45 Years Ago, One Movie Proved That Adapting Tolkien Is Impossibly Difficult

There are a lot of different kinds of Tolkien fans. There are those who refuse to refer to the three novels — The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King — as separate books, arguing instead that those are merely installments in one very long book. There are people who love the Peter Jackson movie trilogy. There are people who hate Peter Jackson's Hobbit films. There are those who defend those films. Still other fans think the 1977 Hobbit was a masterpiece, while few fans continue to pine for that half-glimpse of a punk-rock aesthetic from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated Lord of the Rings.

Among all these different breeds of Middle-earth heads though, the rarest kind is the fan who loves the 1980 animated version of The Return of the King with their whole Hobbit heart. Today, 45 years after this movie aired as a TV special, it remains a curiosity in the pantheon of Tolkien adaptations. And here’s the thing: Even though it's slightly hard to track down this version of The Return of the King, the various haters who have skewered the film for the past four decades are generally wrong. The 1980 Return of the King isn’t great, but it’s delightful and bizarre in a way that makes it essential viewing.

After their success with the 1977 animated Hobbit, Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass set to work on a sequel, which would specifically adapt Return of the King, but through the frame of The Hobbit. An early script was called Frodo, The Hobbit II, which was penned by Romeo Muller with input from Rankin, especially in terms of the storyboards for the movie.

Somewhat coincidentally, in between the 1977 Hobbit and the 1980 Return of the King was the 1978 Ralph Bakshi movie The Lord of the Rings, which was partially animated and also employed rotoscoping techniques.

In terms of coherence, the 1978 Lord of the Rings is the least watchable of these three vintage animated Middle-earth adventures, even if it is a bit more artistically ambitious than the Rankin and Bass Return of the King. That said, one could watch The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978) and The Return of the King (1980) and more, or less, get the broad strokes from all four books. Legend has it that Rankin and Bass did Return of the King because Bakshi was adapting Fellowship and The Two Towers with his animated Lord of the Rings. But this isn’t the case. Bakshi had, at one point, planned to do a follow-up film that would have adapted Return of the King, too, meaning, in some alternate universe, there might have been competing animated version of Return of the King floating around in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. In fact, the Tolkien estate did have a legal dispute with Rankin and Bass over The Return of the King, citing the fact that the animation studio hadn’t secured the rights to adapt anything beyond The Hobbit. This lawsuit was settled eventually, and on May 11, 1980, The Return of the King aired as a TV special on ABC.

There are many weird things about this adaptation, but perhaps the most obvious oddity is the idea that the entire story of The Return of the King is told in flashback. We begin at another one of Bilbo’s birthday parties, but this time Gandalf, Sam, Frodo, Pippin, Merry, and even Elrond are there. Bilbo is basically senile and doesn’t seem to remember why Frodo now has nine fingers. Cue a minstrel, who starts playing a ballad called “Frodo of the Nine Fingers,” which will, of course, explain how he came to lose his finger, and the One Ring that rode upon it.

This goofy attempt to fuse the more child-like elements of The Hobbit with the more serious tone of The Return of the King is fairly unsuccessful. But the fusion of competing tones isn’t exactly the movie’s fault, but rather, part of the challenge of adapting Tolkien in general. Memes and reductive videos from fans might make you think that the difference in tone between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is like when Tolkien just flipped a switch, switching over from fairy tale mode to hardcore epic fantasy. But that’s just not true.

The first half of the book version of Fellowship recreates much of the innocence of The Hobbit, and gradually builds into a darker and more complex tale. The Peter Jackson movies, for the most part, don’t wait as long to make things hardcore and serious, and when he adapted The Hobbit, he basically didn’t even try to straddle these tonal contradictions because, let’s face it, it’s just really, really hard.

In this way, the 1980 Return of the King is like the opposite of Jackson’s Hobbit movies. Whereas Jackson tried to make a lighter story more hardcore, Rankin and Bass tried to make a more hardcore story a little bit lighter. This somewhat misguided marriage of styles is probably best exemplified in the infamous musical number “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way.”

Here, while Frodo and Sam hide out in the shadow of Mount Doom, the Orcs are marched into battle by another Orc, who is whipping them. Turns out not all the Orcs want to go to war, and the sick beats of the song will never let you forget it.

And yet, much of the imagery from Return of the King is intact in this version. The moment when Eowyn declared “I am no man!” and defeats the Witch King is particularly good, as is Gandalf’s confrontation with Denethor. There’s even a bit of novelty in having the version of Gollum from the 1977 Hobbit rendered even more hideous and deranged in this version. In some sense, because this animated Return of the King is trying to be cutesy, that fact makes the undeniable dark material in the story even darker.

You can legally stream the animated 1980 Return of the King online right now, unless you want to wade into the depths of the Internet Archive. Instead, the best way to watch this Return of the King is to track down a DVD. The clips online will give you an idea of why this version is both bonkers and wonderful. But watching the entire movie is worth your time. This may not be the most perfect Tolkien spell ever cast, but it is one of the most interesting and honest.