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More of my fragmented review of the super-platinum edition of the LOTR DVD set:

One scene showed the filming of the wharg attack where Gamling and Wharg-Snack stop and their horses start to spook. Except the horses wouldn't spook. Their trainer was on his hands and knees just underneath the camera, doing strange things like waving plastic garbage bags and generally acting weird. Through several takes, the horses would stop on cue, look down at him, and get this "what's wrong with you?" look on their faces. He eventually got a workable "spook" from them, but complained that they were so well trained that they were bombproof.

Then there was the tour of Weta Digital's computer room, with the 512 parallel xenon processors giving them one teraflop of processing capacity. The head geek said they were getting another two teraflops in a week. They already had more computer capacity than the New Zealand government, and were in the top ten known supercomputing facilities in the world.

Then there was the scene with Eowyn fighting orcs inside the Glittering Caves. This was a full production scene, and not just a quickie visualization. They probably decided it was too far from canon to use, or maybe they just wanted to give Miranda Ott a nice souvenir.

Also interesting was the scene at the showdown-at-the-Black-Gates, where Aragorn whacks the head off Sauron's mouthpiece. They had a special sword, with only about six inches of blade on it, made up for the scene.

However, the prop manager forgot to bring it along, so they took Viggo's "regular" sword, ran behind a truck, and cut off most of the blade with a cutoff saw. Since the blade was aluminum, it just took a few seconds.

It turns out even the "hero swords" were mostly aluminum, although there were some "live steel" ones made, too. Nothing was sharpened, and the points were blunted, but you could still give someone a good whack with an aluminum blade. I guess it's easier to swash your buckle with a two-pound aluminum sword than a ten-pound steel one. Oh, and everything was ground from bar stock, and not forged.

And there was the scene in the steel foundry, where they dropped brass and aluminum rings into a crucible of molten steel, so they could get various examples of The Ring melting.

After getting to know the Extended Edition well, this added material just renewed an old interest. I'm now going to go back to the theatrical version, and give it some attention.