RE:View - The Hobbit (1977)

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit... Many ages ago, when this ancient planet was not quite so ancient, long before man recorded his history, there was the time of Middle-earth, where man shared his days with elves, dwarves, wizards, goblins, dragons and... hobbits.”

- Rankin/Bass The Hobbit (1977)

On a Sunday evening, Thanksgiving weekend in 1977, those lines became a gateway drug for a group of kids that would be called Generation X.

November was what was known as Sweeps Month back in the Before Times of the Three Networks known as the Second Age of TV. That night it was up against The Six Million Dollar Man (Target Steve Austin) and All in the Family (Archie and the KKK). NBC decided to go for the family market that night, and handily won the night.

There is no getting across to kids of later generations what a TV Special meant to us. You had no control over it whatsoever. None. You either watched it at the exact time the network scheduled it for or you didn’t watch it at all that year. You could possibly catch a missed episode of a regular show during reruns in the summer but not a Special. Miss it and it was gone, no place to rent it, and streaming it was decades away. When you heard that Special fanfare from the TV you dropped everything and ran!

A few guitar strings were plucked, one by one, and then John Huston’s unmistakable cadence read the first words Tolkien published about the world that would become Middle-earth. There was a respect there for what J.R.R. Tolkien began with that sentence.

The “Many ages ago” that followed was intended to draw children into myth and it worked magnificently. Tolkien nerds used to regard it as heresy because Tolkien didn’t write it but then they had no idea what horrors the future held.

Even at the time it was hardly the worst version of The Hobbit. That would be the Hobbit (1966) a 12 minute “rights retainer” featuring Princess Mika and Slaag the Dragon whom Bilbo kills at the end. There had been radio and play adaptations before 1977, mostly British naturally. The rights to Hobbit had been sold separately by Tolkien then parceled out again and again after that.

By 1977 The Hobbit’s rights were such a trainwreck that Arthur Rankin was able to snatch up the TV rights for pennies with the following opening credit “Based on the Original Version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.” The rights for that being distinct from the 1951 revision, which is what the TV special was actually based on. In the 1937 edition, Elves were called, Gnomes” (from the Greek gnosis for “knowledge.” And Bilbo won the ring from Gollum fair and square, they even parted on friendly terms. Those and some other changes were enough to make it legally distinct.

And the Rankin/Bass version was certainly distinct in its own right. It looks like something made by Studio Ghibli – Because it was made by Studio Ghibli.

Okay, fine. It was made by Topcraft although, when that studio failed the remains became Studio Ghibli, and you can absolutely see the design DNA in The Hobbit.

You can also see Tolkien’s come to that, his own Thrór’s Map was used directly in the TV show and was part of the influence of the design aesthetic. J.R.R Tolkien approved of Arthur Rackham artwork and it was clearly another strong influence. The Hobbit (1977) was a Japanese take on the Western fairytale as grotesque. You can see its influence in Nausicaä. Rankin/Bass helped keep the lights on at Topcraft until Nausicaä came out. The Japanese approach isn’t interested in cleaning the fairy tale up, it leans into the distortions. Faces stretch, bodies warp, and the line between the comic and the unsettling disappears. What reads as “off” to a Western eye is often deliberate: characters are designed to move, to emote, to perform, even if that means abandoning symmetry or beauty. It turned what was supposed to be a children’s story into something just a little grimdark - perfect for its Generation X audience.

It was an art design for Tolkien when no one agreed what that looked like and there weren’t any brand managers ruining it. There was also some leftover hippy influence clinging to it, like your older sister’s boyfriend’s van that still smelled “funny.” College age-Boomers had first experienced Tolkien – differently.

Which was also part of the reason folk-singer Glenn Yarlborough was brought on board. Maury Laws wrote the music, Jules Bass (as in Rankin/Bass) himself wrote the lyrics, but Glenn Yarbrough owns the soul of it. His singing acts as secondary narrator punctuating the emotional beats story. The music was breaking its back carrying the audience into myth.

The beginning narrator is John Huston, for millions of American kids, he was the first Gandalf. Gravely, ancient, tired authority, a voice that had been present since the birth of the world. It made the story feel like something that had been locked away for centuries, and only now you’re being allowed to hear it. Huston’s narration carried bone weary but immense undeniable weight.

The entire voice cast was better than it had any right to be. Rankin/Bass was always willing to spend money on voice talent and the budget for this special was an at the time ludicrous $3 million for a kid’s show.

Orson Bean’s performance is deceptively simple which is exactly why it works. His Bilbo doesn’t try to be heroic, he just sounds like a man who would very much prefer to be home, which turns out to be exactly what the story needs. He wanted to go on an adventure and found out that an adventure is someone else in deep shit far, far away.

Richard Boone still owns Smaug. A tired, dangerous intelligence that knows it’s the smartest thing in the room. A calm dominant voice that doesn’t need to prove anything. Benedict Cumberbatch is Try-Hard Smaug by comparison.

Otto Preminger… Otto Preminger! …gave Thranduil a voice that was cold, controlled, and slightly alien. He projected power without warmth. Exactly right for the Wood elf king.

Darklings: What the hell was up with the Wood Elves anyway? Those things leaned too hard into grotesque.

Granted but that wasn’t a mistake, it was a choice. The Woodland Realm in The Hobbit isn’t Lothlórien; these aren’t ethereal angels in flowing robes. They’re older, stranger, and a little bit wild and a little bit dangerous, more in line with the fairy courts of older European folklore where beauty and menace sit side by side. Rankin/Bass, filtered through Topcraft, pushes that just far enough to make them feel wrong – and that wrongness is exactly the point. Remember, these were elves that had refused the Call to Valinor and they stayed and diminished when the High Elves returned to Valinor at the end of the Third Age. Fading until the world had no place for them.

Elrond was as an intriguing contrast. He was presented as a higher, elevated, more ancient and more othered being. He’d been on Middle-earth longer than Gandalf. He could read runes from the First Age that even the wizard could not. The halo around his head was a very distinct touch and was kind of a compromise. Topcraft knew Elrond was supposed to glow but with 1970s animation technology that was just too expensive. It did its job. He was voiced by Cyril Ritchard.

Voice artists Paul Frees, Don Messick and Jack DeLeon batted clean up providing most of the rest of the major characters.

Except for Theodore Gottlieb who played Gollum.

Gollum is where Rankin/Bass quietly shifts the entire tone of the film. Up to that point, The Hobbit still carries the trappings of a children’s adventure. In the dark under the mountain, that pretense drops. Gottlieb’s performance is not playful, and it isn’t cute. It’s wet, whispering, and deeply uncomfortable. More creature than character. For millions of American kids, this was their first encounter with Gollum, and it wasn’t tragic or sympathetic. It was something you didn’t want to meet in the dark. The animation leans into it; big eyes, slack mouth, a presence that feels wrong in a way the rest of the film doesn’t. It’s the first moment where Rankin/Bass lets horror bleed through the edges, and it lands harder because nothing before it quite prepares you for it.

Was it overdone? No. Gollum isn’t a creature – he’s the living horror of what’s left of Sméagol’s soul after the Ring is finished with him and has discarded the remains.

Horror was something new for Rankin/Bass. Their earlier work lived in the safe, sentimental world of holiday specials; The Hobbit is where they first let something genuinely unsettling slip through, trusting the material enough not to sand down its teeth.

Violence was also something new as well and quite a problem in 1977. Some half-assed and half-baked pop-science that was a lot heavier on the feels than the facts, had decreed TV violence was responsible for all juvenile delinquency and street crime. This was why the A-Team fired off a hundred thousand rounds over a hundred episodes without (basically) killing anyone.

And the Hobbit was full of violence. The Trolls turning to stone wasn’t a problem but Orcrist living up to its name definitely was. The show had to use a number of tricks to suggest without showing the result of swords doing their bloody work. Truthfully, it’s the weakest part of the movie but on a 1977 network movie aimed at kids, it was pushing things as far as it dared. Glamdring turning the Goblin King into a ghost was as explicit as it could get.

And yet, despite all of that, it works. Not because it faithfully reproduces every event, but because it preserves the feeling of danger. You always understand that the characters are in over their heads, even when the show has to pull its punches. The stakes are still there, even when the blood isn’t. And for a 1977 network audience, that was more than enough.

When it was finished Generation X was left panting for more.

We kinda-sorta got it. Ralph Bakshi made his famous animated version of the Lord of the Rings, which covered Fellowship and half of the Two Towers. It made a real profit but Saul Zaentz and Bakshi nearly came to blows over the sequel and it died in development.

Rankin/Bass had a line on the TV rights to Lord of the Rings as a separate issue. However, they got hit with a lawsuit from the Tolkien estate claimning their version of Middle-earth was only covered by the “Original Version” of The Hobbit which was not connected to the Lord of the Rings… I am not going through this. Bottomline they settled and chose to make Return of the King because it was better than nothing. Although, they could not use the name, Lord of the Rings.

The result was something that would be unthinkable today: no complete version of The Lord of the Rings existed on screen. Not really. You had pieces of it, scattered across studios, formats, and competing visions, but nothing that held together from beginning to end. If you wanted the whole story, you still had to go back to the book.

Does it hold up?

The ‘Yes,’ I’m giving Rankin/Bass is more qualified than I’d like it to be, given my own affection for it. But there are issues and they shouldn’t be swept aside. It’s critics do have some valid points.

The biggest is story compression, this was a three hundred twenty page book being compacted into 78 minutes. Story compression was an issue that J.R.R. Tolkien famously loathed. Beorn the Skin Changer was cut out. A lot of the journey was cut out. The trip home and Bilbo arriving just in time to prevent Bag-end from being auctioned off was gone too. The Arkenstone is gone entirely, which is more significant than it sounds. Even the 1966 version managed to include it, because the Arkenstone isn’t just a plot device, it’s the moral center of the final act.

These weren’t small omissions. If you’d read the book first, their absence was an empty crater.

But this movie’s intended audience had never read the book. That is why this TV movie was so vitally important.

The Hobbit (1977) wasn’t just an adaptation. It was a handoff.

For the Boomers, Tolkien had been something discovered in dog-earred paperbacks passed around college dorms, something half-claimed and half-understood. But for Generation X, it arrived differently. It came through a TV set, on a specific night, at a specific hour, and if you were there, you saw it, all at the same time. You talked about it in school on Monday morning all at the same time.

That mattered immensely.

Because you didn’t have to read Tolkien first. You didn’t have to be told what a hobbit was, or a wizard, or a dragon. You already knew. It was already there, somewhere in the back of your mind, waiting to be filled in later, when you went to the library and asked the nice lady behind the desk if they had a copy of The Hobbit?

That’s how mythology works. Not as something you study, but as something you absorb.

The Hobbit (1977) didn’t preserve Tolkien. It didn’t standardize him. It didn’t even fully understand him. But it did something far more important.

It made him familiar to all of the next generation, all at once.

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