Tuesday, April 06, 2021

The Soviet Fellowship of the Rings



In the final days of the Soviet Union, a full-length version of The Fellowship of the Ring was aired on Soviet TV. It was thought lost forever, but now it's available at YouTube. The Guardian tells us more:

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.
Here's part two.



There are no subtitles, but you can auto-generate English subtitles which are incomplete and may or may not be anywhere near accurate. There are too many ads, but most are skippable. (via Metafilter)

2 comments:

Andy said...

Looks a lot like Peter Jackson's The Hobbit in HFR.

WilliamRocket said...

I loved the books when I first read them at age 14, but my first glimpse of The film by Peter Jackson had me searching for something better to watch.
We see the movie in our heads when we read, and it is hard to get that actually on film, but Jackson's attempt was so twee you would need a bucket to watch it for any length of time.