• Howls Moving Castle
• Legend
• Secrets of Midde Earth - Inside Tolkien's "The Hobbit"
• The Princess Bride
• Kingdom of Heaven
• Constantine
• Primer
• The Ring Two
• Empires - Holy Warriors: Richard the Lionheart & Saladin -Review
• The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Labyrinth

Secrets of Middle Earth - Inside Tolkien's "The Hobbit"

Secrets of Middle-Earth - Inside Tolkien's "The Hobbit"

This is an interesting piece of work if you are a big fan of Tolkien. I stumbled across this in the video store and wasn't really sure what it was. Is it another version of the Hobbit? Or is it a documentary? The Title and the back leads you to believe it is an in-depth analysis of the Hobbit. It isn't. It is a documentary about Tolkien. And it is actually rather intriguing if short in duration (The main feature is less than an hour) but there is some additional bonus materials)

It's a rather interesting work that brings some nice stuff forward about Tolkien and his writing life. It begins by showing letters and telling the story of how JRR used to send his children letters of fantasy stories for christmas. And it goes on to tell the story of the publishing of the hobbit. It seems that the publisher that was considering publishing it had given it to his son to review as he did with all the children's books he receives. And the publisher would publish depending on the son's advice. Well in this case the son gave it a good review so it was published! Imagine the loss if the boy didn't like the book! The world would be a different place for all of us fans.

Anyway, the dvd has a lot of good stuff like actual footage of Tolkien in different interviews and even has radio excerpts of JRR reading from The Lord of the Rings. There are interviews with the Hildebrandts and with the children of JRR and a variety of scholars.

They really focused on his creativity and his drive to create a complete world in Middle Earth. Did you know that Tolkien was also a pretty good water colorist? They show lots of the paintings he did about middle earth.

In summary, if you are a big fan and would like to know more about Tolkien and the workings of his creative mind then this is for you. If you specifically want to gain insight into the Hobbit then this is not going to do it for you. But if you are a Tolkien fan then this is worth five times the purchase price just because of the footage of him.