My Precious

Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film, The Lord of the Rings, is a strange beast. That's understandable, given the immense undertaking of adapting such a complex novel. From what I gather, the film was financially successful and Bakshi fully intended to make a second part to conclude the story, but, for a variety of reasons, United Artists decided against going ahead with it. Instead, fans had to make do with the 1980 Rankin/Bass TV movie The Return of the King (which is itself a very strange thing, though for very different reasons).

Despite this, there's plenty of evidence that either Bakshi or UA initially had high hopes for The Lord of the Rings. I make this assertion because there was a surprisingly large amount of merchandise released to promote it, including a line of action figures from Knickerbocker Toys. 

I didn't see the movie until sometime in the mid-1980s, after it had been released on VHS. However, I came across the figures – or, rather, one of them – while on vacation in the summer of 1979. This was a few months before I'd encounter D&D for the first time and before I'd even read Tolkien's works. The figure in question is the one pictured above – Gollum. Now, by this point, I had seen the 1977 Rankin/Bass TV movie version of The Hobbit, but I don't think I connected it to The Lord of the Rings. Even assuming I had, I was still baffled by the figure, as he looked nothing like the way Gollum was portrayed by Rankin/Bass (not that I'm defending that portrayal, mind you). Still, there was something intriguing about this emaciated little hunk of plastic and I bought it (very inexpensively, since the store where I found it sold lots of remaindered items at steep discounts).

 

I thought about the Gollum figure the other day while I was doing some cleaning and came across a few other mementos of my childhood. I no longer own the Gollum figure – Crom knows what became of it – but thinking of it briefly transported me back to the very end of the 1970s, in the final days of my pre-Dungeons & Dragons innocence, when "fantasy" was a chaotic, undifferentiated mass of weird stuff without any clear explanation or context. Looking back, it was a heady time for my imagination and I'd give a lot to be able to revisit it, if only for a brief time.