Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Time out

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. Ain't it funny how time slips away?

I have been taken out of the race by a ruptured disc. By doctor's orders, I am laying on my living room floor, surrounded by books, DVDs and iPods, and watching a DVD of 101 Dalmatians.

Okay, so the doctor just told me to lay on the floor. He didn't say anything about the DVDs, or any of that other stuff. Oh, yeah, and he gave me drugs to take, and told me to stay here for two weeks.

Since I have been put in the penalty box for 14 days, I am going to try to catch up on my reading. This means studying my Bible, but it also means returning to my place in The Lord of the Rings. I had just arrived at "A Shortcut to Mushrooms" when I lost the track. My wife also wants me to follow her into the Twilight series. I am loath to pick up another series when I'm trying to make my way through Tolkien, and I've never been much for vampires. Still, I may humor her, just so she'll have someone to talk to about the series.

One of the blogs I follow, 2719 Hyperion, has a fascinating post on the myth that Walt Disney once owned the rights to make a movie of The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Disney never actually even approached the professor for the rights, after his story department (I think, correctly), told him that the story was too unwieldy for a feature film. Then there's the not-too-surprising revelation that Tolkien had a "heartfelt loathing" for Disney's treatment of fairy tales and faerie creatures.

As a lover of both Disney's and the Professor's works, I thought the post was fascinating food for thought. What would Disney's artists and storytellers have managed to create with the wealth of imaginative imagery present in the Professor's masterpiece?

A disaster, I am quite sure. Disney would have stripped Tolkien's story down to its barest bones, and slapped on the carcass his own unique artistic vision, leaving something that resembled Tolkien only superficially. P.L. Travers, who Walt wooed for years in an attempt to get his hands on her Mary Poppins stories, was, according to many accounts, heartbroken by the treatment of her story. The friction between Disney and Travers was well-documented, and somewhat nasty. The clash of ego and artistic vision that would have surely happened betwen Walt and the Professor during the creation of Walt Disney's The Lord of the Rings would been an epic battle the like of which the world has never seen.

In the end, I think we can all be grateful that such a battle never had cause to come to pass. Jackson's films, despite their flaws, are head and shoulders above anything that the Disney studios could have produced. The Tolkien books have too much detail, and too intricate a plot, for the Disney treatment. Nearly all of the classic Disney films that I can recall at the present were adapted from shorter fare — short stories and fairy tales. I don't think even a longer story, such as The Hobbit, would have fared well at all as a Disney film.

That's all for this week, campers. If you need me, I'll be here on the floor. Mind your feet, please.