Look What They've Done to the Official Web Site, Ma - Page 2
© Michael Martinez
At this point, I'm not sure New Line can do much to impress me. Oh, they've put up videos, translated the site into 10 languages, and have loaded my browser with flash animations. Gordon Paddison and his handful of Elves have devoted an alleged 30 per cent of their time to this redesign for about a year. That's a lot of work. (NOTE: There is a non-flash site, but I didn't look at it.)
Of course, fans were kind of disappointed with the last redesign. There were fewer updates than promised, and the "ask the director" feature was apparently never implemented. Okay, Peter has been busy managing up to five or six film crews at a time. But he gave the most recent exclusive coverage to Harry Knowles. That seems a bit of a slap in the face to New Line's dedicated Web site. Or maybe it's just the foretaste of what's to come.
So, at 12:01 AM Pacific Time I hit my REFRESH button and saw:
Transferring files from Middle Earth...
Please stand by.
Ah, the anticipation mounts. No more popups plugging the April 7, 1999 Internet Preview.
So, when the site finally loads, we see three main options. The first is a Q&A with Peter Jackson. Cool. Unfortunately, the page is a slow scroller. And this is with my brand new cable modem, folks. It takes a while for the graphics to load or the sound to start or something. But eventually my browser has all the stuff and I can move through it. (NOTE: Eventually I rebooted, twice, and cleared my Internet cache/temporary files -- things speeded up noticeably.)
What they've done is take questions submitted through TheOneRing.Net, Dark Horizon, Ringbearer.Org or the official site (why not any other sites?) and they've conducted mini-interviews with Peter. You can view them in RealMedia clips.
How informative are the answers? Well, the questions spell the name "Tolkein" instead of "Tolkien". Nonetheless, Peter does provide some candid replies. He also dodges the bullet in a couple of places.
Clicking on "The Legend" I read that "generations of more than 50 million people ... in 25 different languages...." Well, this is old hat. The 50 million figure was published in 1992 for the Tolkien Centenary conference. A few more books have been sold since then. We've come to expect this sort of recycled blurb from the news media, but from the movie's official Web site? Come on, guys. Houghton Mifflin was supposed to publish new research last year. What happened to their sales estimates (tentatively over 100 million)?
The copyright of the article Look What They've Done to the Official Web Site, Ma - Page 2 in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Michael Martinez. Permission to republish Look What They've Done to the Official Web Site, Ma - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
