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"I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago when-"
"Yes, I know, I was, like, ten feet away."

Not really an issue either way. If they want him there he can be, but if not, it's a big continent, with plenty going on that could require his attention even during such a climactic event.
More important the the battle for all of Middle-Earth?

Ok.
 


Watched the fourth episode last night. I was taken aback at how extensively it mined LotR for plot elements that were cut from the Peter Jackson movies (Bombadil and the Barrow Wights) and how they were dropped in whole-cloth (taking many lines of dialogue directly from the book) with very little context, like Amazon was showing off that it's licensed to use the novel.

On the halfling front, I got a very "Wizard of Oz" vibe starting with the cyclone at the end of episode three and then the arrival in the munchkin village. Not necessarily bad, but it seems like crossing the streams a bit. Someone could make a really good WoO these days.
 

If Tolkien were still alive he would be vilified on social media for changing canon.
I would like to think he'd be smart like JRRT and just stick to his LiveJournal page and stay the heck off of all other forms of social media.
It’s remarkable how much more vitriolic people get when the source material is fiction than when it is historical.
Boy, you really missed some big news stories in the last decade.
 



I haven't seen the musical, but the book was great. Of course, I was talking more about a direct adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
This probably merits being in its own thread, but the musical (of which this movie only adapts the first half) actually improves on the last 25% of the novel, IMO, when Maguire kind of climbed up his own butt when he realized he had a chance to get this reviewed by the New Yorker and other literary critics.

I love the original Baum books and the Shanower comics from the 1990s (and not so much the Thompson novels that followed Baum's), but I think they'd need a lot more added into them to be a satisfying movie nowadays. Characterization is limited, the language is dated (the first Oz novel was published 124 years ago) and a lot of the world-building might seem a little strange to today's audiences. There are just random isolated societies living over the next hill from each other, per the maps even from Baum's time and plenty of powerful witches, even after Ozma returns to power and theoretically restores order to Oz.

I thought the musical did a great job of giving a more modern take on things while still being extremely respectful and loving of the source material, as opposed to a lot of the cynical cash-ins in film, novel and comic form over the last decade. (Sexy Oz or slasher Oz aren't shocking or clever, folks. Doing something new and great while still fitting in the world Baum created is a lot harder and more impressive and likely to get you money from Oz fans. See Andrew Kolb's great Oz RPG setting book, for instance.)
 


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