to think how Tolkien Society members were so concerned that Tolkien wasnât taken seriously by the literati back then, and to compare that with the huge amount of (over?) analysis LotR and his other works are subject to now. Wikipedia actually has quite an interesting read on that subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_reception_of_The_Lord_of_the_Rings
I think it was buying that poster that got me on the Allen and Unwin mailing list, which then led on to my mother buying me the 48th printing from the first edition of The Silmarillion, signed by Christopher and bound in (apparently not very good quality) red leather.
Yea itâs funny how that goes, itâs safe to say that LOTR and fantasy generally is pretty mainstream now.
Part of me misses that it was generally the odd kids growing up that liked this sort of stuff, tbh I think I just miss being that young, itâs nice that everyone has access to culture on the flip side!Â
that article looks fascinating, if it wasnât for the hairy feet the guy in that photo wouldnât look too out of place in a craft beer pub today!!Â
Itâs very mainstream now - the PJ films obviously had a major impact on that. It gives me a whole load of extra people to subject to my Tolkien lectures đ. At school I think I knew of only 3 other people who were into Tolkien, and one of them only because he blatantly ripped off the description of the combined storm in the Misty Mountains in TH when doing his English homework and it got read out in class without the teacher recognising it, but praising the vivid description đ.
Thanks for the link - t
hatâs my evening waiting for the food to cook reading sorted!
Funny you recognised the description, thatâs the sort of thing you do when youâre young and naive!Â
I do feel slightly lucky in that I wasnât exposed to the PJ films when young so I was free to use my imagination to flesh out the characters/setting/tone etc!Â
I agree re the films. Oneâs own imagination can be so very different from anotherâs interpretation and I think itâs nicer to get your own vision in first - plus we get the full story with no cuts or additions.
very cool! I've been after the poster for a while but its not cheap, will hopefully get it at some point once I have some expendable cash.
I have the 12" record with the artwork so thats kind of close!
likewise I only twigged last year that it was Nighy playing Sam - I still have the cassettes I bought as a teenager, a dads friend had taped it from the radio on one of its many reruns so we had those when I was a kid, but it was a but annoying as sometimes the recording started after it had begun(an analog world problem eh)
I never managed to get into the CD version I know they say that its just the intros that were changed but I swear some of the sound affects and songs were also changed, I've not listened to that for around 20 years so my memory may be off on that one!
I also taped it off the radio as it was broadcast but the quality was terrible đ. We didnât have any good quality audio equipment so I relied on a basic radio with an external microphone connected to a huge cassette player - no direct recording. You could hear the tape mechanism turning on the recording. However it was good enough to satisfy the husband of one of my mumâs friends who was a huge fan but had, disastrously, missed the final episode and its re-run later in the week on the Wednesday evening.
This made me chuckle, talk about cliff hanger not knowing the last episode!!
this sort of stuff makes me feel old - before the internet if you really liked a song before it was released you had to tape it off of the radio(sometimes songs would be on radio shows like Months before they actually came out and you could buy it) the amount of times you have the bloody DJ talking over the intro, or no intro at all.. one of my favorite songs I taped off of Top of the pops by shoving my portable stereo right up against the TV and pressing record, the quality wasn't as bad as. you'd think..
I love seeing art pre 2000s. The movieâs roots run deeply into our consciousness everyoneâs art is influenced by it in one measure or another. This feel
Unique, fun to see an orc that doesnât look like an orc(tm) if ya know what I mean
That was done by Eric Fraser who did some illustrations for a Danish edition of LOTR(def worth a google image search)
I must admit one of the reasons I like this version so much is that your imagination is free to go in whatever direction you like, turns out my imagination is a touch darker than the films!
Speaking of pre-2000s LotR adaptations and Denmark, another wacky thing I'm aware of for some reason is Bo Hansson's early 70s prog album, "Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings." I bought a copy of it on vinyl in a thrift shop probably 15 years ago on a lark (it was like $2 or something), and I've loved it ever since.
It's a great, fascinating album full of psychedelic guitars, bass, and early analog synth experimentation. And the story behind its recording process is also very interesting, like apparently there were no 8-track tape recording consoles in Denmark in the early 70s, and the way Hansson and his producer got ahold of one was by convincing a manufacturer that they wanted to evaluate one for potential purchase. So they had this huge console worth thousands of dollars (tens of thousands today) shipped to Denmark for like a week-long evaluation period, recorded the entire Lord of the Rings album on it, and then sent it back without saying anything.
So for like a week they had the only high quality audio production desk in the entire country and this is what they made with it. LotR fans, man.
first off that is a great album(at that price a steal I should add), secondly vintage records and LOTR is a Venn diagram that I am firmly in the middle of!
I'm half Swedish so was able to pick up the original Swedish pressing relatively cheaply(it has a slightly more sixties esq psychedelic artwork)
Didnt know that story about the 8 track, very cool!
Another weird bit of trivia is that Hendrix Jammed with Hanson in the sixties and ended up covering a Hanson & Karlson track called Tax Free - see here
My favourite story about this production is that Michael Hordern never read the book. His agent told him he was booked for the whole series, so he was confused and angry when he got the script for the Moria episode in which he died.
I listened to this entire thing in the late 80s, on a memorable all-day/all-night drive from LA to Arcata, CA, the last six hours at night while driving up the northern CA coast. One of those transformative experiences you can never duplicate.
It's excellent. The version even includes scenes not from LOTR, but (I think) Unfinished Tales, namely the Nazgul rocking up at Orthanc. No idea how they managed that.
When I first heard it I didn't realise that Denethor was played by the same actor as 'Genial' Harry Grout in Porridge, Peter Vaughan. He's probably best known internationally as Maester Aemon at Castle Black in Game of Thrones, his last role.
I still have my box of cassette tapes of this. I don't have a cassette player and haven't for years, but I will never throw them away.
With genuine respect for Viggo Mortensen, Robert Stephens' portrayal here is my favourite Aragorn (this is perhaps a dig against directorial decisions by Jackson, however - because there are parts of Viggo's portrayal I do love).
And for all it takes some of the same short-cuts as the films, it does at least include a proper section with Farmer Maggot. And the songs! The arrangements of some of the songs are just wonderful.
I agree with you on the casting of Aragorn, Mortensen doesnât bother me to much in the films tbh. Â A lot of the time we base our opinions on the characters on how much airtime they have or how they are edited, a great example is Christopher Lee, who I feel made a great Saruman but was a bit annoyed at having most of his scenes cut and to be honest youâd think he wasnât that important in the films(as opposed to the books)
And yes the music is great, it feels embedded in the story, much like it is in the books!Â
So my problem with film-Aragorn, like a lot of my issues with the film, is that it is not Aragorn but some discount version from the thrift store that Jackson inexplicably finds more compelling. Fortunately Viggo found ways to let book-Aragorn shine through, but there are moments where Jackson's heavy directorial hand just gets in the way.
Compare to the BBC version which has many of the same story skips, but does a far better job of preserving the characterisation, done with quite light narration, a few sound effects, and some really talented voice acting. Ultimately that's why I prefer the BBC adaptation to the films.
I mourn the Aragorn Viggo could have brought to screen with a more authentic characterisation/direction.
I did think when I saw the films that they had pretty much stayed with the narrative as presented in the above Radio adaption.
While I'm not really a fan of the films I can kind of see where Jackson was going, ie Alan Lee visually but with a PG rating making them family friendly, the main critique I have is that the films are essentially a load of impressive set pieces strung together and it doesn't feel like a coherent story, having said that I have tried to watch the Bakshi Version so bearing in mind what a car crash that was they aren't so bad!
Whenever I read the books itâs a much darker vision I get, when the ring wraiths are chasing the hobbits out of the shire that could pretty much be a horror film!
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u/GammaDeltaTheta 5d ago
For my money, the best adaptation of Tolkien in any medium. Great voice acting (Robert Stephens is the definitive Aragorn for me), excellent Stephen Oliver soundtrack, and a script by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell that's far closer to the book than the films would be (Christopher Tolkien approved it).
Like the movies, they left out the Old Forest, Bombadil and the Barrow-downs, but they went back and did them in 1992, in a very similar style but with a different cast. Michael Hordern, Gandalf in 1981, was the narrator this time.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Tales_from_the_Perilous_Realm_(1992_radio_series))