I honestly can’t imagine anyone would sit through all 72 minutes of Хоббит (some may know it as J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”) — not counting all the hardcore LOTR fans, of course, or the Tolkien bootlicker who uploaded the entire Leningrad TV adaptation to YouTube.
Me, I have laundry to do. Otherwise, sure, I’d break out the HDMI cable and watch a leotard-clad Gollum and paper mache spiders for an hour. Actually, I’d just watch this again. But I digress.
The point is, in 1985, the Soviets beat the Americans in the race to reboot Tolkien for the small screen. For those of you who aren’t going to watch the entire video (below), no worries: I didn’t either, but I did my best to capture all the essential characters with seven screenshots (also below). This way you’ll have some point of reference when this is brought up at the next Elven meetup.
Now Back to laundry.
1. The “Professor” (narrator) 
2. A dwarf.
3. More dwarves.
4. Gollum.
5. Gollum’s big close-up.
6. Spiders.
7. Smaug.
Video:
December 28, 2012 at 3:22 pm, Watch the 1985 Russian version of 'The Hobbit' | Blog said:
[...] Watch the 1985 Russian version of 'The Hobbit' I honestly can't imagine anyone would sit through all 72 minutes of Хоббит (some may know it as J.R.R. Tolkien's “The Hobbit”) — not counting all the hardcore LOTR fans, of course, or the Tolkien bootlicker who uploaded the entire Leningrad TV … Read more on Death and Taxes [...]
December 29, 2012 at 7:00 am, Cool Clicks: The Top 10 Geek Movies of 2012 | NextMovie said:
[...] • Now watch the 1985 Russian version of "The Hobbit." Dear lord. [Death and Taxes] [...]
December 29, 2012 at 8:57 pm, Virginie Smith said:
Traumatisée à vie je suis…
December 30, 2012 at 12:11 am, Babette Cally said:
O_o
December 30, 2012 at 9:56 pm, Tayna Laubacher said:
"The point is, in 1985, the Soviets beat the Americans in the race to reboot Tolkien for the small screen."
That would come as a surpise to the animation studio Rankin/Bass, which produced an animated adaptation of THE HOBBIT in 1977 (and went on to release an animated movie-for-television of THE RETURN OF THE KING in 1980).
Andrew L.