Giving Thanks Again For The Rankin/Bass Hobbit

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the premiere. Seven years ago I had this to say about the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit:

The Rankin/Bass adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit first aired today thirty-three years ago, on November 27, 1977, four days after Thanksgiving. It's hard to believe that an entire generation has passed since then, that there are grown-ups today who can't remember a time when it wasn't around. I remember I had only heard about Middle-Earth four years earlier, but even that short time had got me yearning for any adaptation of the material. The excitement had been building since I first heard it announced and was eager for any scrap of news; there were articles in TV guide and in our Weekly Readers; there was even a float dedicated to it in a Thanksgiving Day parade. Finally on the evening the family was gathered in a darkened room, and to the strains of an enchanting melody we heard John Huston as the voice of Gandalf begin, "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit..."

There were cuts to the story and some disappointing designs (like the elves), but on the whole it was a great adaptation. I liked the fact that except for the song "The Greatest Adventure" all the songs were taken from Tolkien's original poetry. In those pre-VCR days the closest we could get to a copy of the show was a long-playing set of records with a booklet; a deluxe edition of The Hobbit with illustrations from the show was soon added. Many a night we would lay down to the sound track set up to play, and drift off to the unfolding of Bilbo's wanderings. We listened to it so much that we could recite it all straight through, and even today a stray phrase can start my brother and me quoting at length.

Nowadays of course in the wake of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films a big budget adventure movie of The Hobbit is in the works, and you will hear people now and then deploring the quaintness and childishness of the Rankin/Bass show. But The Hobbit is a children's book, perhaps one of the greatest children's books ever, and I hope that in the fever of making a "sequel" to Jackson's films that is not completely forgotten. Rankin/Bass did a good job with that.

The picture above is from the Thanksgiving Day Parade float that year.

Since I wrote that post the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies have come out, in all their bloated wanderings. Those adaptations were, as Samuel Johnson might say, both good and original, but the parts that were good came from the original source, and the parts that were original with Jackson's team were, on the whole, not good. Rankin/Bass, for its flaws, did a very good adaptation of The Hobbit in seventy-eight minutes, in some ways better than the four hundred and ninety-eight minutes of the combined Jackson films.

So, forty years on, even at my niece's wedding, my brother and I rolled out great swaths of dialog from the special while we prepared for the reception. It's been woven into our DNA. If every copy of the Rankin/Bass Hobbit soundtrack were destroyed, we could completely reconstruct it, with music and sound effects, from scratch. To us, the Rankin/Bass special was more than a show, it was a shared experience, almost a language. I suppose I can't really give an unbiased opinion about it. But I think that, even stripped of personal nostalgia, it is a wonderful artistic achievement.

Sliding Towards An Ol' Fashioned Christmas

Little Encounters

What Are These Things With Big Black Wings?

Something To Consider On Thanksgiving

The institution of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation, or the institution of the city, are in this matter to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves. The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a narrower world. They are dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals; George wishes to think the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say, for a moment, that the flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a monastery. But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

--G. K. Chesterton, Heretics.

Scales and Wings

Monkish Imposition

Even a Few More Variations on a Thanksgiving Theme