The Return of the King (1980 film)

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The Return of the King
Original VHS release cover
Based onThe Hobbit and The Return of the King
by J. R. R. Tolkien
Written byRomeo Muller
Directed by
Starring
Theme music composerGlenn Yarbrough
ComposerMaury Laws
Country of origin
Original languageEnglish
Production
Producers
  • Arthur Rankin Jr.
  • Jules Bass
Running time98 minutes
Production companies
Original release
NetworkABC
ReleaseMay 11, 1980 (1980-05-11)
Related
The Hobbit

The Return of the King (also known as The Return of the King: A Story of the Hobbits) is a 1980 American-Japanese

Rankin/Bass and Topcraft. It is an adaptation of part of J. R. R. Tolkien's 1955 high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. It takes its name from The Return of the King, the third and final volume of the novel, and is a sequel to the 1977 film The Hobbit
.

The special aired on

Fantasy Films was settled.[1] Both critics and fans gave The Return of the King a lukewarm welcome.[2]

Plot

Further information: Plot of the novel

At Bilbo Baggins's 129th birthday party in Rivendell, his nephew Frodo explains why he is missing a finger from his hand while the Minstrel of Gondor sings a ballad that tells the story of the quest to destroy the One Ring and defeat the Dark Lord Sauron.

In

Mount Doom
to destroy the Ring.

Meanwhile, the wizard

Ringwraiths and infiltrating a battalion of Orcs in the process) only to be attacked by Gollum
, the creature from whom Bilbo took the Ring decades before. Frodo casts Gollum down, however, and goes to the Crack of Doom. Sam prepares to kill Gollum, but is overcome with pity and allows him to flee.

At the same time, Gondor's neighbouring country,

Mouth of Sauron
and the two armies prepare for battle.

On Mount Doom, Frodo succumbs to the Ring's power and puts it on, becoming invisible. Sam discovers Gollum and Frodo fighting over the Ring, which results in Gollum's biting off Frodo's finger to claim it. While dancing with joy at the retrieval of his "precious", Gollum falls into the lava of Mount Doom, taking the Ring with him. The Ring is destroyed, and Sauron perishes. Sam and Frodo are rescued by the

Eagles
from the erupting Mount Doom. A few months later, Aragorn is crowned King of Gondor.

The story concludes with Frodo accompanying Bilbo, Gandalf, and

Grey Havens
.

Cast

The voice cast is as follows:[3]

Production

After the 1977 broadcast of The Hobbit on

Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. The film's original working title was Frodo, The Hobbit II. It was written by Romeo Muller with Rankin doing the script, designs for the characters and storyboards. The original cast from the previous film returned to reprise the voices of the characters with new actors joining them.[citation needed
]

Pippin; Nellie Bellflower as Éowyn; and Glenn Yarbrough returned as principal vocalist, billed here as simply "the Minstrel of Gondor". Thurl Ravenscroft served in the chorus. Once the character voices were recorded, along with background music by Maury Laws, with Jules Bass writing songs and lyrics for the film, the animation production was done by Topcraft in Japan under supervision of Toru Hara, Tsuguyuki Kubo, Kazuyuki Kobayashi and others.[citation needed
]

The release was threatened by a lawsuit filed by the

Fantasy Films on the basis that Rankin/Bass had not secured the U.S. and Canadian television rights to the book. The lawsuit was settled "amicably", allowing it to proceed with a May 1980 release.[1]

The film is often mistaken for a sequel to Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film The Lord of the Rings. After Rankin/Bass became defunct in 1987, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the special for home video distribution and chose to market the film, along with The Hobbit, as instalments of an animated Tolkien trilogy, with Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (by then also owned by Warner Bros., from United Artists) acting as the middle chapter. This false promotion led to rumours that Rankin/Bass had originally decided to produce The Return of the King upon hearing that Bakshi's sequel to The Lord of the Rings had been cancelled. However, Rankin/Bass had always planned on making The Return of the King as a follow-up to their production of The Hobbit, even before the release of Bakshi's film.[7][page needed]

Reception

The film has garnered mixed reviews from modern sources. Charles Cassidy of Common Sense Media gave it a score of 3/5, and said, "Cartoon tale is darker, more complex than others in series".[8] Steven D. Greydanus of Decent Films Guide gave it a C, and said, "Works even less well than The Hobbit, which really is a children's story… overbearing folk-ballad soundtrack doesn't even gesture lyrically to Tolkien's poetry".[9] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 67% of 15 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.90/10.[10]

Director

his films. You can't deviate from these books, or somebody'll wait on the street for you! ...[In] The Return of the King, we had to summarize what had happened before, and then put it all together in 2 hours. It's not a very good film." Asked why he chose only to make The Return of the King, instead of making the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, Rankin admitted, "I didn't know that the audience would sit still for it. I was wrong."[11]

Home media

The Return of the King was first released on

Warner Home Video in 1991, and for the second time as part of the "Warner Bros. Classic Tales" video collection in 1996. The film has been available on DVD
since 2001, both individually and as a "boxed trilogy" with Rankin/Bass's The Hobbit and Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings.

References

  1. ^
    Newspapers.com
    .
  2. ^ Tolkien Online: The Return of the King Archived 2011-11-20 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ "The Return of the King". Behind the Voice Actors. Retrieved 17 February 2021.
  4. ^ Hoffman, Jordan (8 February 2020). "Orson Bean, Legendary Character Actor, Killed in Accident at 91". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  5. The Los Angeles Times
    .
  6. ^ "Peregrin 'Pippin' Took". Behind the Voice Actors. Retrieved 18 May 2020.
  7. ISBN 978-1282283268
    .
  8. ^ Cassady, Charles (9 July 2010). "The Return of the King (1980)". commonsensemedia.org.
  9. ^ Greydanus, Stephen. "The Return of the King (1980)". decentfilms.com.
  10. ^ "The Return of the King". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 17 June 2023. Edit this at Wikidata
  11. ^ "Arthur Rankin Jr., Interview at the Museum of Television & Radio (2003) - Part 2". YouTube. Archived from the original on 2021-12-05.

External links

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