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There And Back Again

New Zealand, You Have Hobbit Holes, You Don’t Need To Try So Hard [VIDEO]

by Jill Pantozzi | 6:00 pm, August 25th, 2012


Here we have a New Zealand tourism promotion. Let’s set aside the fact I already wanted to go to both New Zealand and Australia long before Peter Jackson ever took his crews there, the Lord of the Rings films pretty much assured they’d have geek tourists traveling there or years to come. But what I love about this advertisement is that they are so very aware of that fact. Watch as the New Zealand travel board tries to convince is they are totally just Middle Earth made real.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000980670617 Rebecca Ramsey

    I disagree! I think they should just stop being coy about it and declare New Zealand the official Tolkien fan-country and play it up! Get the WETA teams to build full-size recreations of Edoras, Minas Tirith, Moria, Rivendell, and Lorien in addition to the Shire and I’ll go there on every vacation for the rest of my life.

  • Electric Hobo

    just heads up, not really a thing but PJ has always made films there – he hasn’t “taken” his crews.

  • Anonymous

    We visited the Queenstown area shortly after LoTR was released, and it was a real treat. The scenery really looks just that amazing. (We just wanted to see New Zealand, so the whole LoTR thing was just a surprise.) We hired a guide who told us that an awful lot of tourists had reality problems. They wanted to see exactly where Boromir died and the like. Of course, the film crew had built all sorts of props out of plywood and had long ago dismantled them.

    If you want to see fantasy architecture in the area, we’ll recommend the wineries.

  • Anonymous

    That voice-over sounded just like Ian Holm

  • http://www.facebook.com/j.norelius Jenny Norelius

    I’d visit just to have a “warrior princess warm my heart”.
    Might have been 100% middle-earth but that line is so Xena.

  • Anonymous

    Oh man. These things are so cringe inducing. The NZ tourism board always goes a little too far.

    Although for the record we did actually have giant eagles.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast_eagle

    They’ve just been extinct for quite a while and were never, you know, sapient.

  • http://oaktree.dreamwidth.org/ oaktree

    The voice-over was so cheesy, but man, that is one beautiful country. I’d love to visit, and not just for the hobbit holes :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/marky.o.reilly Marky O Reilly

    I just came back from a trip to New Zealand and saw “Hobbiton” and weta. It really isn’t gimmicky, pandering or theme parky at all, just really interesting and awesome. The country is amazing, beautiful and diverse. I think the main thought you have related to LOTR there is that ‘wow, i can see why they chose to film it here, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth’.

  • Anonymous

    Did you mean sentient instead of sapient?

  • Anonymous

    Huh, I guess you did mean sapient.  Just found a use for sapien that doesn’t mean human.  Learn something new everyday :)

  • Anonymous

    Well the sapien part of Homo sapiens means thinking or wisdom, and homo means man.
    So Homo sapiens means thinking man., Homo erectus is upright man, Homo habilis is handy man etc.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000118406114 Natalie Weingartz

    To this day New Zealand is my favorite country to travel to. When I last went was the first time I had watched the LOTR movies while on the trip. It’s an amazingly gorgeous country.

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