LegolasDuring Comic-Con 2013, and my multiple viewings of artist Jerry Vanderstelt’s booth, I got to see him in the process of working on his next print. Yesterday, via his Facebook Page, Jerry showed the world what I saw during Comic-Con, and let folks know that its in approvals. This stunning piece captures Legolas Greenleaf from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Once this goes up for sale you can count on us letting you all know, so you can add this amazing piece of art to your Middle-earth collection.

IMG_5162As many of you may know when we did our magazine for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey we took submissions from collectors around the world. A few of these ended up appearing in the magazine allowing people all over the world to see some of what you’ve taken time show off your love for Middle-earth. Recently, I was able to finally able to set up my collection and be able to really appreciate many of the pieces I’ve managed to add. Thankfully the room my stuff in now is large enough to show off everything I’ve got with room to spare for new items from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Even if I’m still getting items out of storage to show off. This collection through ups and downs (selling items) started back in 2003 and continues on for a while. It’s my way of allowing people see what Middle-earth means to me and explain why they’re missing out on such a great universe. I hope you enjoy taking a peek into my collection and what it looks like after its been reviewed.

mbladeThe folks over at United Cutlery and BudK have a new item for fans of Middle-earth to pre-order. The new item available for pre-order is a replica of the Morgul Blade Radagast discovers during The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. You can order this awesome collectible for only $129 and it will be in-stock in just 60 days. So you won’t have to wait long before you add this to your collection. Also, if you’re feeling lucky you can enter into a contest and you just might bring this item home. The contest ends when the Morgul Blade ships in 60 days.

Morgul Blade Product Page and Contest!

Time for our live webcast TORnTUESDAY! Every week we bring all the news and rumors from within (and without) Ringer fandom — this week we have dissent among the ranks. Better to say we have *many* different opinions on the leaked photo of Beorn, the shape-shifter who was given a not-so-convincing posterior thumbnail image on the back of a 2014 wall calendar that will soon hit store shelves….

Our reactions within the ranks of the TORn Staff have been across the board (both cold and hot). Watching how fans react on the Message Boards and on our Facebook timeline is fascinating!

We launch TORn TUESDAY every week at 5:00PM Pacific: brought to you by host Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway and producer Justin “That There is a Bear” Sewell — Our innovative live show includes worldwide fans who join us on the Live Event page with a built-in IRC chat (affectionately known as Barliman’s Chat room). Be part of the fun and mischief every week as we broadcast *live* from Meltdown Comics in the heart of Hollywood, U.S.A.!

And yes our YouTube channel will have this archived later.  You can find us on www.youtube.com/the1nering

————————————————-

Follow us on Twitter:  @theoneringnet

Follow Cliff Broadway:  @quickbeam2000

Like us on Facebook:  www.facebook.com/theoneringnet

WIBPSOM-IMDB-scatter Mark Lee at Overthinking It follows up his Words in Books per Second of Movie analysis of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and other successful movies with some additional analysis examining IMDB ratings, plus the trend in adaptations over the decades.


In last week’s article, I started with a simple question: how do book lengths, as measures by word count, compare to their adapted movie run times, as measured by seconds? I was mostly looking for a statistical basis to express my displeasure at The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and by extension, parts 2 and 3 of this unnecessary trilogy), but I wound up comparing the density of the Hobbit movies, as measured in Words in Book per Second of Movie (WIBPSOM), to other prominent movie adaptations of books: The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and the Twilight franchises.

The findings were interesting in and of themselves (TL;DR: The Hobbit Books have way smaller WIBPSOM values than the other franchises), but they begged for a larger scale analysis, both in size of dataset and scope of inquiry. To address the size of the dataset, I found all of the (English language) entries on this list of best-selling books that have theatrically-released, non-silent movie adaptations. After including multiple movie adaptations of the same movie and excluding movies where I couldn’t find any data on book length as measured by word count, I came up with a dataset of 59 movie adaptations of best selling books.

As for scope of inquiry, well, let’s get down to brass tacks: is there any relationship between the density of a book’s movie adaptation, as measured by WIBPSOM, and the quality of the movie, as measured by its IMDB rating?

In a word, the answer to this intriguing question is an emphatic “no.”

[Read More]

If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.