The Hobbit: The 1977 Animated Television Movie

The Hobbit: The 1977 Animated Television Movie

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hobbit-77-opening-shot1The Hobbit (NBC TV, 1977)
Directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. Featuring the Voices of John Huston, Orson Bean, Hans Conried, Richard Boone, Theodore Gottlieb, Otto Preminger, Cyril Ritchard, Paul Frees, Don Messick.

A few years ago, in my early posting days on Black Gate, I wrote a lengthy overview of Rankin/Bass’s strange but oddly likable animated television movie of The Return of the King. I intended to review Rankin/Bass’s other Tolkien TV movie, The Hobbit, some time later. “Later” took the form of two years, give or take a day, but has become “now,” thanks to Peter Jackson.

With The Hobbit back in the front lines of entertainment news because of the start — finally! — of production on Peter Jackson’s two-movie adaptation of the book, it’s the appropriate time to re-visit the first film version of the story. A Long Expected Party for an old friend.

Full disclosure: I have an enormous nostalgic fondness for the 1977 animated Hobbit, since it introduced me to one of my favorite authors at a young age. This movie was my first exposure to anything related to J. R. R. Tolkien when I saw it at age five on its second network broadcast. I already adored monsters of any kind, branching off from a natural adoration of dinosaurs, and my mother told me that The Hobbit was a book chock-a-block full of strange beasts: goblins, trolls, dragons, giant spiders, giant eagles. Since I was still too young to read the book, I took up the movie as my Middle Earth introduction and loved every minute of it. When I read the book myself for the first time three years later, it was in a coffee table edition that used stills and production art from the Rankin/Bass production to illustrate Tolkien’s text. The combination of the TV broadcast and this edition of the book have made the Rankin/Bass movie an inseparable part of my Tolkien experience.

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Diana Wynne Jones (1934 – 2011)

Diana Wynne Jones (1934 – 2011)

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hexwoodDiana Wynne Jones, author of dozens of fantasy books including Howl’s Moving Castle, Archer’s Goon, Hexwood, and Dark Lord of Derkholm, died on Saturday, March 26, 2011.

The first Diana Wynne Jones novel I ever bought was Howl’s Moving Castle, in 1986. Everyone at the science fiction bookstore where I shopped — the House of Speculative Fiction, in Ottawa, Canada — was talking about it, and Pat Caven the owner pressed it into my hands.  It was by no means the last.

Jones studied English at St Anne’s College in Oxford, where she famously attended lectures by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis before she graduated in 1956. She began her writing career with plays, and had three produced in London between 1967 and 1970.

In 1970 she switched to prose with her first novel, Changeover, a comedy marketed for adults. She began writing for young adults with her second book, Wilkins’ Tooth (1973, published in the US as Witch’s Business), and never looked back.

Although Jones is widely admired as a YA fantasy writer, she had a surprising range. Perhaps my favorite of her books is The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (1996), a hysterical tourist guide which skewers dozens of fantasy clichés as it catalogues the common places, weird items, people, governments, and situations readers are likely to encounter as they journey through a typical fantasy novel.

tough-guideHer later novel Dark Lord of Derkholm (1999), set in a Fantasyland which steadfastly adheres to the conventions she described,  is seen by some as a conceptual sequel to The Tough Guide.

Jones was nominated — and won — numerous awards in her lifetime. Her novel Archers Goon was nominated for a World Fantasy Award; The Tough Guide To Fantasyland was nominated for both a Hugo award and a World Fantasy Award, and Dark Lord of Derkholm won the 1999 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. The same year she won the Karl Edward Wagner Award in the UK.

She received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007, perhaps the highest honor our field has to offer.

Her novels have enjoyed extended life in other media: Archer’s Goon became a BBC television serial in 1992, and Howl’s Moving Castle was famously adapted as an animated feature by Hayao Miyazaki in 2004.

Jones continued to work until late in life, publishing her last novel, Enchanted Glass, last year. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, and died on March 26, 2011.

I Am Number Four: Why Movies Are Rarely As Good As Books

I Am Number Four: Why Movies Are Rarely As Good As Books

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i-am-number-fourI am in my mid-thirties and my wife is in her mid-twenties. The eight-year difference between us can be jarring at times, especially because I am a pop culture junkie and she grew up without cable television (and rarely watched the network television she did have access to, as I learned when I discovered she’d never seen an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, even in rerun).

Recently, this generation gap has became particularly evident. A close friend of hers has formed a book club, of which I am the only male attendee and also about the only thirty-something. As such, the books that we’re reading tend to track toward chick lit, much of it in the Twilight-like realm of paranormal, horror, or fantasy-related romance novels, many targeted toward young adults.

Some of the books that fall into this category these days are truly outstanding, such as The Hunger Games, but many of them have serious issues … which brings us to last month’s book, chosen in part to coincide with the release of its film version: I Am Number Four.

I Am Number Four: The Premise

As the planet Lorien was being destroyed by a race known as the Mogadorians, a group of Loriens came up with a plan that would have put Jor-El to shame. They cram 9 of their young on a spaceship to Earth, along with 9 mentors. The Lorien youth are of a class known as the Garde, who will eventually develop powers, called Legacies, intended to defend Lorien. The mentors are part of the class known as Cepan, who help train the Garde.

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R.A. Lafferty: An Attempt at an Appreciation

R.A. Lafferty: An Attempt at an Appreciation

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R.A. LaffertyA little while ago, John O’Neill posted a news item on this blog about the literary estate of R.A. Lafferty (1914-2002) being put up for auction, with the current bid being $70,000 for the copyright to all his works. It’s an odd development, but then Lafferty was an odd writer. I want to try to say something about his work here, not because I’ve read everything he’s written — I’ve read only a fraction of his output, which runs to over two dozen novels and two hundred short stories — but because he’s a writer strong enough to have hooked me to want to read more. And I want to say something about why.

Which is tricky, because that means having to identify what it is that Lafferty does that’s so intriguing. And I think much of what is powerful in his work comes from its sense of strangeness. Almost all of his writing feels like nothing else; not like a traditional sf tale, not like a New Wave tale, not like typical fantasy or horror, less like a mainstream writer trying out genre. You could say there’s something folkloric, but not mythic to it; so it’s become almost a truism to say that Lafferty wrote tall tales. It’s an accurate statement, but what does it mean?

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Goth Chick’s Crypt Notes: The Best of C2E2

Goth Chick’s Crypt Notes: The Best of C2E2

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C2E2_Logo4aIt isn’t very often that I suffer from complete sensory overload, but the Haunted Attractions Show in St. Louis, immediately followed by the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo nearly did me in. It was therefore necessary to retire to the underground offices of Goth Chick News, barricade myself in with the espresso machine, the blender and a bottle of good tequila, and take a few quiet days to absorb everything I had seen.

Black Gate editor and big cheese John O’Neill graciously stood in for my post last Thursday, partially out of sympathy for my over-stimulated state; but mostly because he wanted the blender back.

Now rebooted with sufficient caffeine and marguerites, I am ready to begin telling you more of the amazing events of the last two weeks.

C2E2 takes place in Chicago’s largest convention center, McCormick Place and the event consumed all of one of the largest buildings. Focusing on all manner of artwork, collectibles, music, film and entertainment, it was… well, gi-normous.

Though it will take several weeks of posts to delve into detail on all of the fantastic things I saw, I start as always with a Best of Show overview.

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Selling SF & Fantasy: 1969 Was Another World

Selling SF & Fantasy: 1969 Was Another World

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seas-with-oystersI think what many aspiring writers today fail to grasp — very much as a result of not having been there — is that 1969 was another world.

Books were sold and distributed very differently. Big chain bookstores barely existed. There were many times more distributors than there are today. Science fiction mass-market paperbacks could be found in drugstores or bus stations, as could the digest magazines.

It was the time of the much maligned “science fiction ghetto” but really a time of innocence, in which we tended to assume that if you made it into the pro ranks, you were there for life. (How else could a writer as unimportant as, say, Robert Moore Williams have continued to publish over 40 years?)

There were no post-novelist writers, i.e. good, respected writers still writing but unable to sell novels anymore.

As somebody commented in one of those very early SFWA Forums I have been reading (I have them back to issue #3), “It’s a seller’s market. We’ve never had it so good.” This from about 1968.

It was a time in which a writer did not have to worry about selling his fourth novel because of the sales record of the previous three.

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Writers’ Nights, Open Mics, Literary Soirees: The Importance of Community

Writers’ Nights, Open Mics, Literary Soirees: The Importance of Community

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A Reading in the Salon of Mme Geoffrin, 1755
A Reading in the Salon of Mme Geoffrin, 1755

I’m here to talk to you about the benefits of writers’ nights, open mics and literary soirees. Um. As you have seen. In the title. Of this blog.

“What brought this on, Claire?” you ask.

Why, thanks for your interest! I’ll tell ya!

Tomorrow night, my buddy Patty Templeton (one of the mighty slushers and bloggers for Black Gate) is hosting a small private “Fiction Fun Time Potluck ” at her place. I’m very excited. I will dress up, maybe even wear lipstick! There will probably be candlelight and a lot of giggling. And WORDS! Glorious words — from the mouths of aspiring novelists and struggling upstart writers: each of us, manuscripts in hand, getting a moment in the spotlight. My favorite thing ever!

Wikipedia (it being Wikipedia, all normal cautions apply) has the definition of a salon (literary, that is, not hirsute) thus:

Patty "La Marquise" Templeton, our beautiful and educated Patroness.
Patty "La Marquise" Templeton, our beautiful and educated Patroness.
Portrait of salonniere Élisabeth, comtesse Greffulhe, by Laszlo
La Salonniere Élisabeth, Comtesse Greffulhe, by Laszlo

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation… Carried on until quite recently, in urban settings, among like-minded people…

…Some scintillating circles formed in the smaller courts which resembled salons, often galvanized by the presence of a beautiful and educated patroness…

I’m not sure how much refinement there’ll be (we all cuss like sailors and flirt like courtesans. But I’ll betcha good working-class wages they didn’t do things all that different in 18th century Paris and Venice), however, I do know we’ll come away with a thorough knowledge of  monsters, robots, murderers, gods and maybe even faeries.

My excitement for tomorrow’s revelries got me thinking about events similar to these I’ve attended or invented over the last few years.

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Interzone March-April 2011

Interzone March-April 2011

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303_largeIn the mail this week is the latest Interzone. The  fiction features a novella by Nina Allan, “The Silver Wand,” and stories by Tim Lees (“Crosstown Traffic”), Chris Butler (“Tell Me Everything”), and Ray Clule (“Tethered to the Cold and the Dying”).

The magazine is the print home for David Lanford’s “Ansible Link,” a miscellany of genre news. I found this item from the regularly featured “As Others See Us” department particularly humorous:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone-themed novel Never Let Me Go can’t be sf even though he says it is, because he’s respectable. To clarify: “It isn’t science fiction–indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours (sic) to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of sub-set or derivation of our own.” (Guardian)

That certainly clears things up.

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Nine – “The Six Gates”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Nine – “The Six Gates”

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fumanchu4“The Six Gates” was the ninth installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story was first published in Collier’s on October 23, 1915 and was later expanded to comprise Chapters 27-30 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in the UK in 1916 by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

face-fu-manchu-poster1The story opens, like many early Rohmer tales, with the unexpected arrival of a late night visitor. In this instance, Smith and Petrie are preparing for the raid on the Gables when Aziz, Karamaneh’s brother, turns up at Petrie’s door. While initially skeptical of trusting him, both men are quickly won over by the young man’s tale of how Karamaneh was abducted by Fu-Manchu’s minions shortly after he and his sister returned home to Cairo; how Karamaneh was rendered amnesiac by a drug administered by Dr. Fu-Manchu; and how Aziz followed their trail from Cairo to Rangoon to London in his desperate quest to free his sister from slavery. Smith and Petrie leave Aziz in police custody as they join Inspector Weymouth for the police raid on the Gables.

Smith and Petrie foolishly separate from the Scotland Yard men and encounter Karamaneh in the house. She warns them that they are walking into a trap, but Smith disregards her warning and he and Petrie step right into a trapdoor hidden behind a curtain. They recover consciousness to find Dr. Fu-Manchu gloating over their blundering incompetence. He mocks them for being inferior to children who learn from experience to fear fire lest they be burned a second time. Presently coming to the point, Fu-Manchu explains that Smith is to be tortured with the Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom while Petrie, his devoted friend, is provided with a samurai sword to end Smith’s sufferings if he dares.

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Inheritance by Christopher Paolini to be Released November 8

Inheritance by Christopher Paolini to be Released November 8

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inheritanceI share a lot of books with my kids. I have two sons, ages 15 and 13, and an 11-year-old daughter. As you can imagine, they have a wide range of tastes. It’s uncommon for two to enjoy the same book (or series), and virtually unheard of for all three to agree. They couldn’t even agree on Harry Potter – my youngest two enjoyed the books, but my oldest turned up his nose.

The solitary exception is Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle. All three have devoured every book in the series, and all three have been clamoring for more.

For years. The first novel, Eragon, famously completed when when Paolini was only 19, was released in 2002. My oldest, Tim, read it first, and immediately started asking me when the next one was coming out.

Eldest arrived in 2005, and by then Tim’s brother Drew had read the first one.  Within two weeks of Eldest‘s publication date, both of them were asking me to check Amazon.con for news of the third. Brisingr landed in 2008, and by then (of course) my daughter had leaped enthusiastically on the bandwagon.

It’s now been almost three years that I’ve put up with endless questions about the arrival of the fourth book (the most recent was last Saturday. Man, these kids do not give up). So it was with considerable relief that I saw news articles this week about the fourth and final volume, Inheritance, scheduled for release by Knopf Books on November 8, 2011. Thank. God. I thought I was going to be pestered about this book until retirement.

You’re on your own for a plot summary, or any further details. I’m already tired of hearing about this book, and I first heard about it yesterday.  Read all about it on Paolini’s website Alagaesia.com, or better yet ask a nearby teenager. They’re sure to have all the details.