And certainly no idea that halfway around the world, a teenage Peter Jackson, who had by now seen the animated trilogy, was getting an idea, that maybe it’d be up to him to tell Tolkien’s tale on-screen better than this.

Inured on arcades and football, I have no concept that the cartoon is the conclusion to a larger story. So let’s say we are all very young again and there is The Return of the King playing in the VCR in my living room. You have no choice but to watch whatever makes its way to your home. The Return of the King is exactly the kind of tape ol’ pops would have brought home to his kids, whenever he could remember that he’d already checked out Encino Man a million times before. People who were kids in that decade know the scenario: your parents come home in the evening, one of them grabbing a random VHS from the rental store. This was done out of practicality - The Return of the King DVD was the first used copy I found in the area - and also to attempt recreating the ’80s home movie experience. I watched the last movie of the animated Lord of the Rings trilogy first for this article. On this edition of “Watching Series,” we take a look at the three loosely connected animated Tolkien movies from the late 1970s: The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), and The Return of the King (1980).

Gollum lord of the rings cartoon