Here's a cool piece that's a retrospective from the vantage point of twenty years after Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring dropped into the middle of nerddom like a strafing run by an ancient giant red dragon.
I still remember being at my ex's house back in April of 2000, taking a break from a Diablo LAN party to do a bit of surfing, and stumbling across this video at The One Ring...
...and by "remember", I mean I was drinking a Sweetwater 420 and, when the video loaded over the shiny new DSL line, I blurted "Ohhhh, shit! They're really going to do it and it looks like it's gonna be good!"
At the time, I'd thought that our chance at seeing a good live action LotR adaptation was blown for a decade by the Lucas/ILM vehicle Willow turning in a less-blockbusterish-than-expected performance in theaters despite the most intensive marketing campaign I can remember for a fantasy flick up to that time.
Back in 1988, I watched Willow in its first run and was actually upset. They obviously had the technology to do a Tolkien movie if they wanted to, and instead they squandered it on this project, which wasn't funny enough to be Time Bandits, wasn't serious enough to be Dragonslayer, and wasn't self-aware enough to be The Princess Bride. I'd thought that the chances of a good live-action adaptation of The Lord of the Rings were toast for for the foreseeable future, but Peter Jackson managed to secure studio interest by the mid-late Nineties.
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