The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

The Fake Life blog has a rundown of this week’s fresh DVDs, including Peter Jackson’s latest greatest super-duper edition of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Theatrical and Extended Limited Edition). Boy, that fatboy is sure milking the Tolkien teet. After the dud-a-rama King Kong, he better over-deliver on his next film (and make sure it isn’t 4 hours long zzz). Or maybe he can remake Meet the Feebles with a 200 million dollar budget…

I can’t reason out why I should own three individual releases of these films, even though I love them. I’m also a bit leary about the infamous DVD-18, which is a double-layer, double-sided disc that has been known to be subject to production glitches. Both versions of the films, glued together by a high-tech term known as seemless branching, are split in half over the two sides of the “dreaded” DVD-18. If you can get past that little design quirk, you may be happy to know that there is a second disc with each film which contains some exclusive content. Peter Jackson hired filmmaker Costa Botes to document in great detail the entire production of the trilogy. None of this material, amounting to a feature-length doc for each film, was part of the special features for the other sets, so it seems reasonable to assume that the triple-dip was in the plans all along. Most likely, a rental would be sufficient to appreciate these new documentaries, but if you feel a nagging itch to own every shred of video concerning your beloved Hobbit adventures, please buy away. Since when does logic enter into fandom?

Source: The Fake Life