Fantasy Advent Day 9: Give Rankin-Bass' The Hobbit a try

1977 was a great year for film. Aliens walked among us in both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Saturday Night Fever hit theaters with amazing disco energy and Pete's Dragon made us all believe in the magical. Appropriately, this was also the year that Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr., adapted a 1937 fantasy novel into a 78-minute film called The Hobbit. Here's why I feel it's worth a watch now that it's streaming on MAX.

"The greatest adventure is what lies ahead."

Decades would pass between this movie and the Peter Jackson trilogy, but if you're looking for book adaptation fidelity, this is the preferable vesion.

I myself was eight years old when I saw The Hobbit. Dad had read most of the book to his older children, but the adventure was cut short when my sister was extremely afraid of giant spiders in Mirkwood. I don't blame her. She was about six and a half years old at the time and even I was unnerved by that chapter. My best friend happened to find a copy of this on video and we watched it. It was because of seeing the ending of the story that I went back to finish reading the book and then went on to become a fan of The Lord of the Rings.

This version holds true to the story and the tone in many ways. We see the utter bamboozling of Bilbo Baggins when a wizard turns up with the company of Thorin Oakenshield. We travel through the goblin passageways and meet Gollum in his cave. The tricking of Smaug and the attack on Laketown are represented with minor alterations and the Battle of the Five Armies is much more deadly to Bilbo's dwarven friends than it is in the book. There are omissions, such as Beorn and the Arkenstone, but it's understandable with the limited runtime.

Where it really shines is its fidelity to the tone. Bilbo is intelligent, but timid at first and intelligent and sly by the end. The turning point in his career in the book is the finding of the One Ring, but the encounter with Gollum is also a turning point. To borrow from Martin Freeman in the other adaptation,, he found something in the goblin tunnels: his courage. Thorin is flawed and has to be redeemed, just as it happens in the book and without eight hours of growing "dragon sickness."

All in all, this is a great way to relive your favorite moments of the book that gave us Bilbo Baggins.