6 Deleted Scenes That Prove The Book Isn't Always Better

Ah, Cracked.  Sometimes you provide some nice information that the inattentive masses on the internet wouldn't otherwise be aware of, and other times you're saying Sauron was an alright guy.  And now you turn your daft eye towards The Lord of the Rings and Starship Troopers.

And, naturally, they bring up Tom Goddamn Bombadil as evidence that The Book Isn't Always Better.  Because, as we all know, there isn't a single second, nary a frame, of stupid belief-suspension-failure comedy in Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy, right?

A fake language dictionary disguised as an epic fantasy novel, as you can imagine, doesn't exactly lend itself to the big screen. So, for the sake of streamlining the story, a lot of elements had to be tweaked or outright abandoned. For example, the book version drags on for six chapters after Gollum takes his swan-dive into the volcano, and before it's over, we see Saruman acting like a small-time mafioso in the Shire before ending up on the wrong end of a shiv. So, yeah -- the infuriating multiple endings in Return of the King: That's real.

Except no, it isn't, because the "infuriating multiple endings" in Return of the King weren't spaced one after the other in an endless procession in the books.  Not to mention they weren't padded out with slow motion that tripled their length.

But what they left out was much weirder, such as the part where Merry and Pippin almost get eaten alive by an angry tree but are saved by a dancing, prancing forest-dweller who calms down the tree by singing to it and then lures the bewildered hobbits back to his secluded shack in the woods.

Coming soon on The Blog That Time Forgot: Twenty Things from The Lord of the Rings I loved that weren't adapted. Not featured: the part where Merry and Pippin almost get eaten alive by an angry tree but are saved by a dancing, prancing forest-dweller who calms down the tree by singing to it and then lures the bewildered hobbits back to his secluded shack in the woods.*

You can read Lord of the Rings as an allegory for World War II

Or not, being as Tolkien hated allegory - you can read it as applicable, though.

in which case Tom Bombadil represents the spirit of pacifism and noninvolvement. Which, as we all know, makes for bitching action movies.

I can think of plenty of bitching action movies that involve pacifism and noninvolvement.  The idea of a man of peace who doesn't want to fight, only to be pushed into taking up his weapons when his family/friends/country/beliefs/turtles are threatened, describes half of all bitching action movies.  Hell, even Commando had pacifism and noninvolvement! Feckin' Commando!

In any case, it's perhaps understandable that Cracked would focus on Bombadil, since it's obviously harder to make a case for the the films leaving out great stuff like the Barrow Downs, Glorfindel, Beregond and the Knights of Dol Amroth: let's just take the one really stupid, goofy element of the book, and represent it like there are plenty more like it.  Yeah.  Good one, Cracked.

But then, they bring up Starship Troopers, the most vigorously misunderstood science fiction story I've ever heard of.

When fanboys complain about the soldiers-vs.-insect-monsters, intentionally over-the-top sci-fi action flick Starship Troopers, it's usually about how director Paul Verhoeven left out the giant, awesome, robot-armor death-suits that featured heavily in the novel. (When nonfanboys complain about it, it's usually about how awful it is as, like, a movie.) A complaint you don't hear so often is that Verhoeven also left out the fact that the insect monsters are meant to be stand-ins for the soulless, hive-minded Chinese.

I blame "Starship Stormtroopers," the "Epic Pooh" of science fiction criticism.  Also by Michael Moorcock, as it happens.  Anyone know of a rebuttal to SS like Brian Murphy's rebuttal of "Epic Pooh"?

Now, Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is interesting, for I view it much as I view Conan the Barbarian: a flawed, but ambitious story that is very different and often directly contradictory to the source material.  As an adaptation, it's a disaster: as an independent creation that takes one or two names and ideas from earlier material and runs with it, though, I think it's very misunderstood, almost as misunderstood as the novel in the first place.

Of course, Conan the Barbarian and Starship Troopers differ in that while Milius and Stone started the project explicitly as a Conan film and honestly believe they were being true to Howard's creation, Verhoeven started this project as something else, and after reading through part of Heinlein's novel, decided to satirise it.

The problem is that most of the accusations made towards Starship Troopers are completely inaccurate.  Chris W's Starship Troopers page is what I'm trying to do with my Filmgoer's Guide, albeit perhaps Howard didn't hallucinate the ghost of Conan and write down his biography, Tolkien didn't glorify war... and I forget where I was going with this.

All I can say is that if people can read the likes of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and come to the conclusion that Heinlein was fascist and militaristic because of Starship Troopers... then you might as well say that Tolkien was a rabid secular transhumanist based on The Children of Hurin.

*And to complement that, "Twenty Things from Jackson's Lord of the Rings Films I Loved That Aren't In The Books," itself complemented by "The 20 Worst Things about Jackson's Lord of the Rings Films," finally offset by "The 20 Best Things about Jackson's Lord of the Rings Films."