Last night, for no particular reason, I watched the first of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. (Thoughts on the trilogy as a whole here.) Watching it brought to mind a satirical video I’d seen years ago of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit Christmas special that should have been. Was it still online? A Google search turned it up quickly.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Christmas:
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. Certainly, it couldn’t be any worse than The Leprechaun’s Christmas.
This video, which was shown on YouTube in 2012, when the first of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films was released, was done by Ronimation. This was, sadly, not followed by The Hobbit: The Christmas of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Christmasses (with the immortal Bilbo Baggins line, “But what about Second Christmas?”).
One can dream. 🙂