RANKIN/BASS' THE HOBBIT

Arthur:

"Five years ago when I decided that the first Tolkien property that I could handle was 'The Hobbit,' it was because of the main character himself,"  "The hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, has attitudes and characteristics described by Tolkien that are animatable. When you see him struggling to keep up with the others on his adventure, you feel sympathy for him." "The title of the picture is 'The Hobbit,' our star is the hobbit, and the hobbit is what the picture is about. He's a catalyst to all the bizarre things happening to him. Without that sympathetic character as a thread, you can't get away with doing a picture about goblins and dwarves."

 

"Maybe the new fantasy market-the popularity of movies like 'Star Wars'-has come from Tolkien,"  "The old wizard with the Force in 'Star Wars'-that's Gandalf, the wizard of 'The Hobbit.' The young fellow having adventures-good versus evil-that's the White Tower versus the Black Tower in 'The Lord of the Rings."

"If 'The Hobbit' is a success on television, we will release it to the theaters,"  "Then we will go on to complete our next Tolkien work, which will continue the characters we have established in 'The Hobbit,' and will be adapted from 'The Hobbit' and the last book in the Ring trilogy, 'The Return of the King.' At this point we are scripted, the music is composed and recorded, our backgrounds are painted, the sound track is partially completed, and new characters are designed-such as Frodo Baggins."

"Orson Bean has a demeanor and a voice quality and a private style of life that is very much like a hobbit," 

"I love to hear Dick (Richard Boone) snarl, and fume, and wreak vengeance," "And Dick says he loves to play bad guys because there's more dimension to the villain. But he didn't know Tolkien, and Dick's son is a Tolkien aficionado. 'Dad, are you sure you can handle this?' he said to Dick. 'Please don't louse it up.'" "I kept saying, 'Dick, you're not broad enough,'" "Finally, he burst into flame. He hit Orson with the coffee and the music stand and the script. And we had our dragon."

"I borrowed from a lot of sources, but the Rackham influence is heavy. I couldn't think of anyone better in the history of illustration to visualize Tolkien than Rackham-but the color sense is Tolkien's and mine." "I like monochromatic works and I saw the whole picture in a series of monochromatic designs. There are about a dozen major sequences and each has its key color. The Hobbit Hole is springtime greens; the Gollum's cave, purples; the goblins' place, red; Smaug's cave, golden..." "But wherever Tolkien said that anything was a certain color, we have used that color. On the screen, Gandalf has 'a tall pointed blue hat, a long gray cloak, a silver scarf... a white beard... and immense black boots,' just as he has here on page 17 of your paperback edition (R/B Hobbit movie book)."

 Orson Bean:

"Like Bilbo, I'm approaching 50," said Bean, "and I have a basically comfortable life, filled with spoons and jams-and still, I get into adventures. For the past seven years, I've been living an adventure. My wife and I sold our house in New York and moved to Australia for a year; then we came back and spent almost three years bumming around the country in an old '61 VW van. We put the kids in school wherever we happened to be, but mainly we reveled in being rootless."

"I didn't use a voice change to do Bilbo," "I have a distinctive voice anyway. I did an attitude change, making Bilbo kind of fussy-fussy and proper-then gradually dropped the fussiness and properness as the madness of battle really affected him."