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Not A Fan Of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit? Watch This Other One, In Russian.

There And Back Again

I’m sort of on the fence about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I saw it in 3D and 48 fps and was not a fan of the new technology, so I’m waiting to see it in 2D and 24 fps before I decide whether or not I liked the film. Regardless, here’s an old version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic (entirely unlicensed of course) called “The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit.” It was made in 1984 and aired on aired on the Leningrad TV Channel. According to the Tolkien Gateway wiki, “This children’s film featured Zinovy ​​Gerdt as ‘The Professor’ (a narrator stand-in for Tolkien), Mikhail Danilov as Bilbo, Anatoly Ravikovich as Thorin, Ivan Krasko as Gandalf and Igor Dmitriev as Gollum. Smaug and the Spiders were portrayed by puppets. Missing in this version are the Trolls, Elrond, Beorn and the Wood-elves. The Goblins are human-like with little makeup and portrayed by dancers from the Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre (as were the inhabitants of Lake Town).”

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(via Kotaku)

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Jill Pantozzi
Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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