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Sci-Fi Movies

Soviet TV Version of Lord of the Rings Rediscovered After 30 Years (theguardian.com) 64

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A Soviet television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings thought to have been lost to time was rediscovered and posted on YouTube last week, delighting Russian-language fans of JRR Tolkien. From a report: The 1991 made-for-TV film, Khraniteli, based on Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, is the only adaptation of his Lord of the Rings trilogy believed to have been made in the Soviet Union. Aired 10 years before the release of the first instalment of Peter Jackson's movie trilogy, the low-budget film appears ripped from another age: the costumes and sets are rudimentary, the special effects are ludicrous, and many of the scenes look more like a theatre production than a feature-length film. The score, composed by Andrei Romanov of the rock band Akvarium, also lends a distinctly Soviet ambience to the production, which was reportedly aired just once on television before disappearing into the archives of Leningrad Television. Few knew about its existence until Leningrad Television's successor, 5TV, abruptly posted the film to YouTube last week [part one | part two], where it has gained almost 400,000 views within several days.
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Soviet TV Version of Lord of the Rings Rediscovered After 30 Years More

Soviet TV Version of Lord of the Rings Rediscovered After 30 Years

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  • In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)

    by NoSleepDemon ( 1521253 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @11:58AM (#61239046)
    Ring finds you!

    Wait... Bugger.

  • Sad what the Bolsheviks did to the Czar, he has been forced to make B-movies for late night television. Going from owning a collection of Faberge eggs to having to direct TV versions of second rate childrenâ(TM)s stories is sad.

  • Vladimir Putin (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @12:30PM (#61239196)

    ... played a very convincing Gollum.

  • Stage play, aye. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jogar the Barbarian ( 5830 ) <greg@NOsPaM.supersilly.com> on Monday April 05, 2021 @12:35PM (#61239220) Homepage Journal

    One of the comments on part 1 confirm the theatre stage play angle:

    "To the foreign people in the comments - It is a theater stage play recorded in the format of tv film. Such kind of format was popular in Soviet Union."

  • Amazingly, a Sir Ian McKellen lookalike plays a hobbit, and there's a Stephen Fry lookalike doing the narration. The production seems to run on almost zero budget, good for a few laughs.
    If you are interested in more Soviet stuff, I suggest a look at the 1986 Kin-Dza-Dza!, which is intentionally funny (a comedy), but with a low budget has really good effects and a very interesting look & story.

  • There is plenty of reason to not watch this film, but hardcore LotR fans should not miss it : the scene in the Old Forest with Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil is included. That said, it's clearly a made for TV film that was done on a low budget using "B" list actors, but I don't regret watching it.
  • Finally, a LoR movie that doesn't cut Tom Bombadil!
  • Would be nice to see a version with an english voice over or subtitles. Just looking at the production quality of this, I doubt even a bad voiceover would take much from it. Seems like it would be good for some laughs looking at just how bad the production quality is, but the whole not understanding any of it.

  • "Well, at least we didn't do the worst version of The Lord of the Rings!"

    *Yeah, I know Rankin is dead. His shade sighed in relief...

    • The 1978 Saul Zaentz "vision" of The Fellowship of the Ring is a crime against humanity. But pretty much everything Saul got involved with was crap, except for Creedence. The Rankin and Bass "Hobbit" cartoon is much more entertaining, and the music is decent.
  • I mean, his was basically a top-down command economy focused on industrial advancements. I certainly don't recall seeing any bourgeoisie orcs making a tidy capitalist profit, so it can't be laissez-faire capitalism. And I can't imagine that they average joe from the countryside would win out over the structured and ordered society being built by Great Leader.

    • There was a post-Soviet Russian novel about the Orcs being the good guys in an industrial society, always being oppressed by elves. "The Last Ringbearer." Probably reflects somewhat the Soviet era view (possibly North Korea view) of being high oppressed by the evil empires of America, Europe, etc.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by lxnt ( 98232 )

        Now that is a curious interpretation of "The Last Ringbearer".

        In my opinion it's mostly pro-scientific as opposed to magical thinking.

  • I skimmed through it. Most of the scenes look very cramped like it was filmed in a closet. What the hell man, Russia has the most land of any country and they had to film most if not all of it (including outdoor scenes) in a closet? The blue screen scenes -- many of which were just outdoor shots .. look terrible. Couldn't the KGB steal western blue screen technology or maybe they could have asked for it on a humanitarian basis I'm sure we would have obliged. Only the costumes seem like somebody put some car

    • Re: Budget (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @03:13PM (#61239852)

      In 1989 when Americans were enjoying cordless telephones, cable and satellite TVs, and cars with keyless entry and automatic transmission, my university-educated professional parents' apartment in the capital of Ukraine had a single rotary dial telephone shared on a party line, a single tube television that recieved at most 8 channels, and (in a ratity), my father owned an automobile...with a manual transmission, no rear differential and a backup hand crank in case the battery discharged after sitting too long and couldn't get the engine to turn over.

      No matter how much space or mineral wealth or arable land there was, the place was a shithole country up and down.

      • In the UK during 1989 it was more like the Ukraine in terms of technology than the US - rotary phones were still very much a feature, although party lines were less so and touch tone phones were starting to come in, satellite was something for rich people, everyone else had to make do with BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4 (I didn't know one person with either cable or satellite growing up, no one at my school had either). We got Channel 5 in the late 1990s. Keyless entry cars were something for the extreme

        • Different places adopted different consumer technologies differently I suppose. But to say Western Europeans prefer manuals now and back then doesn't erase the fact that those sporty manuals don't need hand cranks, or batteries that require the owner to top them off every few months.

          To be sure, sealed batteries didn't materialize overnight and most people carry jumper cables in their cars, but I have never used mine in 14 years of owning my car and can count on one hand the number of times I've seen them us

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jemmyw ( 624065 )
          Cable TV never took off in the UK. But as I remember it, many people had Sky satellite TV. My parents house was in a grade 1 listed complex, and there were endless battles between other home owners because you couldn't modify the outside of the building to erect a satellite dish, so people would try to hide them, then someone else would report it. It got pretty heated and ended up with our immediate neighbour having to remove their conservatory because someone complained that hadn't had correct permissions.
        • I grew up in USSR. Please stop comparing it to First-World countries like the UK. It is highly insulting to those of us who actually lived in a Soviet satellite.

      • Maybe the USA was like that, but the rest of "the West" wasn't. Rotary dial phones, manual transmissions, and, where I lived, TWO TV channels...

        But many of those trappings of 80s affluence were crap anyway. Early cordless phones had interference, short battery life, and were trivially easy to eavesdrop on (OK, maybe not quite as easy as a party line phone!). 80s automatic transmissions were woeful. Etc... Maybe your university educated professional parents just decided not to pay the "early adopters" penalt

        • The metro and the trolley cars were quite nice. It was built as a communist vanity project. Not as ornate as the moscow metro but on par with the dc metro in aesthetics.

          Food availability was poor by Western standards. Not starvation (at least not in my day, but before then...), but much less variety, much more seasonality, and much less convenience. Separate shops for dairy, butcher, baker, vegetables, dry goods. Long lines. Without a free market to tickle it, there was no incentive to make convenience fron

        • I grew up in Moldavia, which was very similar to Ukraine. Here are some brief descriptions of our life conditions. HEALTHCARE: Free. Long lines in clinics, minimal electronic equipment. Technology lagging behind the West by decades. No per-patient electronic monitors in hospitals - they were just a multitude of rooms with beds. Ambulances took 3-to-infinity hours to arrive, that is to say half the time they simply would not. My mom had to bribe someone to get me some medical cream that you can simply get

      • No matter how much space or mineral wealth or arable land there was, the place was a shithole country up and down.

        Working in IT I get to meet lots of former Eastern Bloc citizens who have since immigrated or their children, and the story is exactly the same every_single_time. Whether Ukraine, Poland, Czech, Hungary etc Socialism brought inhuman conditions on millions and millions on of people, why do the American Left just pretend this never happened? Why do they chase this with such ignorance?

        • I was such a citizen. The Americans in general have intellectually degraded as a whole, which made them susceptible to basic Soviet brainwashing, the century-old KGB strategy of cutting the legs from under a capitalist regime by making capitalism "racist" and morally equating it to feudalism. We brainwashed your visiting dignitaries and even the everyday Joes by default. American visitors (with their weird smiling habit - what was there to smile about?), were kept at a distance from us regular Soviet citiz
      • Your dad had it pretty good. Most of us in Moldavia didn't have cars either. Let us not omit the other details of Soviet life, such as cavity repair done on children and adults alike without anesthetics or water/suction machines, and the perpetual use of Izvestia and Pravda for toilet paper. Actual toilet paper was unaffordable and unavailable, except for the INTURIST hotels in which they gaslit the Western visitors into thinking the genpop shared their quality of life. You crumbled it and then you wiped yo
  • That's "telespektakl", which means "TV-play" — a theater production shot in a TV studio (rather than in a theater). It was not supposed to be a normal feature film (not that anything even marginally sophisticated was even possible in the USSR).

  • Wow, that is incredibly bad. (Score:3)

    by rMortyH ( 40227 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @07:34PM (#61240790)

    It's really bad.

    It's amazingly, mind-numbingly bad.

    It's one of the worst things I've ever seen.

    It's so bad, that is just might end up being a classic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caviare ( 830421 )

      It's so bad, that is just might end up being a classic.

      For some perhaps, but not others. You may watch "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and find it so bad that it's good. Or you may find it simply bad. A waste of time that you will never get back.

      • "Manos the hands of fate" the same. If you can make it through the 15 minutes of driving to the master's lair, it is gold.
      • On my list there is also 'Pulgasari', 'Who killed captain Alex'. But you need to have some cultural context as well.

  • The fireworks were pretty spectacular (Score:3)

    by bensafrickingenius ( 828123 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @08:49PM (#61240978)
    I mean, whoa.
  • Ahaha! OMG, that's so funny!

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