Pop Culture Phenomenon Films: 70’s

Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit was just minding his own business, when his occasional visitor Gandalf the Wizard drops in one evening.

One by one, a whole group of dwarves drop in, and before he knows it, Bilbo has joined their quest to reclaim their kingdom, taken from them by an evil dragon named Smaug.

The only problem is that Gandalf has told the dwarves that Bilbo is an expert burglar, but he isn't...

The film, featured vocal performances by Orson Bean, Richard Boone, Hans Conreid, Brother Theodore, Otto Preminger, Cyril Richard, Paul Frees, Don Messick, John Stephenson, Thurl Ravenscroft. John Huston, and Glenn Yarbrough.

For some The Lord of the Rings fans, even if the film is considerably cartoonish, and more of a Saturday morning cartoon, it is still better in some aspects than the Peter Jackson live action film.

Why? They feel like it was more to the point, told the story it needed to be told in a single film, as opposed to a three film movie narrative, given that The Hobbit novel, is only one novel, and a brisk read at 310 pages, and is more closer to the book, than Jackson’s films.

Directed by Jules Bsss and Arthur Rankin, who would later give us The Last Unicorn, it aired on NBC on November 27, 1977 with a budget of $3,000,000.