Here's what you missed, according to the Pitch Meeting...



I ain't paying for tv, so I haven't seen it.  No interest, either.  I couldn't get through the Hobbit films.  The amount of stretching and time wasting in the first made me skip the second.  still haven't seen it.  I'd rather watch the Rankin-Bass animated movie.

Like MRP, my intro to Tolkien was the Return of the King animated special, from Rankin-Bass, though I didn't see The Hobbit until I later rented it, from Blockbuster, while in the Navy.  Same way I finally saw the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, after seeing tv spots, back in the day.  For whatever reason, I had labored under the misconception, at the time, that it was from Disney.  For a time, I thought the clip of Tchernabog, in the opening of NBC's The Wonderful World of Disney, was from Lord of the Rings, and not Fantasia.

I found The Return of the King in my high school library, after watching the tv movie and read it, then bought a box set of the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and read the whole thing.  I've tried the Silmarillion on a couple of occasions, but always end up bored.  Quite frankly, I find huge chunks of The Two Towers to be boring and usually end up skimming through to the better parts.  I don't have that, with Fellowship, though it starts to test my patience, just before they arrive at Rivendell.

At the same time I discovered The return of the King, in the library, I also found Michael Moorcock's The Silver Warriors (aka The Phoenix in Obsidian), which launched me onto reading his stuff.