I bought and downloaded all 3 (three) BBC radio dramatizations of Lord of the Rings with Ian Holm as Frodo so I could listen to them at work but now
Friends
Comrades
It’s new (to me) LOTR material
I am not ready.
I am not feeling Gollum’s voice. Andy Serkis is a tough act to live up to but the narrator of the audiobook did a really good job too.
But Ian Holm as Frodo and Bill Nighy as Sam sound adorable so far.
DAVID COLLINGS AS LEGOLAS?????????? EXCUSE ME??????????????????
Yeah…I haven’t gotten to him yet. I’ll let you know how that goes. I’m having a really hard time wrapping my head around Robert Stephens as Aragorn? What.
I can’t recognize Bill Nighy’s voice at all. I’m trying to imagine his Sam voice coming out of Davey Jones’s mouth and it is just not happening. He’s the sweetest thing though.
Ian Holm sounds like himself. Like his Bilbo voice from the movies but a lot younger.
Idk, it’s easy for me to imagine Robert Stephens as Aragorn, but yeah, maybe his voice is a bit too sweet.
I wonder if Bill Nighy’s voice changed a lot. I mean, it’s hard enough to imagine him being younger than 50 anyway.
Also, I like the idea of John Le Mesurier playing Bilbo, he was very sweet in Dad’s Army.
Ian Holm is just a hobbit, that’s it
Robert Stephens is the villain in The Box of Delights adaptation done by the BBC which we watched every year as a kid (I highly recommend it!) so when I would listen to the BBC LotR when I was younger I just couldn’t trust Aragorn at all!
I haven’t listened to the whole thing since around the time of the movies. Imo Ian Holm is the best Frodo and probably the best there will ever be (though I really do like Elijah Wood as well) – the scene when they finally get to Mount Doom haunts me *to this day*. He’s just so good. I’m glad he got to do his little scary as fuck moment in the movies. The adaptation as a whole I’m not that fond of, mainly because the music is not to my taste *at all*, other than Sam’s little songs, which are lovely. The Bill Nighy (credited as “William” back then!) is a really great Sam. But I prefer the radio version of The Hobbit, probably because I listened to that much more as a child, so it’s “my” version. The music is better too! But also LotR is just a lot of work in audio form – I’ve never really been able to concentrate on audio books since my teens, and have only recently got the concentration to listen to podcasts, even.
Excuse me but Peter Woodthorpe’s Gollum is fucking great.
He hasn’t quite won me over yet sorry. That being sad I’m stupidly easy to win over so idk I’ll probably end up liking him more when I get to Two Towers. I’ll say this, the scene where he’s being tortured by Sauron is chilling as hell. I’m listening to it at work and I had to stop what I was doing, it was so unnerving to me.
The Paradox Machine 