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IvanTheNotSoTerrible wrote:

I sympathize wholly with those trying to cling to their copyrights and trademarks. If I relied on movies for my income, I wouldn't want them taken to be viewed for free without my permission either.

As for THE HOBBIT cartoon, I'll always have fond feelings for it. It introduced me to the Tolkein tales when it was first shown and it blew me away!

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sokolkeep wrote:

I have no problem with Youtube removing videos that have copyrighted material. What I have a problem with is Viacom collecting our personal data, Youtube usernames + IP addresses and keeping track of what we watch, when we watch it and how often we watch it.

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The Return of the King is an animated adaptation of the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien which was released by Rankin/Bass as a TV special in 1980. It has since been released on VHS and DVD.

The film was created by the same team which had worked on the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit.

Orson Bean returned as the voice of the older Bilbo Baggins, as well as that of the story's hero, Frodo Baggins. John Huston was back as well, as the wizard Gandalf, and co-starring with them were: William Conrad as Denethor, Roddy McDowall as Samwise Gamgee, Theodore Bikel as Aragorn the King himself, and reprising his darkly spoken role of Gollum was the grumpily dangerous Brother Theodore. Rankin/Bass stalwart Paul Frees replaced Cyril Ritchard as the voice of Elrond; Casey Kasem, best known for his role as Shaggy in Hanna-Barbera's Scooby-Doo, was Merry with Sonny Melendrez as Pippin; Nellie Bellflower as Éowyn; and Glenn Yarbrough returned as principal vocalist (taking vibrato to painfully exaggerated heights), billed here as simply "the Minstrel of Gondor".

Rather than picking up where Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings had left off in 1978, Rankin-Bass present The Return of the King as a sequel to their 1977 adaptation of The Hobbit — giving the audience an ultra-brief recap of the events ("Frodo and his friends had many exciting adventures before arriving in Mordor."), and adapting a few story events from The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, while leaving out some major details. The visual style of The Return of the King is largely shared with the 1977 Hobbit, including, for example, the depiction of battle as a swarm of black dots milling around and quickly covered by huge clouds of dust.

The animated Return of the King is available on DVD from Warner Bros., both individually and as a "boxed trilogy" with the Rankin/Bass Hobbit and Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings.

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The Return of the King Animated Movie
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In 1980 Directors Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr completed the Trilogy finishing the work that Baskhi had left. The Cast used in the Hobbit returns where relevant which make (some of) the casting one of the positibe elements of the movie. The movie begins with a conversation between Sam and Frodo which brings them back to the events during their journey through Mordor.

The Movie has some very cool scenes from the defense of Minas Tirith and Eowyn slaying the Lord of the Nazgul.

As with the Hobbit this movie also suffers from the short timespan in which a massive tale must be told. The movie has a duration of 97 minutes in which a billion events must be pressed. This automatically results in the ommission of some of the interesting events and plots that make the Tolkien books so brilliant. Like in the Hobbit the movie features some musical interpretations of the songs and poems in the Lord of the Rings books. They work out quite nicely and could be considered as a nice addition.

Like the Hobbit and the first part of the Lord of the Rings the animated movies are simply a must-see for any Tolkien Fanatic. The movies are all quite enjoyable as long as you are not too critical and do not expect an exact interpretation of the books.

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