Actually, I prefer Meet the Feebles to FOTR. You should try hanging out in a record store where people come in and ask the staff, “Do you have that song that goes, ‘I love you’?”
Could be worse. Recently – at Wal-Mart – I was looking at magazines when this guy walks up and begins thumbing through some paperbacks in a cardboard display, right?
It’s worth noting that he’s a redneck. Well, maybe he’s not, but he sure had the “look” down. John Deere ballcap, sleeveless T-shirt, ratty jeans, and sneaks. His female companion is wearing a sort of shapeless dress thing, which worked for her since she was about four feet tall and shaped kind of like a sofa pillow.
He then asks his female companion if they should get these books and this DVD for Laura Thurangs.
It took me a minute to make the hookup. They weren’t buying books and a DVD for their friend, Laura Thurangs. “Laura Thurangs” was the NAME OF THE BOOK…
Yes, could you please run that by me again, I seem to have completely missed your point there. Thanks much.
Rhum: Try pronouncing the name then think of a thick southern accent
Or try pronouncing Lord of the Rings in a thick southern drawl
A friend of mine recently saw FOTR for the first time and was very surprised because:
The ring is Evil!
The pre-teen girls sitting behind me when I saw TTT in the theatre wanted to know what happened to Frodo and Sam’s shoes.
The OP is too much like the following tidbit which I read in (IIRC) Ralph Gleason’s San Francisco Chronicle column in circa 1973.
Gleason wrote of being in a record shop and seeing a teenybopper flip through the cutout bins of album. Said kid holds up a Beatles album and says…
Wait for it…
“Hey look, McCartney was in a group before Wings!”
More info on the incredible Ralph Gleason
:mad: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!
You mean the Quarrymen?
Just kidding. That’s fucked up, man.
We need to cull ourselves. Badly. Some people are just wasting our precious oxygen here!
This is why I cringe when they make movies out of my favorite books! Everyone says, “Well, it’s not like the book doesn’t exist anymore”, but then you have idiots in bookstores going “Look what they done made a book outta!”
(Semi-related story) I heard one of the parents at my kids’ school the other day describing how she had read the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” from her child’s literature book. “It was deep. I had to read it twice!”
More than once, I have thought back to that redneck at Wal-Mart… sitting on the ancient couch in his trailer home… the DVD playing… a paperback “Lord Of The Rings” in hand… trying to follow Prof. Tolkien’s delicate prose, and to reconcile it with what’s going on on the DVD player…
Then again, I shouldn’t make fun of him. He’s tryin’, at least…
Believe it or not, many people the world over have never read Tolkien or care to read Tolkien. This message board tends to skew towards people who read fantasy, in my opinion, but not knowing that the Lord of the Rings was a book is not exactly a high crime or a reason to be stunned or evidence of ignorance.
I was a ware that Tokien had written the trilogy and was vaguely aware of the plot outline (and had read The Hobbit) before I saw the movie. It’s not something that really interests me. And while it might be the giant of its genre, it’s a genre that many people don’t care about.
But Zoff a substantial part of the promo for the movie went on and on about “Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkein’s books.” Even if you never heard of the book prior to the movie, it would be pretty hard to know the movie was in the theatres without hearing something about its source.
There was coverage about how the book’s fans were responding. There was coverage about how they had to take some artistic license because the book was so long and detailed… and so on and so on.
By the time the Oscar hooplah had come about, if you didn’t know that it was adapted from a book, it means you hadn’t picked up a newspaper.
Well, I have never read the LOTR books either. Not for any particular reason; I just never really got into the fantasy genre. But I at least knew of their existence since I was a little kid, since they were often the subject of much conversation.
I don’t expect everyone I know to have read Hamlet, but my jaw would hit the floor if you hadn’t heard of it or didn’t know who wrote it.
That’s by J K Rowling isn’t it??
So would I, but Shakespeare is much more a part of our culture and literary history than Tolkien.
I don’t remember much about them hyping it as an adaptation. I’m not saying you’re not right, but it didn’t really register with me so it might not have registered with a lot of people.
I understand that it might seem weird to some, but many people were first introduced to Lord of the Rings from the movie. And a lot of people who saw it because it was a good movie, not because of any particular love of fantasy novels or movies. And I think people who like fantasy (or like any particular genre of literature) are amazed when the world doesn’t know about an element of their love. For instance, somebody has shown amazement that her friend didn’t know the ring was evil. Well, guilty as charged. I didn’t know much about the ring, nor would most people who don’t share a love of fantasy novels.
That isn’t quite as goofy as it sounds, I think. More than one movie made from a book has then been “novelized” so that both the novelization of the movie and the original book exist. Little Women and Planet of the Apes spring to mind. In any event, it’s true you’d think the name of the author would be a giveaway, but I can understand their wanting to get the “original.”
SEE!?!? SEE!?!? THAT’S WHY I SAID THEY SHOULD NEVER HAVE MADE THE MOVIES!!! LOOK WHAT HAPPENED! THEY MADE A BOOK OUT OF IT!?!?!? THEY MADE A BOOK OUT OF IT!?!? WHAT KIND OF CRAZY, EVIL THING HAS PETER JACKSON WROUGHT, WHEN PEOPLE SEE LORD OF THE RINGS IN THE BOOKSTORE AND ARE SURPRISED THAT THEY MADE A BOOK OUT OF IT!?!?!?!?
takes a tranqualizer and colapses on the couch with a copy of the Silmarillion
What gets me is the number of replicas of the One Ring that are sold on eBay and in catalogues for people to wear. There’s even a wedding ring based on the One Ring. How sick is that?
Personalized Tengwar Runes Band “One Lord to guide them and with these rings bind them”.
'Long as I’m hijacking, I may as well brag… mr. emilyforce is the coolest ever and he teaches an intro-to-linguistics class organized around Tolkien’s languages.
He’s also the handsomest linguist in the whole entire world and universe but he’s MARRIED, so don’t y’all go getting any ideas.