Thanks! (Incidentally I'm sick today, so may not post as much as usual tonight.) I read the author's Bakshi review at the bottom a couple weeks ago (that's where I got the picture of Bakshi Sam I posted for you :) , but didn't notice the Rankin-Bass RotK review. Some of it's funny, but the author also criticizes some stuff I thought Rankin-Bass did well, and in the process gets some facts wrong. For instance, in one paragraph they complain about, "The orc explains that they were fighting for the "hobbit's pretty cloak. . ." Actually the orc said "coat", not "cloak", referring to Frodo's mithral shirt. There's some other stuff like that in there, and also places where I think the author is nitpicking (like the complaint that "the wound caused by severing a finger has already magically closed up and has healed neatly in a matter of seconds"--well, of course, you're not going to show a bloody severed finger in a kid's cartoon). In the Jackson-vs.-Rankin-Bass column at the bottom, I'd add that Rankin-Bass included some things Jackson cut out, such as Sam being tempted by the Ring; and I also thought the Rankin-Bass fight between Eowyn and the Nazgul was truer to the book than Jackson's. My own biggest complaint about the Rankin-Bass RotK was that it was supposed to pick up where Bakshi's version stopped in the story, but they skipped Shelob, so there was never a version of RotK with Shelob until Jackson's version. This is one reason I was worried at the end of Jackson's
Two Towers when they ended without showing Shelob--I was worried he was going to skip it, too!
Now if only we could get Rankin-Bass to do a cartoon adaptation of the scenes with Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire, the trilogy would be complete!
While we're at it, I will take this opportunity to post a picture of Rankin-Bass Sam for comparison with Bakshi Sam--I think Rankin-Bass wins on that count, too :)
BTW some funny Bakshi-bashing sites here:
Brentai's Shameless Ripoff of Thumbnail Theatre Presents: Ralph Bakshi's Animated "Lord of the Rings"
Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, Part One: A Critique
Lord of the Rings (1978)