When going to youtube, I'm seeing a full page cookie consent and I can't proceed to the video without interacting with it. I didn't see that before.
I browse in private mode and clear cookies, looks like they want to show that page for every video in that case. Is there a plugin or tool that works around a page like this?
Hobbit, yes! While 1991 "lotr" and 1985 "the hobbit" are both tv playes, the lotr is rather awful and amateurish. But "the Hobbit" is a real masterpiece.
Similarly, there is an early-90s Russian version of The Wizard Of Oz. Watching it with the help of Youtube's auto-translated subtitles was...quite an experience.
This happened when a YouTube peado ring was discovered using playtests and comments to share clips. COPPA was also becoming an issue again, so they did this.
> Aired 10 years before the release of the first instalment of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, the low-budget film appears ripped from another age: the costumes and sets are rudimentary, the green-screen effects are ludicrous, and many of the scenes look more like a theatre production than a feature-length film.
I wish the article wasn't so sneering in tone... sneering is good larks if you're on board with it, but if you come in like "oh wait this actually seems interesting" it can be a bit off-putting. However, it is nice to know of this show's existence, and I'm grateful to learn of that.
Actually it is a theater adaptation, but aired on TV. I remember that time. The Leningrad TV made plenty of similar TV-plays for children featuring actors from Leningrad theaters.
I find it funny that such production is compared with Jackson’s trilogy now.
I love Star Trek TNG but it was about as “ludicrous” in a lot of ways.
I also grew up on Soviet movies and cartoons so this doesn’t look as out of place to me as I guess it might to someone who’s never seen this genre of film.
>more like a theatre production than a feature-length film
Because it was basically a "television play", a hybrid between a theater production and a higher budget TV series/film. Such things were common on Soviet TV.
One has to understand that Soviet Union was relatively poor when compared with the west, especially so during perestroika.
From what I've seen on youtube regarding British TV plays, they were much much higher budget, and much closer to just a normal TV series/film, maybe with a theatrical dramatic flare, while Soviet TV plays often had abstract "modern theatre" like decorations, fewer or no background characters, other cost cutting measures, much closer to theater in terms of production.
Which, once you get over the low production values, is actually a very good series. Amazing actors, including Derek Jacobi. I once saw Derek Jacobi and Robert Lindsey in a play on stage, Becket, which had a few cloths and spotlights as props. These people can act. It was amazing.
The production values of this Soviet Lord of the Rings strike me as quite similar to I, Claudius. And it's worth noting that the televised low-budget stage play production values of I, Claudius notwithstanding, it's one of the best television shows ever made.
Many of the original Star Trek episodes look like a TV play too. Lots of backgrounds that are just colored lights where today you'd expect to see some setpiece. It's all about the story anyway.
They made a tv show too, some of the cast being the ones from the radio show. It's definitely in the original doctor who style of special effects, and I really enjoy it!
If you read the entire sentence that I wrote to the end, you will understand, that I actually liked it, because is is a great source for creating gif memes
quite amazingly, it was written, produced and performed by (mostly) hobbyist musicians and actors from Russia's pretty sizeable LARP community (though some leads are pros)
>The Soviet version includes some plot elements left out of Jackson’s $93m blockbuster, including an appearance by the character Tom Bombadil, a forest dweller cut from the English-language version because he was too long-winded and failed to move the plot forward.
Someone involved with this piece is still bitter that Tom Bombadil was cut from the trilogy.
Curious character. Provided some backstory regarding the origins of magic and layered perception of the universe. Lots of color about culture. Didn't move the plot forward? The Hobbit is what, 300+ pages? What fraction of that actually did move the plot forward?
Tom Bombadil was in the Fellowship of the Ring, not the Hobbit.
The thing about Tom Bombadil is that he was an enigma. He wore the ring and did not vanish. Instead, he made the ring vanish. It had no power over him. He was just completely orthogonal to this struggle, which detracts from its urgency. He was neither in the Ralph Bakshi film nor Jackson's, in part because it detracts from the dangerous atmosphere.
He's backstory. The Silmarillion was mostly backstory, is almost 500 pages, and people read that. They can stand a few pages on Tom Bombadil in their adventure story.
And he's so singularly interesting, that I remember him particularly. After 40 years. With no help from the movie industry for sure.
Yeah, Tom is supposed to be older and more fundamental that the current antic magics of Elves and Wizards. Like an Elemental, except even they are newer than Tom. I see him as different in kind. He can live in the dangerous forest, because it holds no danger to him.
If he's dangerous, its like the old Gods are dangerous because they may be capricious. They may squash something because they aren't paying attention to it.
Warning to those who will click this - that site hijacked my browser's "back" button. Had to close the tab and about 40 entries in thr History afterwards
From what I can remember from Tolkien's letters, he apparently introduced Tom Bombadil as a deliberate enigma. He does not belong to any of the known races of Middle Earth, nor is he one of the Ainur. I thought he made for a nice change of pace in FOTR, a great tool for world building.
LOTR is not an action/adventure book, but the Jackson movie trilogy is. I was very bitter that some characters like Bombadil, Glorfindel, and the Druedain didn't make it into the movies. But the movies are not the book, and I doubt it's possible to make a LOTR movie that's true to the book.
It's more that he's refusing to explain it, and describing it as a "enigma" to justify it after the fact.
Tolkien plotted by instinct, writing things down and then trying to figure out what that meant. Tom Bombadil was a character from other unrelated stories. He was introduced in a draft of Lord of the Rings that was much more stylistically "Hobbit part 2" than what we eventually got.
But Tolkien was a consummate retconner: once something was written down it it tended to stay. He molded and reinterpreted but rarely removed, until he found something that felt right to him.
That style of writing leaves a lot of tiny inconsistencies -- but inconsistencies that mimic the way any culture's lore evolves. That makes them incredibly intriguing, as if you'd just chanced on Greek myths or the Arthurian legends -- except instead of the product of centuries, it was one obsessive guy.
His ultimate retcon, by the way, is the first published edition of The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings grew out of the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit, but changed in ways that made it incompatible with the original. (In the original Gollum really was going to just give it to him.) So he rewrote it, but the first edition still existed -- and in the intro to LotR, he explains it as Bilbo's propaganda covering up the truth about how he got the Ring.
Tom is interesting but not vital to the plot and generally seems to raise more questions than answers among fans today.... He seems like he would be more of a distraction than anything else.
>"the costumes and sets are rudimentary, the green-screen effects are ludicrous, and many of the scenes look more like a theatre production than a feature-length film"
Actually officially it was "telespactakle" - which basically is theatre production but made for TV instead of being played on live stage. So no surprise here.
Also "rediscovered" by The Guardian maybe. It's been well-traded on Russian torrent sites for years. The article makes it seem like it was lost to time or something.
I had that book -- bought it in Leyden, the Netherlands when I was studying Russian. When we have a group of Russian orphans staying over in the early nineties, I gave them all my Russian books, including this one. It was really good to see them reading out of Xobbit to each other every night :-)
I have to say, I prefer the illustrations in that Soviet version to the illustrated western version based on that cartoon movie. Smaug actually looks like a dragon, instead of a giant cat...
This book was republished several times with the same content but with a different colour of the cover each time (white; dark blue; something brownish; maybe more). As a child, and I went through at least three different colours; I managed to destroy or lose a The Hobbit every year or so.
To be honest. I've been introduced to some translated soviet Russian literature of late that is absolutely fascinating. Especially in the descriptions of daily life and struggles in the soviet cities which do not deviate anywhere near as much as I expected from non communist life.
Even these soviet tv shows are slowly coming out and are just absolutely fascinating.
There were deals between the Soviet Union and the United States that each one would place its books in school libraries of the other. The magazine Soviet Life is the best known item placed by this program. Wonder what access Soviet children really had to the American equivalent
I would recommend Sergei Mihkalkhov's Disobedience Holiday. Soviet children's writing was very high quality and at par with what was being written in the west. Perhaps the Soviet ones had better art too and were well printed and bound as well.
Even the lush Soviet inks had a peculiar inviting smell.
Anecdotally since I see people referring to other Soviet TV shows making their way to Western audiences a friend turned me to on Comrade Detective. It's a fascinating view into propaganda as entertainment from the Cold War. It's free on Amazon Prime's streaming service.
From IMDB:
Parody comedy designed to resemble a non-existent gritty 1980's Cold War Romanian police show that promoted Communist ideals. The action-packed and blood-soaked first season finds Detectives Gregor Anghel and Joseph Baciu investigating the murder of fellow officer Nikita Ionescu and, in the process, unraveling a subversive plot to destroy their country that is fueled by what-else-but the greatest enemy: Capitalism.
I never knew this exists up until now. I'd love to watch this if ever there was an English caption available. Russians did an excellent job in this theater adaptation.
I picked up a cd version of the BBC radio play with Ian Holm as frodo, and bill nighy as Sam which was made around 30-40 years ago. Its really good and worth a listen
Anyone familiar enough with the language to figure out what happened to Gandalf in Part 2? They have him crossing the bridge, there's a spooky tunnel, there's a lot of talk from Scarface (Aragorn?) and some of the hobbits cry. But there's no Balrog!
This was released in 1991, a period of great economic and political turmoil in Russia. They were essentially in the process of switching from one-party communism to a democratic system with real private property. Many organizations were undergoing rapid (often overnight) privatization.
Just to give you an idea of the economic chaos, inflation in 1992 was 2000%. You can imagine how that plays out for a production budget.
Yet, despite the turbulence, people tried to create and to entertain.
“ The Soviet version includes some plot elements left out of Jackson’s $93m blockbuster, including an appearance by the character Tom Bombadil, a forest dweller cut from the English-language version because he was too long-winded and failed to move the plot forward.”
This quote speaks volumes about the respective audiences.
98 comments
[ 60.4 ms ] story [ 1932 ms ] threadPart 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLevCLNnLmg
I browse in private mode and clear cookies, looks like they want to show that page for every video in that case. Is there a plugin or tool that works around a page like this?
Self answering: looks like it's an alternative front end to youtube, more details at https://github.com/iv-org/invidious .
Version history: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/412178-youtube-dismiss-sig...
Out of interest I disabled the script and tried the Customize option. Clicking Confirm then tries to redirect me via https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/ads/preferences/cu/optou...?... which is on both my uBlock and Pihole blocklists.
I'll carry on auto-consenting for cookie storage, and auto-deleting them when I close the tab.
Also found this version of The Hobbit (as I don’t know Russian I have no idea if this is solid or not) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekbJdOGAxPQ
(sorry, don't know about English captions. Seems like they aren't available for it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7gbwu0A3s8
I wish the article wasn't so sneering in tone... sneering is good larks if you're on board with it, but if you come in like "oh wait this actually seems interesting" it can be a bit off-putting. However, it is nice to know of this show's existence, and I'm grateful to learn of that.
I find it funny that such production is compared with Jackson’s trilogy now.
I also grew up on Soviet movies and cartoons so this doesn’t look as out of place to me as I guess it might to someone who’s never seen this genre of film.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/startrek/images/2/20/Skino...
Because it was basically a "television play", a hybrid between a theater production and a higher budget TV series/film. Such things were common on Soviet TV.
One has to understand that Soviet Union was relatively poor when compared with the west, especially so during perestroika.
For example "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" is another Soviet tv play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCutJ-7acvg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQWLsZurF5U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YksNxkF2TQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPamQ-khmf8
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2020/08/dd-wait-hang-on-ther...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuKRdgnmO8 - this is the best version in my opinion (aside from the "classic" version with Natalia O'Shea as Takhisis)
http://nyc.qadviser.com/articles/steamtank-featuring-warhamm...
Do not taunt Russian LARPers.
Someone involved with this piece is still bitter that Tom Bombadil was cut from the trilogy.
The thing about Tom Bombadil is that he was an enigma. He wore the ring and did not vanish. Instead, he made the ring vanish. It had no power over him. He was just completely orthogonal to this struggle, which detracts from its urgency. He was neither in the Ralph Bakshi film nor Jackson's, in part because it detracts from the dangerous atmosphere.
He's backstory. The Silmarillion was mostly backstory, is almost 500 pages, and people read that. They can stand a few pages on Tom Bombadil in their adventure story.
And he's so singularly interesting, that I remember him particularly. After 40 years. With no help from the movie industry for sure.
If you get to re-reading it again, just imagine Tom singing his songs as if they were country, like Hank Williams or Garth Brooks-style. Hilarious!
https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
(and yes, this has been refuted countless times but it's really funny)
If he's dangerous, its like the old Gods are dangerous because they may be capricious. They may squash something because they aren't paying attention to it.
LOTR is not an action/adventure book, but the Jackson movie trilogy is. I was very bitter that some characters like Bombadil, Glorfindel, and the Druedain didn't make it into the movies. But the movies are not the book, and I doubt it's possible to make a LOTR movie that's true to the book.
Tolkien plotted by instinct, writing things down and then trying to figure out what that meant. Tom Bombadil was a character from other unrelated stories. He was introduced in a draft of Lord of the Rings that was much more stylistically "Hobbit part 2" than what we eventually got.
But Tolkien was a consummate retconner: once something was written down it it tended to stay. He molded and reinterpreted but rarely removed, until he found something that felt right to him.
That style of writing leaves a lot of tiny inconsistencies -- but inconsistencies that mimic the way any culture's lore evolves. That makes them incredibly intriguing, as if you'd just chanced on Greek myths or the Arthurian legends -- except instead of the product of centuries, it was one obsessive guy.
His ultimate retcon, by the way, is the first published edition of The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings grew out of the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit, but changed in ways that made it incompatible with the original. (In the original Gollum really was going to just give it to him.) So he rewrote it, but the first edition still existed -- and in the intro to LotR, he explains it as Bilbo's propaganda covering up the truth about how he got the Ring.
Actually officially it was "telespactakle" - which basically is theatre production but made for TV instead of being played on live stage. So no surprise here.
https://mashable.com/2015/12/25/soviet-hobbit/
Since then, I've forgotten all my Russian...
Even these soviet tv shows are slowly coming out and are just absolutely fascinating.
Why or how it came to be there, I have no idea, and I regret not inquiring about it, and I also regret not spending more time reading it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_De...
Even the lush Soviet inks had a peculiar inviting smell.
I think the whole thing is on Youtube (as video fragments in a playlist) but is definitely also available as a torrent.
> In the opening song, Romanov sings a rough translation of Tolkien’s description of the origins of the rings of power,
The Soviets had their own Led Zeppelin. Perhaps we weren’t so different after all.
From IMDB:
Parody comedy designed to resemble a non-existent gritty 1980's Cold War Romanian police show that promoted Communist ideals. The action-packed and blood-soaked first season finds Detectives Gregor Anghel and Joseph Baciu investigating the murder of fellow officer Nikita Ionescu and, in the process, unraveling a subversive plot to destroy their country that is fueled by what-else-but the greatest enemy: Capitalism.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834198/
https://youtu.be/bEwE4wyz00o
This was released in 1991, a period of great economic and political turmoil in Russia. They were essentially in the process of switching from one-party communism to a democratic system with real private property. Many organizations were undergoing rapid (often overnight) privatization.
Just to give you an idea of the economic chaos, inflation in 1992 was 2000%. You can imagine how that plays out for a production budget.
Yet, despite the turbulence, people tried to create and to entertain.
This quote speaks volumes about the respective audiences.