Happy kids asleep. A few good feeds in jammies, then new clothes. Choral music on CBC radio all day. Missed the Queen… but, really, she missed me as well, didn’t she. It has been unusually warm here and Saturday may hit a sunny ten above. I don’t miss the snow – only wish I had a patch of garlic growing in this weather.
With a bit of an achy cold starting I felt little compulsion to move off the couch despite Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 two hour cartoon of Lord of the Rings being on the TV. I saw it when it first came out at the Centennial Twin Cinemas in downtown Truro when I was in grade 10, the scene of many of my Friday nights in those years. I had read the Tolkien books when I was about 12 and, although I never took to playing/worshiping Dungeons and Dragons and all the other pre-Internet outlets for nerdy fantasty geeks, I was not then utterly offended by the movie. I do recall, though, that hopes were high in the era of Close Encounters and Star Wars – and that we expected something new and important. For the first moments, we thought that the cartooning was imaginative. Soon it was repetitive. Then tedious. The Orcs are creepy if you think the bad guys – Cylons? – in Battlestar Galactica were as well. This review captures the disappointment. Watching it tonight it strikes me that it certainly owes a lot to the genre of Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood, without, though, the benefit of the voices of Paul Soles and other Wayne and Shuster regulars but, sadly, with the tell tale repetition of short scenes over differing backgrounds a few minutes apart. The ending is the best crap bit:
The orchestra now begins playing Christmas music as Gandalf rides Shadowfax through the Orcs, slaying at will. He begins killing them in hideous detail, and in gruesome slow motion at that. Two Orcs fall dead over the camera, the backs of their heads spraying blood. What the hell! Since they’ve already gone this far, they may as well make Lord of the Rings into a slasher flick too! Why not just give Gandalf a chainsaw and be done with it?
Watching tonight, I remembered this last bit from when I was 16, how creepy the choice of image compared to the accompanying stirring-to-a-private-schoolboy music, how at that age I believed (as English teachers told you) that story endings with slo-mo mass slaughter was really bad art… as opposed to now – since Columbine – when it is also cause for preventative arrest.
Why would Bravo show this on Christmas night? It is so embarrassingly bad it defies camp. It is not even a welcome antidote even to a fifth hour of the Kings College Boys choir singing “Once in Royal David’s City”. And, yet, I watched it again. Christ was born to give me a day off to watch Bakshi.