Have you ever ever heard Elijah Wooden chuckle? Like, actually chuckle? Straight-up bust a intestine in shock and delight? It’s nice. He doesn’t actually do it a lot in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, however you possibly can nonetheless see him do it on the Lord of the Rings DVDs should you dig fastidiously by means of the scene choice menus on The Return of the King to search out one among two hidden Easter Eggs there. That’s the way you’ll discover among the best jokes in all the movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
2021 marks The Lord of the Rings films’ twentieth anniversary, and we could not think about exploring the trilogy in only one story. So every Wednesday all year long, we’ll go there and again once more, analyzing how and why the movies have endured as trendy classics. That is Polygon’s Yr of the Ring.
It’s a prank name by Dominic Monaghan, posing as German interviewer “Hans Jensen,” asking Elijah Wooden more and more ridiculous questions in a remarkably constant German accent. It’s an amazing goof, but it surely’s additionally reminder of simply how completely different fan and web tradition was when these movies have been launched — of how if these films had come out immediately, we would already be uninterested in them.
Should you’ve by no means seen the interview earlier than, it’s now a lot simpler to see than it was in 2004, because of YouTube. Wooden, as he notes in an introduction recorded after the very fact, utterly purchased Monaghan’s schtick, and for the subsequent eight minutes, is totally taken for a journey as “Hans Jensen” asks him about his lovely eyes and, in one of the best change within the video, if he has “vorn vigs.”
(It’s additionally value noting that this prank name is a little bit of a product of its time — each as a result of it’s a prank name and since Monaghan makes use of his German character to make blunt statements about their co-star’s sexuality. It’s not terribly egregious, however the joke performs on a discomfort that speaks to the commonplace homophobia of the early ‘00s, which was not that way back!)
The video is a delight partly as a result of it’s very humorous — effortlessly flowing from absurd to cringe to a depraved non-sequitur about Wooden’s former dolphin co-star from Flipper — but it surely’s additionally steeped within the meta-narrative across the Lord of the Rings films, and the way the solid that performed its core Fellowship turned greatest associates over the course of the trilogy’s filming. This friendship was an enormous a part of the film’s folklore — all of them received tattoos of the Elvish character for “9”, a little bit of trivia that comes up usually sufficient that Dominic Monaghan would discuss it at size in a 2016 Leisure Weekly interview, and Orlando Bloom commemorated the occasion with a photograph he shared on Instagram across the similar time.
What’s attention-grabbing about this backstory is the best way that it’s been preserved and remembered, sometimes surfacing when folks, for instance, recall on Reddit the time Viggo Mortensen and Karl City purchased Gunpla collectively whereas doing press in Japan. When the Lord of the Rings movies have been popping out, on-line fandom was very a lot there, however social media was not — followers gathered on an Web that feels prehistoric looking back, sharing information and posting away on siloed message boards and fan websites. Quite a lot of them, like this Viggo Mortensen one sharing those self same photographs of their authentic context, are nonetheless round! And along with the extra conventional press tales in regards to the movies launched on the time, a hybrid textual content is fashioned, as trendy fandom re-processes the fascination of a earlier technology.
The Lord of the Rings isn’t the one film celebrated on this approach, but it surely is likely one of the largest blockbuster phenomena to come back alongside at a time the place followers have been on-line and flicks weren’t. Now, one thing like Dominic Monaghan pranking Elijah Wooden wouldn’t be tucked away on a DVD for less than the largest followers to search out, it might be shared on the film’s Instagram account. It might be one among many orchestrated stunts for viral publicity — an look on The Masked Singer, possibly one other on Sizzling Ones, a shoot with Wired to reply the net’s most searched questions, a Jimmy Kimmel phase studying hate tweets — an extended attraction offensive which may begin to make folks query if anybody on that movie truly appreciated one another. (Or, probably, affirmed these questions.)
These trendy media blitzes can have nice moments — Tom Holland selling Spider-Man: Homecoming by upstaging Zendaya in drag on Lip Sync Battle is a traditional of the shape — however they’re additionally an effective way to break what was beforehand form of enjoyable. Now, the press tour is the story, a battery of interviews and viral video games that contort actors into pretzels of performative authenticity. We’re at a degree that when celebrities begin to do issues folks truly do like, for instance, Paul Bettany’s sly joke about attending to work with an actor he’s at all times wished to work with (himself), a tidbit snowballs into rampant fan hypothesis a few thriller WandaVision villain performed by … Al Pacino? In a world like this, the one technique to win is to troll. Which Bettany did, reminding everybody that that is all efficiency, and we’re all a part of it.
These strains weren’t so cleanly drawn whereas The Lord of the Rings was occurring. And that’s what it felt like, prefer it was occurring, not being projected. Algorithms weren’t so instrumental in deciding who noticed what, social media didn’t but gamify outrage and hypothesis, and on-line fandom was nonetheless largely a spectator sport — studios have been completely not seeking to court docket or have interaction with on-line boards. So followers spun their wheels in relative obscurity, and now after we keep in mind these movies, we’re additionally remembering that fandom — which is, after all, an extension of a really lengthy line of people that adore the world of Center-Earth.
It’s becoming {that a} trilogy of flicks about fantastic and scary myths rising up from the shadows for one final hurrah would additionally generate its personal mythology that seems like one of many final of its sort. That distance between the Web because it was and the Web as it’s makes The Lord of the Rings really feel like a bit of the previous, in a approach that the following Hobbit trilogy and forthcoming Amazon present by no means will.
One thing that occurs on the Web now’s at all times occurring, at all times current, all shared on the identical social networks. However with The Lord of the Rings, all we have now are the tales, and one actually good prank name.
