THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)
I have had a strange relationship with The Lord of the Rings. I remember being at school and getting very into Dungeons & Dragons, and other cool fantasy tabletop RPGs, and everyone in the group seemed to have this almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Tolkien. Me? Not a bit...
Must have been around 1983, I thought I should remedy that especially as we'd started playing Middle Earth Roleplaying (or MERP as everyone called it). So I saved up, and bought myself a copy of The Lord of The Rings (the all-in one edition). And I didn't get very far at all. I think I got as far as Frodo and Sam leaving Hobbiton and the encounter with Tom Bombadil, and that was about it. It was too much for me, I wasn't a reader at that age, and I gave up.
I saw the Ralph Bakshi movie of the first half, and that was all I knew...
And then, many, many years later... Along came Babylon 5. I watched it avidly, but around season 3 there was the introduction of a particularly cool character (Marcus) who was a Ranger. And suddenly things were starting to make sense in my head - Babylon 5 was The Lord of the Rings in space!!
Rangers, the coming of Shadows, and then when Sheridan falls when he goes to Z'ha'dum, and comes back wearing white... Oh god, Sheridan is Gandalf!! Anyway, I loved Babylon 5, and I wanted to see how it compared - so I dug out that old copy of The Lord of the Rings that I bought ten years earlier and tried again.
Older, and wiser, I blasted through the whole thing and loved it. Absolutely loved it.
So when one of my favourite film makers announced he was tackling The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of movies I was very excited. I followed Peter Jackson's movie making right from Bad Taste, through to the awesome and underrated The Frighteners. If anyone was going to bring Middle Earth to life it was going to be him... Jackson had this knack of producing things on a lower budget that didn't look like they were low budget, and approached movies with a practicality that was being dismissed in favour of green-screens.
I think Debs and I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring on opening night, and absolutely loved it. The casting was brilliant, the whole production amazing, and it looked like Middle Earth. It was what I imagined reading it.
Astounding.
As for how The Lord of The Rings has shaped my life? Well... When Debs and I got married, we didn't have a big wedding. Hell, the whole thing cost a fraction of what most weddings are these days. Let's just say that it was half the cost of most engagement rings or wedding dresses. Debs made her dress, and our wedding rings have elvish on them like the One Ring (just not as dark in its message). The ceremony itself was at a little registry office, and the music we chose at the wedding was a track from the Return of the King soundtrack where Aragorn sings when he is crowned. Gotta love Aragorn...
And then, when we were house hunting for our first ever house to buy rather than rent, we looked at so many houses. So many of them. We spent months looking, viewing house after house and none of them were right. We were just about to give up, when this one popped up on Rightmove and the price had come down a bit as it wasn't selling - dropping it just into our price range. We looked at the photos on the site and in the middle of the living room in the estate agent photos was a lifesized cardboard standee of Aragorn.
We had to give it a look. Debs thought if nothing else we could try to get the standee off of them...
As if fate determined it, the house was perfect and we put in an offer that week. (The standee had already moved to a new house by the time we viewed). And we're still here now.
Final bit of Lord of the Rings trivia for me, and how it's impacted my life. I was working at Ottakar's bookstore for many years, looking after the SF/Fantasy section. I loved working there, a really awesome company to work for. Anyway, I was on my lunch break and popped to the nearby Boots to grab some food, and I bumped into an old friend from University, from my Animation Degree, that I hadn't seen in years. This must have been 2003-ish, so I hadn't seen Annabel in nearly eight years. She had popped back to the city to see friends, and was about to jet off to the States. She asked what I was doing, and I said I worked in a bookshop... retail. Nothing glamorous. I asked what she'd been doing, and she said she'd been in New Zealand for a bit, but didn't say anything more... Was fantastic to see her, and off she went. Didn't give it another thought...
A few weeks later I picked up the Extended edition of The Two Towers. We watched the extended movie, then worked our way through the two disks of documentaries... and there, in the little section on the award-winning animation for Gollum, was Annabel. Pulling faces, and animating Gollum...
So that's what she was up to in New Zealand! And there was I working in retail. God, I felt like such a failure.
Anyway, Annabel, if you read this - awesome work, and proud of you.
Me? I really should have done better...
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