The Return of the King

The Bakshi film is bad, but at least interestingly so. This one is just awful all around.

This is one of the worst adaptations of all time. Sometimes it's unintentionally hilarious, sometimes it's just plain dull - 100% of the time it is a complete disservice to the great work of J.R.R. Tolkien. It's too bad, too, because the Rankin and Bass Hobbit movie is pretty good, and this goes more than a little ways towards tainting that movie's good name. It's amazing how much they missed the point with this one. Oh, and Glenn Yarbrough's vibrato could (and probably has) caused earthquakes.

"FRODOOO, OF THE NIIIINE FINGERS! AND THE RIIIING OF DOOOOM!"

Doesn't capture the feel of Tolkien at all, shoddy animation, and terrible songs.

(review sung with crazy vibrato) My score is based on the fact that I crack up during the bit where the image slowly zooms in on the young wide-eyed hobbit on the rocking horse.

Rankin and Bass really dropped the ball with this hackneyed attempt at Tolkien.

Where there's a whip *woopishhhh* there's a way.

So incredibly terrible, even compared to the animated films that came before it , let alone the live action trilogy.

Anticipating the worst I was pleasantly surprised. There are a few non sequiturs with select songs but they pass quickly. The animation is relatively good, not stock limited animation "cheats," and not that god awful rotoscoping. The water color backgrounds were all well done too. The bulk of the voice work is good especially McDowall. Rankin and Bass are quite capable of producing crap, but this can hardly be considered so. Recommended more for Hobbits then to men; give it a honest chance.

I have some good memories of it, but no where near as memorable as "the Hobbit".

This movie was pretty much a really confused mess. It's trying both to recap all of The Hobbit and the earlier LotR trilogy, while also being its own standalone story, which it just cannot possibly be. I also have no idea if it was supposed to be for kids, adults, LotR fans, or whoever else. It was occasionally of such poor quality that I got some laughs out of it, but most people probably won't get that same value without reading the LotR books and seeing pretty much all the other movies.

I liked the Rankin-Bass HOBBIT well enough that I was willing to give this a shot. . . but no. RETURN OF THE KING is not THE HOBBIT and this studio was in no way up to the challenge of adapting it. This falls hard and heavy into the category of "Pretend it doesn't exist."

What were these guys thinking?

Love the songs!