Exciting news: tomorrow, Tuesday 9th February, Viggo Mortensen and his son Henry will be joining Quickbeam on TORn Tuesday!
Last week saw the online release of Viggo’s powerful and moving directorial debut, Falling. You can rent or buy the movie now on Amazon or iTunes. It’s a profound, compelling piece about families, love, and dementia. Viggo and Henry will be chatting about the movie, and about the power of story telling, at 5pm PT/ 8pm ET tomorrow; find TORn Tuesday on YouTube or Facebook. Don’t miss it!
Middle-earth Madness officially starts today! We’ve split our field of 64 characters into four divisions:
Movies Only – characters who appeared only in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and/or The Hobbit movies Books Only – characters who didn’t make the final cut for the movies Movies and Books – characters who graced both the written page and the silver screen Wider Mythos – Middle-earth characters not in the movies from Tolkien’s works outside of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit
There are some very interesting match-ups in round one this year. In one of the more intense match-ups in the Movies Only division, Tauriel is up against the Warg Matriarch, Azog’s vicious white warg. A perennial TORn fav, FIGWIT (stay-tuned for the story behind the name if you don’t know it already) takes on Alfrid, and it’s anybody’s guess as to who will come out on top in the match-up between Sebastian the Hedgehog and the Goblin Scribe.
The Books Only division is chock-full of interesting matches such as Ghan-buri-Ghan vs. Quickbeam, and The Fox (who wondered at Hobbits traveling through The Shire in FOTR) vs. Prince Imrahil.
It was almost impossible to narrow down the Movies & Books division with so many amazing choices, but there are some gut-wrenchers in the contests as they stand with Beorn going up against the Balrog and Shelob battling Sauron.
Finally, some of Tolkien’s Titans go mano-a-mano in the Wider Mythos division, with two powerful dragons, Ancalagon and Glaurung battling it out, and Beren and Huan facing each other in what is sure to be a close call.
The Slaying of Glaurung, by Ted Nasmith
A note on how the bracket combatants were determined. TheOneRing.net created a document containing all combatants, sub-divided into divisions. We asked staff to cast sixteen votes per division, with the votes having a weight of 1-4. Each staffer cast four 4 votes, four 3 votes, four 2 votes and four 1 votes in each division. We then totaled all the votes from each division to determine their rank, and ultimately placed the top 16 into each bracket for seeding.
As you can imagine, our staff is diverse and the results were very interesting! Not only are there some great match-ups in this first round, the final four will pose some amazing choices between the various literary and film sources.
Weta’s Ben Hawker is a brilliant guy and he worked with the creative and fun folks at Air New Zealand to create the ideas that became perhaps the most popular airline safety video in the world, collecting 8 million hits since it was launched a week ago. TheOneRing was honored to play a part with Cliff “Quickbeam” Broadway and I (Larry “MrCere” Curtis) appearing to help represent fans from across the globe. Well, they also asked us to chime in on the behind-the-scenes video which features J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandsons Royd and Mike, the genuinely excellent and beautiful airline employees Kara, Mark and Will (plus others not in the video), the film’s director Josh, the soon-to-be superstar Dean O’Gorman, Peter Jackson and that Hawker guy. TORn may have its own version of a story and photos from that set before long but Air New Zealand has a great video to follow up last week’s starting off with a familiar face. Also fun, many of the crew making this video also worked on The Hobbit. Check out the short clip on the next page! Continue reading “A secret look inside Air NZ’s Middle-earth safety video”
This week on TORn Tuesdays we were joined by animation legend John K., creator of Ren & Stimpy who is currently working on a new cartoon “Cans Without Labels.” Here he talks about working with Hobbit animation pioneer Ralph Bakshi, breaking into the business, and the inspiration behind his many famous characters. Remember the amazing toy LOG or Powdered Toast Man? Watch the entire interview with John Kricfalusi on YouTube and support his new show on Kickstarter!
ATLANTA — DragonCon 2011 marks the 11th year of involvement with the Atlanta based convention, where it has grown dramatically and yet remains true to its fan-based roots. (We dug up the earliest reports we could find, well worth a look here and featuring Karl Urban, Corvar and Calisuri.)
But this DragonCon had significant differences as well. With an over 2,500 mile journey from Los Angeles to Atlanta sponsored by War In The North, this convention featured the Fellowship of Drivers on The Road to DragonCon. They not only went there but back again with the help of Badali Jewelry and Anglotopia.net.
And on content partner Stickam.com, TORn was the most watched event for the week and the month. A special thanks to those who supported the trip with personal meetings, donations, texts, phone calls and other help.
There it is, right near the top of the newly released Comic-Con Thursday programming schedule: “10:00-11:00 TheOneRing.net: Hobbit Talk”.
That means Comic-Con is having TORn back to talk Hobbit with fans and media at one of the biggest and best popular culture celebrations in the world. Our own staffers Quickbeam and MrCere will take the stage to deliver multimedia images and words, rumors and truths and maybe even deliver a secret or two. Garfeimao and other TORn staff will be distributing some select items to the always supportive fans. Other staffers, like the mysterious Calisuri collaborate on the presentation to make it as full of information and fun as possible. Our team will also be reporting on everything Middle-earth related that we can dig up at the event that starts with preview night on July 20 and runs through the weekend.
As always TheOneRing.net is not-for-profit (nobody gets paid) and in fact, the site supports literacy charities, so look very soon for a t-shirt remnant sale to help cover our expenses for this big show.
The Thursday start time means, from past experience, that as soon as convention doors open, attendees will find the way to room 7AB in the upstairs of the conventional hall to line up for the always capacity crowds that leave many standing in the hall waiting to get in. Continue reading “TORn to deliver ‘Hobbit’ news at Comic-Con”
