The Return of the King (1980 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Return of the King begins at a birthday party in Rivendell. Bilbo Baggins turns 129, and his nephew Frodo is asked why he's missing a finger. The answer arrives in a ballad, sung by the Minstrel of Gondor, telling of a quest to destroy a Ring and defeat the Dark Lord Sauron.

  That opening tells the listener something important: this special assumes its audience already knows the earlier chapters. It adapts only the third and final volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1955 novel The Lord of the Rings, picking up after Rankin/Bass's 1977 special The Hobbit. The first two parts of Tolkien's story, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, get just a brief summary at the start.

  How does a television special compress a war across an entire continent into two hours? Who returned to voice Frodo, Gandalf and Gollum, and who had to be replaced? Why did a lawsuit threaten to keep the film off the air before it reached ABC? And why would people spend decades mistaking it for something it was never meant to be?

• 2. The Hobbits' Ordeal

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  In Mordor, Samwise Gamgee carries the Ring while Frodo is held prisoner in the Orc fortress of Cirith Ungol. Sam sets out to free him, and along the way he's tempted to claim the Ring for himself. He resists, rescues Frodo, and the two set off toward Mount Doom together.

  Ringwraiths and a battalion of Orcs lie in their path, and the Hobbits manage to slip past both. Gollum, the creature who took the Ring from Bilbo decades earlier, attacks them on the way; Frodo throws him down and continues on toward the Crack of Doom. Sam raises a blade against Gollum but stops himself, overcome with pity, and lets him flee.

  At the fire's edge, Frodo's resolve finally breaks. He slips the Ring onto his finger and disappears from sight. Sam finds him wrestling with Gollum, who bites off Frodo's finger to seize the Ring for himself. Dancing with joy over his recovered 'precious,' Gollum tumbles into the lava, carrying the Ring down with him. Sauron perishes in the same instant, and the Eagles lift Sam and Frodo clear of Mount Doom just as it erupts.

• 3. Gondor's Last Stand

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  Minas Tirith gets an urgent warning when Gandalf the White and the Hobbit Pippin Took arrive to alert Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, to the coming war. They find him already unraveling, his sanity gone, and planning to take his own life.

  Across the plains, Rohan throws its strength against Sauron's armies at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. Théoden, King of Rohan, falls to the Witch-king of Angmar in the fighting. His niece Éowyn, who disguised herself as a man to join the battle, kills the Witch-king with help from the Hobbit Merry Brandybuck.

  That victory buys Gondor's defenders only a brief lift. Denethor's despair comes first: the sight of a black fleet sailing from the west convinces him all is lost, and he takes his own life before it can be identified. Sauron's own troops take heart at that same fleet, mistaking it for reinforcements, until they see it sailing under the command of Prince Aragorn of Gondor. Their morale collapses on the spot.

  Aragorn, heir to Gondor's throne, arrives ready to confront Sauron directly at the Black Gate, trading words with the Mouth of Sauron as both armies brace for battle. A few months later, Aragorn is crowned King of Gondor.

• 4. Leaving Middle-earth

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  Frodo doesn't stay behind once the fighting ends. He joins Bilbo, Gandalf and Elrond as they prepare to leave Middle-earth for good.

  Before he goes, Frodo hands Sam the Red Book of Westmarch, a volume built from Bilbo's own memoirs with a few blank pages left inside. He tells Sam that a good life still awaits him. Gandalf adds his own reassurance: Hobbits, he says, will someday have descendants among humans, a way of carrying their kind forward even as the old world changes.

  The film closes on Frodo's departure from the Grey Havens. Getting that ending onto American screens took a production spread across two continents, and not every voice from the first film would return unchanged.

• 5. Assembling The Voices

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  Work on The Return of the King started at Rankin/Bass Productions in New York City soon after The Hobbit aired on NBC in 1977, under Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. Its working title was simply Frodo, The Hobbit II. Romeo Muller wrote the screenplay, while Rankin handled the script's staging, the character designs and the storyboards himself.

  Most of the cast from The Hobbit came back. Orson Bean returned as both the older Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins, and John Huston reprised Gandalf. William Conrad joined as Denethor, Roddy McDowall as Samwise Gamgee, Theodore Bikel as Aragorn, and Brother Theodore returned to voice Gollum, credited simply as Theodore. Elrond needed a new voice: Cyril Ritchard, who had played the part in The Hobbit, had since died, and Paul Frees stepped into the role.

  Casey Kasem took on Merry Brandybuck, Sonny Melendrez voiced Pippin Took, and Nellie Bellflower played Éowyn. Glenn Yarbrough came back as the film's principal singer, credited only as 'the Minstrel of Gondor,' with Thurl Ravenscroft rounding out the chorus. Maury Laws composed the background music, and Jules Bass wrote the songs and lyrics himself. The animation was produced an ocean away, at Topcraft in Japan, supervised by Toru Hara, Tsuguyuki Kubo, Kazuyuki Kobayashi and others.

• 6. A Legal Threat

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  Before the film could reach television, the Tolkien Estate and Fantasy Films filed a lawsuit against Rankin/Bass. Their claim was that Rankin/Bass had never secured the U.S. and Canadian television rights to Tolkien's novel.

  The dispute was resolved and described only as settled 'amicably,' clearing the way for the special to air in May 1980. Whatever tension the lawsuit created behind the scenes, it left no visible mark on the finished film. When the special did reach ABC that month, the audience watching had no idea how close the broadcast came to never happening at all.

• 7. Mixed Verdicts

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  ABC aired The Return of the King on the 11th of May 1980, a Sunday. Both critics and fans responded with indifference at the time.

  Reviews written since have landed on mixed rather than uniformly cool. Charles Cassidy of Common Sense Media scored it 3 out of 5, describing it as a cartoon tale that is 'darker, more complex than others in series.' Steven D. Greydanus of Decent Films Guide gave it a C, writing that it 'works even less well than The Hobbit, which really is a children's story' and pointing to an 'overbearing folk-ballad soundtrack' that fails to echo Tolkien's poetry.

  Director Arthur Rankin Jr. later reflected on the material itself. 'We tried to do Return of the King... but it is an awful lot to put into it,' he said, adding that Peter Jackson ran into the same problem in his own films. Rankin admitted the special had to summarize everything that came before and 'put it all together in 2 hours,' concluding, 'It's not a very good film.' Asked why Rankin/Bass adapted only The Return of the King instead of the full trilogy, his answer was blunt: 'I didn't know that the audience would sit still for it. I was wrong.'

• 8. After Broadcast

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  RCA released The Return of the King on CED videodisc in 1979. Warner Home Video issued it on VHS in 1991, then again in 1996 as part of the Warner Bros. Classic Tales video collection. It has been available on DVD since 2001, sold both on its own and inside a boxed trilogy alongside The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated The Lord of the Rings.

  That packaging created a lasting mix-up. Many viewers assumed The Return of the King was a direct sequel to Bakshi's film rather than to Rankin/Bass's own Hobbit. The confusion deepened after Rankin/Bass went out of business in 1987, when Warner Bros. acquired the special for home video and marketed it, alongside The Hobbit, as one leg of an animated Tolkien trilogy, with Bakshi's film placed in the middle.

  That framing fed a rumor that Rankin/Bass greenlit The Return of the King only after Bakshi's own planned sequel fell through. In fact, Rankin/Bass had intended The Return of the King as a follow-up to their Hobbit all along, well before Bakshi's film ever reached theaters.