A Weekend at the Books.
This week in "Mike Read a Book", I finished off two books by guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not long after the show ended, Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy got into the book-writin' business. I don't think I realized this until several years later, when I started buying MST3K videos off Amazon, and it would start recommending their books
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I bought the BBC radio drama of LOTR a few years back, and thought they were excellent. The radio version actually got me interested in maybe reading the book someday.
But the quality of the radio drama revealed to me how badly the movies mangled the story. When I watched the first movie, I thought Arwen and Galadriel were the same character. This was because the movie spent way too much time showing me their faces and no time at all explaining to me who these two women are and why they matter. The BBC version could take its time and introduce the characters organically, instead of cramming events into an artificial timetable. They should have cut all the lingering shots of Elijah Wood reacting to things, and used that time to have a narrator fill the audience in on what the hell is going on.
And I'm not a fanboy, but Peter Jackson fucked up Faramir's character. And where is Tom Bombadil? Not that I'm terribly interested in Tom Bombadil, but if it wasn't for the BBC version I never would have heard of him.
My favorite character in the movies was Christopher Lee, and they cut out key Saruman scenes from RotK. That may have been justifiable, but screw it. I wanted more Christopher Lee, and I don't feel like buying the box set to get him.
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