Hello my beautiful watchers.
Let me take you back, back before the disappointing bloated mess of the 2012 hobbit trilogy, before
the smash hit Lord of the Rings adaptations at the turn of the millennium, even before
Ralph Bakshi rotoscoped Middle Earth into existence in the 70s, all the way back to
June 30th 1967.
Picture yourself as a resident of New York City, out for your daily constitutional, minding
your own business enjoying the hustle and bustle of the busy streets.
Suddenly you are approached by a gentleman, he asks you if you’d be interested in watching
the premier of a movie.
It’s a brand new adaptation of a book that’s really taking off right now and all it will
cost you is a dime.
You hesitate to even spend even that paltry amount on a film you’ve never heard of,
but that's no trouble.
The man gives you 10 cents to give back to him as payment and takes you inside.
What follows is almost certainly the most confusing 12 minutes you’ve had in a long,
long time.
(montage of shots from the film)
After watching the piece, you’re asked to sign a form acknowledging that you technically
paid to see this film and go about your day, probably forgetting all about the strange
incident.
Little do you know, the man you spoke to was Gene Deitch, accomplished animator and director,
and for the next 45 years you would remain one of the mere handful of people who had
seen the first ever on screen adaptation of the works of JRR Tolkien.
What's more, you’d have no idea you had just unwittingly taken part in a scheme that
would end up costing the father of modern fantasy $100,000.
So yeah, it turns out, against all expectations, there's a worse adaptation of The Hobbit out
there than the recent one that featured a love triangle entangled Legolas super mario-ing
his way up a falling bridge.
I beg you to bear with all the way through this one my beautiful watchers because in
my opinion, the only thing more batshit crazy than the film itself is the story behind its
creation.
It's a story of incredible opportunities clashing with terrible timing, of cunning plans and
unfortunately…
Betrayal.
This episode was requested on patreon to be a Lost in Adaptation but alas it is really
not compatible with that format, it's barely even suitable to be an in name only episode…
It's just…
It's nothing, this film is nothing, it has virtually no value whatsoever as a work of
art.
I think that I’m safe in assuming that at this point I really don’t need to synopsize
The Hobbit for anyone right?
A general understanding of the story is common knowledge.
Bilbo Baggins, Lonely mountain, Dragon, Wizard, 13 dwarfs, Gollum, riddles, ring, elves, barrels,
Dale, arkenstone, 5 armies, oh no Thorin's dead?
Yeah?
Splendid.
So we can jump straight into the rundown of what is and will always be its first officially
licensed adaptation.
Please keep that in mind as I describe it.
This is an officially licensed adaptation of The Hobbit.
The film is available in full on youtube with a total run time of 11:43 seconds.
It’s “animated” with massive neon lit quotation marks around the word as there’s
not any actual animation.
It’s just panning shots of still images, some of which look like they might have been
drawn in crayon and sometimes overlaid with an obnoxious amount of flashing lights.
It's entirely narrated by a single person, who also provides all of the character voices
on the few occasions they’re given speaking lines.
Due to an unfortunate choice of colouring, this voice actor appears, at a casual glance,
to be credited as Erbert Ass.
Mr Ass starts by explaining that in the land of middle earth, in the time before men arrived
and ruined everything, there existed the city of dale, rich in gold and gems, the largest
and greatest being the heart shaped arkenstone.
However disaster struck when Slag the terrible lay waste too….
Wait…
Hang on...
Reginald…
The Dragon’s name is Slag?!
Like seriously you're enot joking?
Right then.
There are only three survivors, a watchman who was bad at his job and is absolutely irrelevant
to the story.
“Turin” Oakenshield, the general of the city Garrison and the girl he appears to be
groping, Princes…
Umm..
Look I’ve watched this a dozen times but it's really garbled when Mr Ass says her name
and there's no official subtitles so my best guess is “Speaka Milla Vona”?
“And Princess [absolute gibberish].”
These three are never referred to as Dwarfs so from context I’m only confident in saying
they’re not men or Hobbits.
Turin decides to seek the advice of the great wizard Gandalf, who informs them of a prophecy
that Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit is destined to slay the dragon and save everyone.
Bilbo himself was having a nice time chillaxing in his hobbit hole until they burst in and
eat all of his food.
They explain to him what they want him to do, he politely declines but is guilted into
it by the princess who claims she’ll try alone if he won’t come.
On the way there they’re captured by a pair of Trolls, no I do apologize….
Growns.
Yes apparently they’re captured by growns who attempt to roast them on a spit but Bilbo
uses some sick ventriloquist skills to get them to argue with each other until daylight
and the sun turns them into trees.
Hot off that success Bilbo immediately falls down a hole into an underground cave where
he finds a magic ring that can turn him invisible.
He cheeses it away from the previous owner, Goloom who’s a bit upset about that.
Finally making it to the lonely mountain in which the dragon slumbers, Bilbo uses his
magic ring to sneak into … umm…
“Slags” treasure room and sees the arkenstone.
Hatching a cunning plan, he half inches it and…
Oh good lord…
The team builds a giant crossbow and uses it to shoot the arkenstone into the inappropriately
named dragon, killing it instantly.
Bilbo marries Princess *mumbles*
“Princess [still complete gibberish]”.
they rebuild Dale and rule together for a bit before retiring to live in Bilbo's hobbit
hole.
The story ends on the suggestion that Gandalf might be back to send Bilbo on another quest
someday.
So on top of everything else wrong with this film you might have noticed that the naming
conventions are both inconsistent and bizzah, with some characters retaining their true
to the book designations while others now sound like porn parody titles.
You get why I’m so incredulous right?
It’s the Hobbit you know?
100 million copies sold worldwide.
Seeing an officially licensed adaptation that looks this amateur is like watching an embarrassing
zero budget student film from the 80s and suddenly realising it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Robert Downey Jr and Carrie Fisher.
Maybe there would be like a love triangle or something..kind of wish that was a real
film now.
So many questions spring to mind including but not limited to: Why?
And how?
How is this a thing?
How is this the first officially licensed Tolkien adaptation?
Why is it so crude looking, and so short?
Well, stick with me my lovelies because surprisingly, there are answers to all of these questions.
Though not unsuccessful by any means in their initial publications between the 1930s and
50s, the books of JRR Tolkien were somewhat limited to the UK and didn’t explode into
obscene levels of popularity until the second edition paperback copies of The Lord of the
Rings trilogy were distributed in america in the mid sixties.
Right before this incredible boom, a Mr William Snyder procured the film rights to The Hobbit,
apparently very cheaply due to the book’s lack of notoriety.
Snyder was an american born producer who founded Rembrandt Films, a studio in Czechoslovakia
that provides cheap outsourcing options for American animations, most notably Popeye and
Tom and Jerry.
The creative mind behind the company was Gene Deitch, who passed away in April last year
much to the sadness of fans of his illustration and directing work.
Rembrandt Films most notable claim to fame was producing their own movie Munro, which
became the first picture made outside of the US to win an Oscar for Best Animated Short.
The one stipulation of The Hobbit contract was that they would need to produce a full
colour animated film with an official release on or before june 30th 1967.
If they failed to do this the licence would revert back to Tolkien.
Snyder and Deitch apparently had no idea that they had just bought the island of manhattan
for a couple of beads.
Snyder had purchased the rights because he recognised the Hobbit was a very skillful
piece of writing that was unknown enough to be an interesting jumping off point for Gene
to write his own fantasy tale around.
Neither men were even aware of The Lord of the Rings and how the Hobbit tied into it.
Deitch set about writing what sounds like quite an ambitious project for the small studio
hiding out on the other side of the iron curtain, involving a feature length film sporting musical
numbers and a mix of traditional animation and rotoscoping.
Unfortunately it all came crashing down big time when Snyder tried to play hardball with
20th century fox and demanded a much higher budget than they were prepared to invest.
After all attempts at negotiations failed the project was officially cancelled.
The film rights ended up collecting dust for a year or two until 1967, a mere month before
they were scheduled to revert back to the Tolkien estate due to the lack of promised
movie.
Suddenly The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit was all anyone could talk about.
It seemed like a cruel twist of fate had befallen Rembrandt Films.
They now had one of the most coveted licenses in the world…
But there was absolutely no time to use the book's new popularity to renegotiate with
the american studios and produce a profitable film.
That's when Snyder had a revelation.
There was still a way to make money from this, and they wouldn’t even have to make a real
film.
The contract stipulated it had to be a full colour film that was released in theaters…
But there was no minimum length requirement.
Snyder tasked Deitch with making the shortest, cheapest film he could in the next 30 days
and Deitch delivered JUST in the nick of time, rushing the barely completed product to America
and, as you now know, grabbing a bunch of randos off the street to watch his 12 minute
narrated storyboard.
Having technically fulfilled the contract, Rembrandt Films was now under no obligation
to return the film rights to the Hobbit to Tolkien and his crew.
Eventually they reached an agreement to sell them back to him for $100,000, which I am
very confident in saying is 100 times the cost of the film they had made.
Factoring in inflation it’s close to 800 grand in shitty 2021 moneys.
Now this unfortunately is where the before mentioned betrayal comes in.
Despite him having done all of the work to write, direct, cast and animate a one reel
film in literal days and personally recruiting an audience to see it, allegedly Snyder did
not share one single dime of that 100k with Gene Deitch.
The film was then lost in the mists of time for nearly half a century.
After Snyder died away in 1998 his children took over the studio, and in 2012 his son
found the only existing copy and uploaded it to youtube.
It was originally mislabeled as having come out in 1966 but this was later updated when
additional records were discovered.
Presumably inspired by the memories that seeing it conjured, shortly later Deitch posted an
entry on his blog about his late friend.
It was compassionate, and clearly intended to be as fair as possible, but umm…
Tea was spilt.
The blog is technically gone now, the domain having expired and been brought up by a sport
equipment vendor since Deitch’s death, but my indomitable researcher Kate was able to
find it on the wayback machine and I will link it in the video description.
I must stress this is all hearsay and almost certainly impossible to ever fully prove this
long after the fact and you have to be a little careful when you’re only getting half of
the story because bias can obviously radically inform memories of events, but egad, if half
of what Deitch said about Snyder is true then fuuuck that guy.
Gene summerises in his post what sounds to me like a borderline abusive friendship with
a casually misogynistic narcissist.
He describes years of Snyder emotionally bullying him, cheating him out of money and taking
advantage of him at his weakest moments.
It turns out he had played no creative part in the making Munro, leaving Deitch to do
all of the work, but had happily taken credit for it at the academy awards, accepting the
Oscar and barely mentioning Deitch in his speech.
In particular, the story of the 12 minute Hobbit sounds very different from Deitch’s
perspective.
Instead of a funny scheme to make a ton of cash for little to no work, it's a legitimately
tragic tale of shattered dreams.
Like with Munro, Snyder had left the actual making of the movie entirely to Deitch who,
after being inspired by Tolkien's work, put his heart and soul into preparing for the
intended feature length film.
He admits in hindsight, after Middle Earth’s rise to stardom that some of the changes that
he had planned would have gotten him burned at the stake by book obsessed, adaptation
fanatics *ahem* but he was planning some seriously creative stuff for the animation including
some groundbreaking uses for rotoscoping and 3D backgrounds that sound (on paper at least)
even more ambitious than what Ralph Bakshi pulled off over a decade later.
When Snyder threatened to walk during distribution negotiations and was promptly shown the door,
Deitch’s months of work and effort were completely wasted and, because he was apparently
primarily paid in gross percentage, largely unpaid as well.
Snyder’s bright idea to alternatively monetize the film rights, was a demand that Deitch
hack the screenplay he was so proud of into something so minimal it was basically gibberish.
Getting screwed out of his percentage of the fiscal reward (which by the way, he refers
to as “weazled boodle” earning my admiration) was unfortunate enough but it was only the
start of poor Deitch’s torment.
The dude had to spend the rest of his life watching a myriad of other people get to shoot
their shot at a legitimate Hobbit adaptation, knowing his contribution, the first of them
all, would forever be an embarrassing rushed sideshow and a pawn in a technically legal
extortion racket.
So that's the story of the first and worst Hobbit adaptation.
A film that cost virtually nothing to make, cost viewers nothing to see but a dime that
was handed to them, but ended up costing JRR Tolkien $100,000 and an animation director
named Deitch his dreams of fame and success.
You know I’m starting to see why so few people talk about this now, it's a bit of
a bummer overall.
You know I think I would have liked to have seen the film Deitch was going to make, even
if it sounds like it would have been way off book.
Good or bad it at least would have been a film unlike the version that Snyder made him
cut it down to…
Oh good lord I’ve just realized that makes this The Snyder cut.
Thank you for joining me my beautiful watchers, please forgive me for the repetitive diatribe
but I am behooved to remind you that the youtube algorithm is programed in such a way as to
leave creators with the distinct impression that it's an eldritch nightmare eager to destroy
any channel that's fail to get enough likes, comments and new subscribers to protect them
from it so doing any of those things for me it would be much appreciated.
If you’re interested in extra content check out my patreon page for access to my discord
server and exclusive lost in adaptation and podcast episodes, please take care of yourselves
out there in these troubled times and I hope to see you soon.
I got sword-like fangs Wings Hurricanes
Slag Ass Dragon Bring that Lake-town pain
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah you fighting with this slag ass dragon
Bring an arrow and a bow for this slag ass dragon
Gotta get that Arkenstone from this slag ass dragon
Now Send a Hobbit, try to rob it From this slag ass dragon
Lonely Mountain, got it shoutin’ For this slag ass dragon
That fire’s hot hot hot That’s a slag ass dragon
Sauron wants me in his plot I’m a slag ass dragon
Much love and appreciation to my patrons of honor: Shelby Hotz, Etel Sverdlov and Kat
Harker, shout out to Il Neige for performing this awesome tune, check out his chanel for
more parody and original songs, and a huge thank you to this video’s co producer kate
robinson, she does some really amazing work on her channel that I thon you would really
enjoy so be sure to check that out too.