Dating back to Comic-Con 2012 when Weta Workshop had the three giant Trolls guarding their booth these three trolls have been a huge hit with fans around the world. Tonight, via their most recent newsletter, fans are getting a chance to add another one of these mini-versions to their collections. Bert the Troll is joining Tom the Troll who was released as an in-stock item during Comic-Con 2013. You can Pre-Order Bert the Troll right now for $75 with him shipping in November/December of this year. The third member of this trio William will be coming up for Pre-Order before October to complete your trio of Trolls.
Category: The Hobbit: There and Back Again
Welcome to our collection of TORn’s hottest topics for the week ending August 18, 2013. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s happening on the Message Boards, here’s a great way to catch up on the highlights. Or if you’re new to TORn and want to enjoy some great conversations, just follow the link to some of our most popular discussions. Watch this space as every weekend we will spotlight the most popular buzz on TORn’s Message Boards. Everyone is welcome, so come on in and join the fun!
Continue reading “TORn Message Boards Weekly Roundup – August 18, 2013”
During Comic-Con 2013, and my multiple viewings of artist Jerry Vanderstelt’s booth, I got to see him in the process of working on his next print. Yesterday, via his Facebook Page, Jerry showed the world what I saw during Comic-Con, and let folks know that its in approvals. This stunning piece captures Legolas Greenleaf from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Once this goes up for sale you can count on us letting you all know, so you can add this amazing piece of art to your Middle-earth collection.
As many of you may know when we did our magazine for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey we took submissions from collectors around the world. A few of these ended up appearing in the magazine allowing people all over the world to see some of what you’ve taken time show off your love for Middle-earth. Recently, I was able to finally able to set up my collection and be able to really appreciate many of the pieces I’ve managed to add. Thankfully the room my stuff in now is large enough to show off everything I’ve got with room to spare for new items from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Even if I’m still getting items out of storage to show off. This collection through ups and downs (selling items) started back in 2003 and continues on for a while. It’s my way of allowing people see what Middle-earth means to me and explain why they’re missing out on such a great universe. I hope you enjoy taking a peek into my collection and what it looks like after its been reviewed.
The folks over at United Cutlery and BudK have a new item for fans of Middle-earth to pre-order. The new item available for pre-order is a replica of the Morgul Blade Radagast discovers during The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. You can order this awesome collectible for only $129 and it will be in-stock in just 60 days. So you won’t have to wait long before you add this to your collection. Also, if you’re feeling lucky you can enter into a contest and you just might bring this item home. The contest ends when the Morgul Blade ships in 60 days.
Mark Lee at Overthinking It follows up his Words in Books per Second of Movie analysis of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and other successful movies with some additional analysis examining IMDB ratings, plus the trend in adaptations over the decades.
In last week’s article, I started with a simple question: how do book lengths, as measures by word count, compare to their adapted movie run times, as measured by seconds? I was mostly looking for a statistical basis to express my displeasure at The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and by extension, parts 2 and 3 of this unnecessary trilogy), but I wound up comparing the density of the Hobbit movies, as measured in Words in Book per Second of Movie (WIBPSOM), to other prominent movie adaptations of books: The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and the Twilight franchises.
The findings were interesting in and of themselves (TL;DR: The Hobbit Books have way smaller WIBPSOM values than the other franchises), but they begged for a larger scale analysis, both in size of dataset and scope of inquiry. To address the size of the dataset, I found all of the (English language) entries on this list of best-selling books that have theatrically-released, non-silent movie adaptations. After including multiple movie adaptations of the same movie and excluding movies where I couldn’t find any data on book length as measured by word count, I came up with a dataset of 59 movie adaptations of best selling books.
As for scope of inquiry, well, let’s get down to brass tacks: is there any relationship between the density of a book’s movie adaptation, as measured by WIBPSOM, and the quality of the movie, as measured by its IMDB rating?
In a word, the answer to this intriguing question is an emphatic “no.”