A Brief (?) History of SF Productions--Part 6
Let's talk about Bored of the Rings.
Anyone who's read Tolkien's work or sat through the films knows this is a huge concept to take on. However, Eric and I foolishly felt it could be done, and he turned the books into a set of talking points he used as the narrator. It took eight months and six tapes at 45 minutes apiece--that's 4.5 hours of silliness. We could have cut it down it we hadn't taken a detour at the British Royal Wedding--more later--and if we didn't repeat a lot of what the narrator said.
There's a lot of drug references in BotR (what do you think pipeweed is?), which is ironic because you would be hard pressed to find a more teetotaling group than SF--at least one member is an ordained minister, for gosh sake. So, our references are broad and poorly done. This also made it impossible to skip the whole Tom Bombadil scene that Peter Jackson skipped.
We tied "The Ring" to class rings, since we were ordering them at school at the time. Also, the Orcs seem to have a lot of machine guns.
Mark Saylor took the role of Merry, and mistakenly assumed a high female voice throughout. Mike covered the Ring Wraiths by sniffing close to the microphone. Did I mention that the others had not read Tolkien at that time?
Anyways, take a listen to highlights(?) from the first two episodes of Bored of the Rings...