Missed Classic 20: The Hobbit - WON!, Final Rating, and More

Written by Joe Pranevich

The forest awaits…

When we last left our hero with the hairy feet, Bilbo had escaped from the goblins’ cave with the golden ring, but we also had to leave behind at least one puzzle: liberating Thrain’s key from the dungeon. I hope that the solution to the puzzle lies ahead, or at least that I’ll come up with some brilliant plan--but it could also be that the legendary randomness in the engine has doomed me to failure. Am I in a walking dead situation? How would I know? All we can do is press onward! As we marched east, we passed Beorn’s house (empty except for a packed lunch) and then ended the post at the entrance to Mirkwood. In the book, this is where Bilbo was nearly killed by spiders and elves, so this should be pretty exciting!

At the Forest Gate, we are presented with a fork in the road: we can go east along the Elf-path or south to the Old Forest Road. I honestly don’t remember what path Bilbo took in the book, but the road seems like a good place to start. It doesn’t take long to regret that decision as “pale and bulbous” eyes start to follow us. Two screens later, Bilbo is ambushed in front of a waterfall and we die. Time to restore and try the other direction!

Missed Classic 20: The Hobbit (1982) - Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

Smaug looms large in the Hobbit.

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” With those words in 1937, J. R. R. Tolkien launched a fantasy series that arguably changed the face of genre fiction for all time. Bilbo Baggins, the titular “hobbit” (or halfling) is joined by a wizard and some dwarves to travel across the land, through caves and forests, to defeat a dragon and claim its treasure. Along the way he meets the sage elf Elrond and his hidden valley, lunches with a were-bear named Beorn, catches a ride on some eagles, and plays a riddle game on a hidden lakeshore deep underground. It’s a fantastic book, one of the first novels that I can remember falling in love with as a child. Tolkien followed up his children’s novel with a more mature and intricate sequel trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, between 1954 and 1955. In the years after his death, the Tolkien estate have released two further novels, The Silmarillion (1977) and The Children of Húrin (2007), short stories and poetry, as well as drafts and unfinished portions of yet more stories. The Hobbit itself was adapted into an animated film in 1977 and then, against all common-sense, made into a trilogy of films by Peter Jackson between 2012 and 2014. While some might argue that you should not transform a 293-page children’s novel into nearly eight hours of film, the movies collected nearly three billion dollars at the box office. How can you argue with that? Even if you believe that modern fantasy would exist even without Tolkien, you have to admit one thing: he changed the plural of dwarf from “dwarfs” to “dwarves”. No kidding.