Earlier this week, it was Hobbit Day, the anniversary of the original publication of The Hobbit. I decided to celebrate by watching the 1977 animated TV movie version. For one thing, it’s about the only incarnation of the story you can get through in under an hour and a half, but for another, it was in some ways my introduction to that universe and even to fantasy fiction.

I was in elementary school then, and my teacher would read a chapter from a book to us every day after recess, I guess as a way of settling us all down. As the airing of the TV movie approached, she read The Hobbit. I recall there were some other linked lessons that tied it into the curriculum, but I don’t remember details about them. I did as I always did when she read us a book and got impatient with the chapter-a-day pace, checked the book out of the library, and read it much faster so that I was done well before the class was. When the TV movie came on, I told my parents that it was homework, so I had to watch it.

I didn’t remember much about the movie itself, not even whether I liked it or how I thought it compared to the book. I was in the midst of Star Wars mania at the time, so I don’t think it registered too much. It was a brief diversion from all things Star Wars, and I wasn’t interested if there weren’t spaceships and laser swords. I was too young for The Lord of the Rings at that time, so I’m not sure where else I could have gone with it if I had really gotten into The Hobbit and wanted more like it. I guess I could have found the Narnia books sooner (I had read The Horse and His Boy during my horse phase, but I read it more as a talking horse book than as a fantasy novel and didn’t know it was part of a series). I was reading the Oz books around this time. I don’t think I’d yet figured out the concept of genre. I just read the books I liked that were about things I was interested in at that time. I hadn’t realized that there were categories of books that similar books fit into.

It was a couple of years later before I got into the Narnia books and from there spotted The Fellowship of the Ring in the library and remembered that this was a follow-up to that book I read before the TV movie came on. Then I went into a big fantasy phase that I’ve never quite come out of.

It was interesting to revisit the animated movie after all this time, after having seen the bloated epic saga of the live-action version and having read and re-read the books. In a lot of respects, the animated version is more faithful to the book than the live-action version was. It doesn’t contain a lot of made-up stuff that isn’t in the book. It does skip some things, but I think it’s proof that they could have done a faithful adaptation in around two hours. I think Tolkien would have approved of all the insertions of folk-style songs into the soundtrack, though he might have been baffled by the disco synth sounds that often came up in the score, especially for action scenes.

If you’ve got kids you want to introduce to that universe, this would be a good option. They skim over any serious violence, like zooming out and showing dots on a map as a way of depicting the battle, and it’s very much done as though aimed at kids, focusing on the stuff kids would find interesting. It’s also a fun watch for adults who want to reset their brains after the live-action attempt at this story. Their Smaug and Gollum are a bit of a letdown compared to the live-action versions. They have a very different take on the wood elves and the dwarfs than we get in live action (no hot young dwarfs). On the other hand, their trolls look a lot more like the traditional Scandinavian depictions, and I like their take on the goblins. It is very, very 70s, so depending on your age it may be a blast from the past or so retro that it’s a bit campy.