Chris Wellons wrote:

I feel the same thing happened, to a lesser degree, with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy after the movie. I see “42″ jokes used way too much.

Yes! Thank you! And I’m not even that big of a fan of the books. I think I casually scanned through the first one when I was a kid, so most of the jokes flew over my head, but I did enjoy the occasional references to 42, vogon poetry or not panicking.

Now… Eh…

While I think the LOTR movies were good, they definitely did water down the LOTR fandom. The movies created a smaller common denominator that allowed much more people in, too many people. (I read the books before the movies were even announced, so I’m not one of those! :-D) Like Usenet, for various fandoms to survive, there needs to be difficult barriers in place to filter out the posers. Otherwise it’s eternal September.

I feel the same thing happened, to a lesser degree, with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy after the movie. I see “42” jokes used way too much.

Now, considering all this, imagine what Linux distributions would look like if it ever caught on mainstream. This is one reason why I don’t promote it to non-geeks :-P.

Now, to go celebrate Hobbit Day …

@ Matt`:

The stupid image must have moved up the ranks. I could swear that when I was looking for it two weeks ago it was on like page 8 and I had to do a search for hobbit -“elijah woods” or something like that. :P Sigh…

And yes – it was supposed to be slash fanfics.

I do agree that the movies were good. They were very well made, and relatively faithful to the books which was something quite rare when the first movie came out. I enjoyed them thoroughly.

However, personally, I think I liked Middle Earth as a fantasy universe more than I actually liked the Trilogy. I’m drawn to fiction with well established “fluff” – I’m the kind of person who will gleefully sit through a lengthy lesson of the taxonomy of some alien species, intricate descriptions of alien customs, social behaviors, history. I’m the guy who gets annoyed when characters interrupt it with the canonical “just get to the point already”. I’m the kind of person who watches a show/movie and then hits up the wiki pages to learn more about the stuff that was merely hinted at on screen.

I felt the same way about Star Wars universe – the actual setting is actually way more awesome than the movies themselves.

I like character driven stories that are set in meticulously designed universes that seem to have realistic depth. I hate when the authors hand wave explanations away, and make stuff on the spot.

Do you know how long it took me to find a hobbit picture that was not Elijah Wood?

I don’t know how long it took you, but I do see the image you used on page 2 of a Google Image search for “hobbit”. In amongst some from the earlier animated films, some of the hominid species that’s been called a hobbit, some from the video game and yes… plenty of Elijah Wood and friends.

Whilst I’m nitpicking, did you mean slash fanatics, or slash fanfics? (Looking at the spellcheck replacement options for fanfics, I think I see how that one happened)

Aside from the above, I know the films aren’t perfect, but they are good films. If they get more people into Tolkien then I think it’s a net benefit, even if a lot less of them actually read the book than we might like. Personally I’ve never been that enamoured with the extended history that Tolkien created for LOTR, it feels like it pushed past the sensible limit on fictional words and, whilst I’m sure it’s a well thought out mythos, I just don’t find it compelling as a story.