The Lord of the Rings (1978 film)/Trivia

Trivia

 * The elves in this version do not have pointed ears; instead, they tend to dress in white and appear slightly brighter than the other characters.
 * The film includes an adaptation of the song which Frodo sings at the Prancing Pony: The first three lines are true to Tolkien's original, but the fourth line (which can only barely be heard) goes "That you never would believe it, so pass the beer all round!" (The original version reads "That the man in the moon himself came down one night to drink his fill".) However, the later line "With a ping and a pong the fiddle strings snapped" is true to the original.
 * Just as in Jackson's version, Bakshi's Balrog has wings.
 * Unlike in Jackson's version, Gandalf retains his hat even upon becoming Gandalf the White.
 * Cel animation was produced and shot for this film, but was cut out at the last minute. Except for the cel-animated shot of the hobbits at Bilbo's birthday party, the final product is entirely rotoscoped.
 * Future director Tim Burton worked as an animator on this film. He was not credited, but worked as an "inbetween" artist. It was his first job on a film.
 * At one point in the film's development, studio executives thought that the names "Saruman" and "Sauron" were too similar, and would confuse the audience, and decided that Saruman should be renamed "Aruman". This decision was eventually reversed, but some references to "Aruman" remain in the finished film.
 * Bakshi's film sparked enough interest in Tolkien's work to provoke not only the Rankin/Bass Return of the King, but a complete adaptation of The Lord of the Rings on BBC Radio. For this broadcast, Michael Graham Cox and Peter Woodthorpe reprised their roles of Boromir and Gollum, respectively, appearing alongside Ian Holm who would go on to appear in Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy.
 * Peter Jackson first encountered The Lord of the Rings via Bakshi's film, and some shots in his live-action trilogy appear to have been influenced by it. One such shot features Frodo and the other hobbits hiding from a Black Rider under a big tree root, while the Black Rider stalks above them. In his version of the sequence, Jackson uses a similar shot — although he films it from a different angle (in the book, Frodo hid separately from the other hobbits). A second sequence features the camera slowly revolving around Strider and the hobbits, who stand in a circle as the Black Riders approach them on Weathertop. In his staging, Jackson also uses a similar shot — although his camera is much faster, and Strider is not among the hobbits. A third similarity is the depiction of Gollum losing the ring in the prologue: both films show very similar events but the book had no such prologue and indeed it runs directly counter to Tolkien's scheme for the storyline. Another similarly staged scene is Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn's discovery of Gandalf the White. On the DVD commentary of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson acknowledges one shot, a low angle of a hobbit at Bilbo's birthday party shouting "Proudfeet!", as an intentional homage to Bakshi's film. By far the biggest "lift," however, is the scene of the Nazgûl appearing in the hobbits' room at the Prancing Pony and slashing the beds to ribbons thinking the shapes under the sheets to be the hobbits (but are actually pillows). This is almost identical to Bakshi's version, which is significant, as the scene is not depicted in the book; a passage does appear that states that hobbit beds wind up slashed during the night, but the townsfolk of Bree are the perpetrators, not the Nazgûl. Some of Sam's interjections are also sourced from Bakshi rather than Tolkien. Another idea used in both films is to depict Éomer as a late arrival at the Battle of the Hornburg, rather than the book's Erkenbrand. Indeed, the whole stricture of the first two installments is but Bakshi's movie script plight in two and a little expanded with some episodes (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ends exactly where Bakshi's movie ends: the end of the Battle of Hornburg and Gollum leading Frodo and Sam to Shelob - the Black Gate is presumably cut, since Gollum talks about his "secret way", and Faramir could be as well, since the Hobbits are journeying through the Mountains of Shadow).
 * During the battle of Helm's Deep, a song with non-English lyrics is heard on the soundtrack. The words Isengard and Mordor can be clearly discerned. However, it is not in Quenya nor Sindarin, nor even in the Black Speech. For the song, composer Leonard Rosenman had his choir sing nonsense lyrics to get the desired effect.
 * In Stephen King and Peter Straub's novel The Talisman, Jack Sawyer and Wolf attempt to hide out by going to a matinee showing of the movie.