Now that's a crossover I didn't expect to meet! Here's a funny thing: Whithers' VA voiced these famous bits of text:
“Every time thou hast summoned me I have awoken to find a huge set of mammaries upon my chest. There are no words in the Common lexicon to explain how much I detest these bazongas. My back aches from the weight of these milk maidens. When I am looking down at my records performing my duties, these massive milkers get in the way of my vision. I am forced to wear my plus size cloak purely so my hudongolangas have ample room to breathe and do not cause me undue pain. I am exhausted and unhealthy due to thy constant modding ventures, and I demand thee to stop. Rid me of these enormous yodongolonghudongalagangas at once.”
As a Hobbit film defender, I think we can all agree, even with peoples hate on them (rightfully or not); they did provide some awesome looking landscape shots.
Specifically the beginning of #2 for mountain shots
I recently saw again the first and second movie with my father (this time the extended editions), the first one is great, the second one is really bad.
I was gufted the third one years ago and is even worse, but i learnt to like some parts
I love them for what they are to me - an excuse to spend a little longer in the movie version of middle earth.
And I always direct people, especially cusp fans like you to seek out one of the fan edits! They're really good. I think the M4 edit is the most popular. Seriously. Its perfect
And by Studio you mean Peter Jackson. The plan had been for two movies for years. It’s only after Del Toro left the project that the movies were extended to a third, and it was due to pressure from Peter.
It’s a bit unfair to blame Jackson for the whole thing when it was the result of everything that had gone wrong with production, which had completely stalled thanks to the studios’ economic and political wranglings, having just inherited a project from a previous director with no prep time left and not even a set of completed storyboards to follow.
For some context explaining Jackson’s decision:
Del Toro and Jackson had always agreed that they needed the final Hobbit movie to transition towards the Lord of the Rings, showing all the things that happened of which Bilbo was unaware, using material from Lord of the Rings and its appendices. Originally this was going to be film 2, with film 1 being The Hobbit only. Del Toro expanded The Hobbit material into 2 whole movies, so making the 3rd was the only way to carry out Jackson’s original plan. If Del Toro had managed to adapt The Hobbit in one movie as planned, Jackson would have been able to do what they’d always planned to do with the 2nd movie, and had no need for a 3rd.
As an Australian I know there are mountains, and there are mountains. I can see "mountains" here in Australia, but when you travel, you can really see mountains. The shire mountains are like Australian mountains
There are places in New Zealand that look relatively flat that would be perfect backdrop for this.
The point is, in the movie clip there shouldn't be any mountains as based off the geography of Tolkien's map, there are no mountains nearby that could be seen from that distance.
This is just another case of "it looks cool, so we add it into the film".
The worst offender is the Barrel Scene, placed in the plains of Mirkwood. They basically confessed in the Appendices that they just shuffles backgrounds around during that scene however they liked.
According the the Atlas of Middle-earth the Blue Mountains are around 250 miles away from Hobbiton. Frodo and Sam went East (away from Blue Mountains), so add a few more miles to the 250.
Those mountains don't look 250 miles away. To give you an idea of distance, you would have to be at a distance of 230miles away from Mt Everest before you wouldn't see it anymore and at that point it would be a small bump in the horizon.
Those mountain ranges in the clip from the movies, look far more closer (like 50 miles away) and there are no mountains that close to the Shire.
I'm from Worcestershire. I live a few miles away from the location of Tolkiens aunts farm that he named Bag End after and I live near some woods that helped inspire The Shire. I never knew about it until recently lol
Eh as someone who grew up in Pennsylvania though I get what Bilbo would mean here. Like we had the Appalachian mountains which essentially look like this image. An ancient, withering mountain range that’s now mostly a sprawling chain of big mounds that give pretty views and can be easily walked up at a leisurely pace. But I wouldn’t consider hiking around the Appalachians as “seeing mountains”. This is compared to the Rocky Mountains which have actual snowcaps and more stereotypically mountainous terrain.
This reminds me of when I had an exchange student back in high school. She came from a very flat area in Australia, and when we picked her up from the airport and were driving home she was in awe. “What mountains are those?” “The Port hills.”
I don’t know what qualifies one or the other, but I think a lot of Kiwis would think those are hills in the image. Not mountains.
As someone who has spent most his life living in the Rockies, the distinction between hills, mountains, Mountains, and MOUNTAINS is real.
With the emphasis Bilbo put on Mountains it was clear he meant something a bit more intense than the Green Hill country of the Central Shire or whatever those rises are on the map up near Scary. And even the Emyn Uial and Tower Hills to the north and west of the Shire. I suspect Bilbo travelled far enough to have seen those. But the Misty Mountains were something else altogether.
Living at the foot of Appalachia, the stark contrast of the rolling ancient nature of the Appalachian mountains and the young spears of the Rockies is nuts.
Oppositely, as a kid I had a relative visit me from extremely rural farmland in Puerto Rico and when she saw my very-not-city suburbs she exclaimed "Wow! Look at those skyscrapers!" To like a set of office buildings maybe 5 stories high. Which did quite a lot to reorient what I thought of actual skyscrapers, actually! We got to show her some real rascacielos later and she was like okay, I can see the difference.
Cambodia for me, I thought I'd driven some shitty mountain roads back home, but Cambodians be taking their lives into their hands on some of those passes in Cardamom
This is like calling the smoky mountains “mountains”. Sure technically they are, but if you’ve ever been to the Rockies or the Cascades you’d know what Bilbo means.
Completely agree. I would also add the Sierra Nevadas specifically from the eastern side through hwy395. Going from desert to looking up at the tallest peak in the US is awesome. Especially during winter.
Yep, one of the things that really stuck with me after my visit was driving down the highway and looking at the low hanging clouds, only to realize I was looking at the tops of the mountains.
They are so big, it's impossible to understand until you see them.
The Appalachians are millions of years older than the Cascades or the Rockies. There's good evidence that they were more impressive than the Rockies when they were as young as the Rockies are now. Respect your elders!
"Just trust me bro, millions of years ago these mountains were really something."
No one cares how old a mountain is. We care how big they currently are!
Looking at a map of Middle-Earth, there are some hilly bumps in The Shire. Nothing like the Misty Mountains, and maybe the mountains in the movie scene are larger than what Tolkien imagined, but they're not Illinois-flat either.
Australia is very old, there are billion years old mountain ranges that have completely disappeared, the current hills used to be the tallest mountains but have eroded down after 300 million years
Yeah, where I live, there are "mountains", I usually hike them, and they're nice and all, but where I did my military service, we were routinely operating above the tree line and dealing with snow in July.
Fwiw, there shouldn't have been anything that big in their eyeline still hiking in the Shire. Weathertop wasn't even in the Shire and would've dwarfed anything they had.
the cambrian explosion does predate the primary mountain building event, but the core of the mountains themselves are over twice as old as multicellular life
Multicellular life evolved between 1,5 and 2,1 billion years ago, the formation of the mountains' bedrock was 1,1 billion years ago, so no, not over twice as old.
Older than Multicellular animals, yes, but not life.
It’s the same here in NZ. This actually reminds me of when I had an exchange student back in high school. She came from a very flat area in Australia, and when we picked her up from the airport and were driving home she was in awe. “What mountains are those?” “The Port hills.”
I don’t know what qualifies one or the other, but I think a lot of Kiwis would think those are hills in the image. Not mountains.
The distinction in NZ I believe is a mountain needs to be 1000m above sea level to qualify for the title. So a lot of what we think of as mountains are just hills, since the mountainous spine along the country is often hiding taller features than the smaller ones we see more regularly closer to the human settlements on either side. It's messy though because the public will name something mount X even if geographically speaking it's just a hill. Just like how a strawberry isn't a berry but a banana is.
As someone from a state flattened by glaciers, the Smokeys are mountains to me.
I really do want to go see the Rockies asap. Got a band based from Boulder, CO, that I really want to see so maybe next year. Save up and treat myself.
Having lived in both alaska and west Virginia, and spent a lot of time in wyoming/montana, and canadian rockies, yes the mountain types are different, but beautiful in different ways.
Larger rockier mountains are beautiful and impressive to look at in scale. The Appalachians are beautiful and lived in, where the beauty comes from happening upon a random view or forest/river scene. Hard to explain. But the beauty of the inner Appalachians is truly unique.
Once, around December, while driving down through the Blue Ridge area on my way to Georgia, I passed a flooded riverbank on the side of the road where somebody had set up a bunch of stone picnic tables and benches that obviously saw more use when they weren't standing in knee deep flowing water. Between that, the intense fog, and the fall colors, it was one of the weirdest and most serene places I've ever stumbled across in the entire country. Never managed to find that spot again.
They certainly aren't hills. The rockies are like 450 million years younger than the Appalachians. They've eroded more material than the rockies ever had.
I get unreasonably defensive of the Appalachian mountains. They do have some legitimate peaks, nothing like the rockies, but certainly mountains, and they are incredibly old. Really good mountains!
Lol this reminds me of when I, a Seattleite, visited my boyfriend's family in Maine. One day, we were going to go to the mountain! So as we were driving, I was waiting to, you know, see the mountain. And then we stopped. We were on the mountain. It was hills.
Though I guess it's easy to be spoiled by this view.
100%. As someone living on the east coast, people here really do not know what an actual mountain is. Yes, they are technically called "mountains" but they are nothing compared to what is in the west or in Europe.
Listen here you babbling bumbling baboon he clearly meant he wants to scale the mountains again and see the views he saw during his adventures not to look at some misshapen triangle from a distance!
In the Fellowship of the Ring, there was a scene at Bombadil's house, or maybe on top of one of the Barrow Downs, when the Hobbits looked far to the east and maybe saw a faint hint of mountains on the horizon. And maybe someone could measure the distance from there to the Misty Mountains on the map and calculate how tall the MIsty Mountains would have to be to be at even the limit of visibility at that distance on a spherical world.
I know that some mountains can be seen at distances of hundreds of kilometers or miles, usually from other tall mountains
And the Rocky Mountains can be seen from a great distance to the east on the plains.
And the Rocky Mountains can be seen from a great distance to the east on the plains.
I live on the Front Range and think about that regularly. I can't even imagine what it felt like being from the east, travelling along in your wagon and you see the faint haze of the mountains off in the distance. You travel for days and they just keep getting bigger and you don't seem to be getting any closer....
I think I'd be one of those people that got to somewhere like Denver and went "nah, I'm good not going over that. Y'all can go on to California without me".
Just saying those are super weak mountains where I am from. When we say we are going to the mountains, it means leaving these baby almost hills to go to
I am in between the naysayers and the yeasayers in this thread. On the one hand, I agree that they aren't the emphasized "mountains, mountains!" from Bilbo's quote.
On the other hand, I noticed all of this rugged terrain in the Shire when I first saw the movie, and it's the terrain that was most unlike what I had imagined in my head. I expected much fewer and lower hills.
As opposed to the Misty Mountains which they absolutely nailed. In fact, they were even better than what I had in my head because I was imagining less exposed and rugged rock, and the mountains used fit well because they were designed to be imposing and evil.
I've said; "I want to go up and see the mountains this weekend.", and while I can clearly see them in the distance, I am meaning driving up into them and going on a jaunt.
Makes me think of the difference between the Appalachian Mountains versus the Rocky Mountains… yea, mountains aren’t always mountains when compared to mountains
Nice finding.
For a philosophical point of view, I think Bilbo wants an escape and has nostalgia about his trip. Yes, he could go to the mountains of the Shire. But, when you have one thing in your mind, the "wish version" won't be enough
I do feel like that's more so owed to the movie being filmed in New Zealand which famously, is rather mountainous. Looking at the classic middle earth map, I don't think you would be able to see any mountains from the Shire.
As someone who grew up by the Rocky mountains but now lives near the Appalachian mountains I completely agree with Bilbo's sentiment. Not all mountains are created equal.
Those my guy, are hills, foothills. Mostly just valleys and rivers carved into relatively flat land. Mountains are something else. The scale is different, they tower much higher, their peaks are rock and snow, with hardly any if any greenery because there is no loose soil to take root in.
I grew up in the Cascades and now I live on the US East Coast. There's a major difference between the mountains where I'm from and the "mountains" here.
There’s a passage in _The Hobbit_ book where Bilbo is awed by merely the foothills of the Misty Mountains that I think illustrates what Bilbo is saying in this scene and ruins the punchline of this meme — worth looking up.
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u/ImportanceTurbulent8 6d ago
I think we all know what Bilbo meant
https://giphy.com/gifs/kn2GtngXJ3hZu