Regarding “sharpening” pixels. I came across this today:
sorry for the painfully long graphic…
Bahhahahahaha!!! 
There’s nothing you can’t do with Visual Basic and a GUI interface.
click-click-clickety-click
“Enhance.”
click-click-click
“Enhance.”
clickety-click-click
“Enhance.”
…
“Just print the damn thing!”
If memory serves me correctly from when I was poking around researching this stuff a couple of months ago, they tossed the idea of one Hobbit movie and one bridge movie out the window in favor of cutting the story in half somewhere around Beorn or Gollum. Unless they’ve changed things again of course. But this idea is that people wouldn’t want to just see the ‘filler’ movie. So instead we will get one movie cut into two parts with a bunch of stuff that is outside of Bilbo’s story put in (like the meeting of the White Council where they drive Sauron out of Dol Guldor, something that happened during the course of the narrative, had bearing on the War of the Ring, but never made it into the book. It was where Gandalf was disappearing to all the time).
I’m not such a big fan of that plan, for two big reasons. The first is that the tone of The Hobbit is much different than the Lord of the Rings, and I’m afraid the story is going to lose some of its intrinsic kid qualities if we bring in all of the LotR stuff. The second is a more minor thing, but thanks to Audra turning me on to the Tolkien Professor and listening there, there is a whole difference in voice and metafiction in The Hobbit, as the text we read is supposed to be an edited version of Bilbo’s journal (even later including major revisions between first and second editions of the book to be Bilbo covering up how he got the ring). Putting in all of the stuff that is beyond Bilbo, that is beyond the Hobbit, gets beyond the story.
Then again, last I heard they were going to keep Beorn in it, so there’s a nice tibit for those of us who love the frequently cut heroes in stories.
I want to thank President O’Hara for the honorable mention.
Team Dyno-Mite will try hard to bring more fun to our next challenge solution.
Woohoo got a mention lol! It was great meeting all of you folks as well 
Coma coma coma coma coma chameleon!
Yup. That documentary is HILARIOUS, though very difficult to come by. There’s this part in it where it explained how his cameo on the Fellowship led to the “Figwit” craze (which in itself is hilarious), which in turn led to Bret as “Figwit” returning in The Return of the King and even getting a line.
Huh. The Hobbit was my first Tolkien book but I don’t remember it being really hard to get into, or harder to get into than LotR. (The Iliad, on the other hand, will forever be a book I hate with a vengeance. :D) But I guess because it was my first, The Hobbit has always been my favorite Tolkien book.
That’s a good point. I was really excited to hear that Peter Jackson would be in charge of The Hobbit, but you’re right that as stories The Hobbit and LotR are vastly different creatures, despite inhabiting the same world. It would suck if it gets overshadowed by LotR stuff - which is great stuff, but I’m much more interested in how they would make a movie of “The Hobbit”, and not “LotR the prequel: The Hobbit”. (Yes, I know The Hobbit is a prequel of LotR, but one with a different narrative and focus.) But, I trust Peter Jackson, who is a genuinely good director (unlike…hm, I shouldn’t say. :D) to do right by it. So, very very excited!
And yay Team Hot Bitches got a (non-honorary) mention! Thanks to bkitty’s all girls team.
ETA: GALAXY QUEST! WOO! “Those poor people!”
Let us be clear about this Tolkien vs Harry Potter business
What we all must remember is that: Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, The Black Cauldron, World of Warcraft…pretty much anything in the fantasy genre - all of these “ideas” are in fact swimmers. Swimmers in thongs, in my mind. They are swimmers in the fantasty construct that Tolkien built.
Also, I’ve got to throw in that I saw (and loved) the 1980s animation of The Hobbit as a wee little babe while my mother was in some continuing education course at a local college. Years later (in third grade) I had started reading and was watching the animated follow-up of the Return of the King. At the very beginning it said 'based on the books by JRR Tolkien". I turned to my father and said “There are books?” (my whole world of the time was the Boxcar Children). He went down to the basement and grabbed me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I went through The Hobbit in three nights and two days, and wrote a book report. I suppose it helped that I’d seen the movie, but I never really had any trouble getting into it at all.
And I really do contest calling The Hobbit a prequel to LotR. Different styles, different audiences, different ideas. LotR only came about because people loved hobbits in The Hobbit and wanted more of them. After The Hobbit became popular he sent of a bunch of stuff to his publisher (all parts of the Silmarillion) and a half of a chapter with the hobbits in it. Unfortunately for Tolkien, their reader at the publishing company got bored with all the stuff, but saw the bit with hobbits in it and said “This is it!”
Then Tolkien went back to The Hobbit and edited it to make the ring slightly more important, treacherous and ominous. If you want a good laugh, go find the first edition version of The Hobbit and read the encounter with Gollum. Very different from our current story.
Thanks. Yeah, Billy West from Futurama was a guest on the Adam Carolla podcast a couple weeks ago, and he explained the whole background of how Fox screwed up how they aired the shows and all that. Interesting object lesson in how TV shows are handled and mis-handled by networks.
I do love all the inside scifi geek jokes in Futurama. I just TiVoed the two(?) new ones (on on Comedy Central) last night. Look forward to watching them.
When I first started listening to GWC–at almost its beginning–I had never heard of Futurama, much less seen it. I remember it being mentioned by the crew a lot. Just another one of those great shows I gotta catch up on, but it’s good to know I don’t have to stress about watching any in order.
It was just the most asinine thing ever. “Hey, we tried: We showed people the second half of a lot of episodes. And they simply weren’t into it.”
Bizzare. I don’t know what kinda dumb-juice they were drinkin’ over there at fox.
Ah. Thank You. Sounds like my information is way out of date re the Hobbit movies. Yeah, I suppose I don’t really mind too much how they split up the Hobbit story versus other stuff. Either way it could be done well, or it could be done superbly. I’m such a hard core Tolkein fan that I’d watch a 30 hour version and smile the whole time, but that’s not practical. Beorn is a great character, so I really hope they include him somehow.
And the White Council’s attack on the Necromancer (Sauron) at Dol Guldor would be awesome to include. Also love to see Aragorn and Gandalf hunting down Gollum. All that stuff. And Saruman’s fall to the dark side.
Also, I didn’t mean to open up a can of worms with a Tolkein vs. Harry Potter debate. I love Tolkein’s stuff and am very passionate about it. Whereas HP just isn’t my cup of tea. But there’s room for all in Middle Earth.
Thanks for the shout out in the very beginning! Still listening to the news…
I live in the UK so I should not have seen futurama for another year because sky have decided not to show it for a year but through the magic of the internet I have.(think Audra may have said this in the cast have only jumped through it) I always preferred futurama because it had the jokes and innuendo. My little brother of 7 also likes futurama. however i think the first two new episodes where just too blunt and inappropriate. I hope this is not turned into family guy.
Just thought I would voice my opinion.
re: changing the ending of things…
… this made me think of Don Quijote - there are two tomes, the first of which was published in 1605, and the 2nd in 1615 - the 2nd, written by Cervantes, was (supposedly) published because of the popularity of a not-written-by-Cervantes “continuation”
Hey, is the Martian Chronicles that were discussed the one that Tim Minear (writer and director of “Out of Gas”) working on?
(i.e, writing the screenplay?)
ETA: I think my first experience with the Hobbit was my father reading it to me and my brothers. And that may be the best way to experience it. (The first part of Fellowship meanders quite a bit because it was also a story that Tolkien was writing for his kids.)
The Hobbit is the only book that this book maven never finished. I grew up having to listen to it, and LOTR, on tape with my family on car trips, and saw the animation that was available in the 80s. Needless to say, I was unimpressed by it all. Indeed, I grew to actively dislike it. I didn’t actually read LOTR until I was in college, the movies were going to come out, and my best friend convinced me to get past my misgivings. But I’ve still never been able to finish The Hobbit, even though I blew through the Simarillion. I must have a block on it or something!
I’m dumbfounded by the number of people who read LotR and never managed The Hobbit, or only did so with difficulty.
I read both as a tweener, and LotR is definitely the tougher slogging.