This I Believe #24

Where there's a whip, there's a way.

As log as I'm blogging Rankin/Bass via YouTube, check out Eowyn vs. the Witch King:

Three things I noticed:

• Casey Kasem!  Man, I could hardly watch a cartoon as a kid without tripping over that guy.
• When Eowyn whips off her helmet, check out the character design—what's a big-eyed anime chick doing in my American-produced adaptation of a British novel?  I think somebody's been out-sourcing their animation!
• I missed the flavor of the original language in Peter Jackson's version of this scene.  I understand compressing and punching up the dialog for film, but don't you think this exchange (unaltered Tolkien except for the explanatory sentence about the prophecy):
  
  Witch King:  "Hinder me?  Thou fool.  Dost thou not know the prophecy?  No living man may hinder me!"
  Eowyn:  "But no living man am I!  You look upon a woman.  Eowyn am I."
  
  ...is better than this one:
  
  Witch King:  "Fool!  No man can kill me.  Die now!"
  [Merry stabs him in the leg]
  Eowyn:  "I am no man."

Comments

[Matt]

Well, part of the reason for the rewrite was that they couldn't get hindering to look right in the CGI mockups. The focus audience kept interpreting it as "causing to dally" and the whole thing went downhill from there. ("Wait, so... does that mean Merry is gay? Oh, is that what 'Merry' meant... back then?")

[DeAngelo Guillory]

Rankin Bass has always outsourced their animation.

The Japanese studio Topcraft (now Ghibli) was the party responsible for this.