{"id":31659,"date":"2018-12-17T07:14:03","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T12:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=31659"},"modified":"2018-12-17T06:59:14","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T11:59:14","slug":"christmas-in-the-shire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=31659","title":{"rendered":"Christmas in the Shire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Last night, for no particular reason, I watched the first of Peter Jackson&#8217;s <em>Hobbit<\/em> film, <em>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/em>.\u00a0 (Thoughts on the trilogy as a whole <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28880\">here<\/a>.)\u00a0 Watching it brought to mind a satirical video I&#8217;d seen years ago of the Rankin-Bass <em>Hobbit<\/em> Christmas special that should have been.\u00a0 Was it still online?\u00a0 A Google search turned it up quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Christmas<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio aligncenter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Christmas\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Qtt0wEMMANg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The Rankin-Bass stop-motion and animated specials of the 1970s collide in this, and watching it I kind of wish that something like this, as un-Tolkien-ian as it is, had been made, circa 1978.&nbsp; Certainly, it couldn&#8217;t be any worse than <em>The Leprechaun&#8217;s Christmas<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This video, which was shown on YouTube in 2012, when the first of Peter Jackson&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Hobbit<\/em>\u00a0films was released, was done by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/ronimation.com\/\">Ronimation<\/a>.\u00a0 This was, sadly, not followed by <em>The Hobbit: The Christmas of Smaug<\/em> and <em>The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Christmasses<\/em> (with the immortal Bilbo Baggins line, &#8220;But what about <em>Second<\/em> Christmas?&#8221;).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One can dream. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night, for no particular reason, I watched the first of Peter Jackson&#8217;s Hobbit film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.\u00a0 (Thoughts on the trilogy as a whole here.)\u00a0 Watching it brought to mind a satirical video I&#8217;d seen years ago of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit Christmas special that should have been.\u00a0 Was it still online?\u00a0 A<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=31659\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Christmas in the Shire&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":31660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135],"tags":[64,45,134],"class_list":["post-31659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tolkien","tag-christmas","tag-j-r-r-tolkien","tag-the-hobbit","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}