Reviews

I really hate to be the guy who whines and complains about Fox canceling something like Arrested Development and green-lighting shows of lesser quality, but this warrants it. How bad is this show? It opens with a joke about a mother believing "O.J. Simpson couldn't hurt a fly!" (the show is based in 1994). That's the very first joke. That's the joke with which Ricky Blitt decided to launch his sitcom; which would be seen by millions of people who just finished watching The Simpsons. I changed the channel before the canned laughter even started, which my roommates found hilarious.

You want to know what the true sodomy of this show is on the American viewers? Fox aired TWO episodes of it on one night. One after The Simpsons and one after Family Guy. I seriously thought the ad for another "all new episode" after Family Guy was a mistake. True to word, the second episode aired. I tried to give it a second chance, hoping the O.J. Simpson joke was a fluke.

Whatever talent Rob Corddry had on the Daily Show did not serve him here. Whatever comedic insights Seth McFarlin and Ricky Blitt had in animation, it doesn't translate to live action. When you combine over-acting with meaningless situations meant to be awkward the end result is completely empty trash.

I'm very confident this won't last. Why? Because if Fox had any faith in this show, they wouldn't have given away two episodes on the first night. If you have a quality product you know people want to see, you milk it for all you can and spread out the goodness. Obviously, that didn't happen here.

For the record, I'm not a movie geek. I commented on one movie years ago. I could count the number of message board posts I've made on one hand. In fact, I'm making this comment rather than posting something on the boards because I honestly don't care what other people think of what I have to say. I'm an average viewer who was insulted by what I saw being presented to me. The saying goes, "if you don't' like it, change the channel." I did change the channel. Twice.

I remember watching this movie back in the early 90's, back before the technology existed for Peter Jackson to do what he did. And for that time, the 1978 cartoon telling of Tolkien's first two books wasn't entirely a bad "movie". Of course, that's only if you don't know anything about the books. If the movie was a sole creation unto itself, then things wouldn't be so bad. However, this is a moderate movie based on one of the greatest works of fiction ever created, so problems arise. Since I had never read the books until 97, this movie seemed interesting.

After I read the books, however, this whole work of animation and rotoscoping gone mad was revealed to me as horrible. The depth of the characters and huge story just didn't seem to be conveyed as I imagined it. At no point in reading Prof. Tolkien's novel did I see the animated characters from Ralph Bakski's (sorry for misspelling your name, sir) movie. So a film that once was rather decent in my eyes was suddenly crap when I realized it botched the source material.

And now, the final nail in the coffin of this flick's decency was the masterpiece of film making accomplished by Peter Jackson and the diligent crew of Weta Workshop. Granted, there was technology available to this production team that simply didn't exist in 1978, however the movie succeeded on a stylist level possible in 1978. For instance, take the look of Boromir. In Jackson's movie, his costume and general style of appearance have been determined after hours of research into the history of Gondor as written by Prof. Tolkien himself. In the 1978 version Boromir is a frickin Viking! He even has a helmet with horns for the love of Pete(r)!

In general, it wasn't the lack of technology that made this a bad movie, it was the near infinitely exceeding love of Tolking that the Jackson crew shared for the source material compared to the 78' crew. Not to mention that any fan of the book would know the Bakski crew hadn't done Prof. Tolkien's novel justice, even in 1978.