The burning Ent in the Two Towers has always been called "Jacko" among my friends.

Personally I liked the Treebeard in the movies. It may be a nostalgia as he was pretty much as I had imagined him when I read the books when I was young.

But to me the best part of John Rhys-Davies Treebeard is his rendition of the burárum speech. Whenever my son is sick or is fighting the brave fight against going to sleep. I take the little guy on my shoulder and do my Treebeard impression. It usually does the trick in less than five minutes. I guess it’s the rhythm and the rumbling of the voice that puts the boy under.

The best thing... Numfar... Played by Joss himself.

ABC Monsters

Concept Art from The Abyss

Yeah the 'historical sources' bit was nice. Don't know if he was the first but you see this all over the place today.

The music always bothered me but then again Toto and Brian Eno were never my guys to begin with.

Trivia: The Landsraad is an Icelandic word - "Landsráð" meaning "lands council"

Who would play who is one of my favorite party games. But I'm coming up blank on somebody to play Paul. I tried looking over actors in that age range on IMDB and nobody seemed to fit the bill. I would put the casting directors from Game of Thrones on the job. I feel they have not put a put a foot wrong.

Mother Superior was well done but the whole Bene Gesserit Sisterhood aspect was shallow. But I guess that's basically the movie's main overall problem.
Lady Jessica was good but the hair was... well... of an era.

The Weirding Shield was just asinine and the stillsuits looked like mock up prototypes.

And the music... oh god... Dune, Highlander, Blade Runner... I blame the drugs really.

Awesome!
How much does something like this cost?

Númenor was Tolkien's Atlantis. Didn't make the map. Just thought it was fun way to think about Middle Earth.

Middle Earth During the Cold War

LOTR was a running joke

Sorry I did not want to hijack the discussion regarding Dune but only to comment on the filmmakers choice how they started their movies. But about the Peter Jackson and the production of LOTR.

Over the years I’ve met a lot of industry people from Hollywood. What I’ve gathered from different sources I’ve never really seen written about. The revisionist history has whitewashed the unbelievable attitude and negativity the production of LOTR faced from the filmmaking industry.

Before the movies started to come out The production of LOTR was a running joke in Hollywood. People could not bad-mouth the entire endeavor enough. New Line was going bankrupt, because you know, they were idiots. Peter Jackson was a hack who had conned him self onto a project he was in no shape or form able to complete. Richard Taylor and Weta were a joke in the vfx world. The actors who went to New Zealand were never going to work again and so on.

What I’ve gathered is that Hollywood took the standard “everything I’m not involved in is shit” attitude to another level when it came to LOTR.


Off course when the movies successfully came out nobody recognized ever having said anything but good things.

I remember reading TheOneRing.net religiously at the time when the movie was in production. I was working in a book store at the time and collected all the magazines who wrote about it and read it over and over again. But whenever we would meet anyone connected to Hollywood or the industry (filmmakers working here on projects, technicians from Lucas Farm tuning the THX in movie theaters and so on) I’d hear this undertone of negativity to almost pathological hate. People seemed to have almost psychotic hopes for the project to fail and fail spectacularly.


I’m not saying these people I talked to at the time and later had these views but they told me about how hateful the unofficial discourse was.

Today everybody seem to be on team LOTR and I have the same feelings when I hear them talk as when I see old germans. “On which side were you REALLY on in the old days?”