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If I only had a Bombadil... - Page 9

© Michael Martinez

If, on the other hand, the Hobbits are shown eluding the Nazgul quickly and easily (say, by sliding down an embankment in a possible homage to the Ralph Bakshi movie), then Bombadil's role is assigned less importance. The Nazgul look weak and flimsy if all one has to do is duck down a hillside, but there is still Weathertop and the Ford of Bruinen. I suppose in the final analysis what it really comes down to is how much the story has been changed from the book. Removing Bombadil surgically is simply impossible. You either leave in a lot of stuff which goes unexplained (such as the Hobbits' swords) or you change the story to eliminate the discrepancies. Hence, the Barrow-blades are nonsensically given to the Hobbits by Aragorn (he would never do such a thing, but that is purportedly what the two-film script was going to do, and some people are guessing this is still what happens in "The Fellowship of the Ring"). The biggest problem with having Aragorn give four magic swords to untrained Hobbits is that he still wanders around the landscape with a broken blade in his sheath. On the one hand, that makes him look pretty stupid. On the other hand, that makes him look very confident. And if Aragorn and the Hobbits just stumble across some old barrow where swords await them (ala "Conan the Barbarian"), well, you're changing the story. However the barrow-blades are handled, removing Bombadil forces other changes in the story. But then the point of the movies is to tell the journey of the Ringbearers, not to document Bombadil's every silly song. We already know that Arwen has a larger role in the movies (although so far she doesn't seem to have much of a role at all -- she doesn't accompany the Fellowship as some people feared, and very few spy reports have identified her in any scenes). The larger role for Arwen means that some other things have been changed. And then we have a very strong suspicion that Saruman dies at the end of the second film. And the Uruk-Hai are no longer Orcs, they are pod-born creatures who emerge with plate-armor. Okay, the point is, the story has already been changed. Maybe it's too late to save Bombadil and add him into a DvD version. Or, maybe, just maybe, Peter Jackson has held back a surprise and he'll do just that. One of the greatest scenes in "The Wizard of Oz" movie (in my humble opinion) is the Jitterbug sequence. What's that? You don't remember the Jitterbug sequence? I'm not surprised. It was cut from the movie. But not everything connected to the scene was cut. When the Wicked Witch of the West sends the flying monkeys to capture Dorothy and Toto, she tells their leader, "They won't give you any trouble! I've sent a little bug ahead to take the fight out of them."

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