Merryand Pippin pipsqueaks

[Morsul the Dark]

Snow day in New England wife and I watched LOTR trilogy

Wife pointed out at the end when Aragorn bows to the hobbits and the four are in a row Merry and Pippin are shorter than Frodo... in the Extended TT they do show the Entdraught scene sooo Apparently PJ forgot?

Never noticed before.

[MCRmyGirl4eva]

The height of the hobbits was always a problem when making the movies. PJ had a heck of a time trying to keep them short enough. They used scale doubles, perspective tricks, bluescreen technology, etc. So there are inconsistencies in their heights throughout the movies. There's the part at the end of ROTK, for example, whre Merry and Pippin enter the room. Their heights are aproximately up to the horizontal part of the carving on the door. When Legolas enters, his height is up to the carving as well. When the camera zooms out, and you can see the whold door, you can clearly see that there is only one horizontal line in the carving, so apparently the hobbits and elf were the same height.

Ues, the inconsistencies are there, but you really can't get too worked up about it. They're nearly unavoidable in such a work. I can guarantee that there will be problems with the dwarves' heights as well.

And another thing... nice Condescending Wonka avvie!

[William Cloud Hicklin]

There are practical limits to what you can do within a budget, even a budget as vast as PJ's. He fudged as far as possible by casting short-ish actors as hobbits, and then the hulking JDR as Gimli, so that relative to one another they come out OK, and only require trickery when onscreen with Big Folk and Elves. But that means that you are stuck with the relative heights of Frodo (described as "taller than some [hobbits]" in the book) and his cousins, Ent-draughts notwithstanding.

Of course, that sort of detail also isn't really the sort of thing PJ ever cared about much anyway; not nearly as much as the Workshop's assemblage of True Geeks (for example, in a detail almost nobody would notice, Pippin when he rides back into Hobbiton at the end is wearing his black surcoat with the Tree and the Crown above it.

Before:


After:

[Mithalwen]

Yes, having seen the props at the science museum, it was obvious they were made by people who really cared. The proportions are off throughout. Maybe they should have just used the scsle doubles... like Willow..

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

Maybe they should have just used the scsle doubles... like Willow..

Yeah! Here's Rosie Cotton.

You really can't fashion a concrete, accurate representation of a fictional race of beings though, and expect it to match everyone's mind-picture. Yet another problem with bringing works like Tolkien's to hard, unflinching physical reality.

[Morsul the Dark]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Yeah! Here's Rosie Cotton.

You really can't fashion a concrete, accurate representation of a fictional race of beings though, and expect it to match everyone's mind-picture. Yet another problem with bringing works like Tolkien's to hard, unflinching physical reality.

Your link made my head hurt.