Long ago, in the days when disco ruled the Earth and Dungeons and Dragons was in its first edition, there was a Hobbit movie. Before Harry Potter, before World of Warcraft, before Game of Thrones, before Shwarzenegger’s furry Conan Speedo, before even Hawk the Slayer, there was The Hobbit. A simpler Hobbit. A cartoon Hobbit. A Hobbit that wasn’t stretched out into a butt-numbingly long trilogy. Rankin/Bass’ 1977 TV movie version of The Hobbit is… well, we’ll get to that. But first and foremost, it was the many adult geeks, myself included, were first introduced to Middle Earth. My parents rented this on VHS, and it blew my mind when I was six.

It was, shall we say, a product of its time. Being a TV cartoon from the seventies, it looks a bit creaky nowadays, but I still find kind of charming. I was sick for the better part of two days this week, and spent a fair amount of time slurking down lemon tea and watching movies, including The Hobbit. Surprisingly, after all these years, it's not wholly awful.

More after the jump.

• In this version, Bilbo was played by Topher Grace. Get it? TOE FUR! WOO! Um... Yeah...

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• Another Hobbit Post, Another Excuse to use this Image

Peter Jackson's been making a big deal of the fact that he shot The Hobbit films at 48 frames per second instead of the traditional 24, claiming that by getting rid of the flickering effect we associate with film, the doubled frame rate "looks much more lifelike, and it is much easier to watch, especially in 3D." But a while back, when a few minutes of the film were projected at a high frame rate (HFR), the reaction was... hmm. How to put this? TERRIBLE. Apparently, what Jackson sees as "much more lifelike," everybody else sees as "like a cheap sitcom." A representative review, from Badass Digest's Devin Faraci:

It is drenched in a TV-like—specifically '70s era BBC—video look. People on Twitter have asked if it has that soap opera look you get from badly calibrated TVs at Best Buy, and the answer is an emphatic YES.

The 48fps footage I saw looked terrible. It looked completely non-cinematic. The sets looked like sets. I've been on sets of movies on the scale of The Hobbit, and sets don't even look like sets when you're on them live... but these looked like sets.

The other comparison I kept coming to, as I was watching the footage, was that it all looked like behind-the-scenes video. The magical illusion of cinema is stripped away completely. (Via.)

After the wave of bad publicity that followed that screening, Warner Bros.—while still insisting HFR was "the most important change in exhibition, probably since the introduction of sound"—significantly downgraded their plans to release the film in HFR. A few theaters are still getting the film as Jackson wants it to be seen, though, and Regal just came out with a list—which includes the Regal Bridgeport Village in Tigard.

I'm guessing Warner Bros. won't screen The Hobbit in HFR for critics—I doubt they want to risk having a bunch of reviews that point out how cheap their super-expensive movie looks. I'm also guessing theater chains like Regal will charge more for their HFR screenings, because the few people who will know/care what HFR is are also the ones willing to pay a premium in order to complain about it. And I'm guessing this won't be the last you'll hear about any of this: James Cameron, because he is James Cameron, is planning to shoot his Avatar sequels at 60 FPS.

• SECOND BREAKFAST Breakfast is important—especially if your lunch money gets stolen every day.

That last entry is going to be pretty hard to beat, but if you still want to have second breakfast with me and Steve*, you have until 5 pm today to enter and/or re-enter our incredibly dumb contest. Have at, hungry nerds!

* "No one is going to want to have breakfast with you guys." —Mercury Arts Editor Alison Hallett, WHO CLEARLY DOESN'T KNOW WHAT SHE'S TALKING ABOUT

• I Will Never Stop Posting This image

While INSANE DETAILS about Denny's Hobbit Happy Meals for grownups continue to shake the internet to its very foundations—and don't forget, one of those could be yours, and you could eat it with me and Steve right there, watching you—Peter Jackson's been telling Empire how long the first of his three Hobbit movies is going to be, and if you guessed that Jackson still has yet to find anyone who'll tell him "No," you are correct!

“It’s looking like it’s going to be about 10 minutes shorter than Fellowship was," explains Jackson. "So it’s going to be officially our shortest Middle-earth yet. I mean, Fellowship was just under three hours and this is about 2 hours 40 minutes at the moment.”

The "at the moment" refers to the fact that the credits hadn't yet been added and not all effects shots finalised when we spoke to Jackson, but it's going to be close. (Via.)

Keep in mind that The Fellowship of the Ring was a condensed adaptation of an entire novel, while The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be an adaptation of the first part of a far, far shorter novel, along with some extra stuff that was originally put in to pad the movie out to make two movies, and now is padding the movie out to three movies. By the time The Hobbit actually comes out, I'm pretty sure Jackson's going to announce it'll be better as a weekly TV show that will run from now until 2042. Each hour-long episode will consist of three minutes based on The Hobbit and 57 minutes loosely inspired by some stuff that Jackson vaguely remembers possibly reading in one of the Appendices.

Via Topless Robot comes the news that, starting November 6, Denny's—the Jantzen Beach location of which I find myself at surprisingly often—is offering a The Hobbit-themed menu. You can watch a terrible ad for it above, or head to Denny's suspiciously chatty Twitter (Exhibit 1, Exhibit 2, Exhibit 3), or you can just read the menu items below:

• Gandalf's Gobble Melt
• Hobbit Hole Breakfast
• Pumpkin Patch Pancakes
• Lonely Mountain Treasure
• Frodo's Pot Roast Skillet
• Shire Sausage
• Bilbo's Berry Smoothies
• Radagast's Red Velvet Pancake Puppies
• Seed Cake French Toast
• Build Your Own Hobbit Slam

Before one of you brainiacs points it out in the comments, I should probably note that "Gandalf's Gobble Melt," "Shire Sausage," and "Bilbo's Berry Smoothies" do not seem to be appropriate for children, and "Hobbit Hole Breakfast" is... borderline. MOVING ON.

WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY AND I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS SHIT TO START. Just as we ran to Burger King when they were selling Star Trek glasses, and just as we raced to 7-Eleven for Iron Man Slurpees, we are going to go to Denny's and eat all of those things and it is going to be glorious. (I am 99 percent sure Steve has never actually seen a Lord of the Rings movie, and I am 100 percent sure he views them with the same disdain he holds for Game of Thrones. IRRELEVANT. He really, really likes Denny's.) AND YOU CAN COME WITH US*!!! That's right... the Mercury will buy you a Hobbit-themed breakfast, AND you get to hang out with me and Steve while we talk about how much we love Lord of the Rings and/or Denny's*!!! You can even weigh in with your own opinions about Lord of the Rings, Denny's, and/or any troubles that might be on your mind*!!!

Here's all you have to do to enter to win this once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience Denny's in the exact manner that learned Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien intended:

In the comments below, note which Hobbit-themed menu item you will be ordering, and why. (Last year you nerds went apeshit with the haikus for that Lord of the Rings in Concert ticket giveaway, which means I will give extra credit to any entries composed as a haiku.) Steve** and I will then choose the best and/or least annoying comment and then contact that person about when we'll all be going to get second breakfast! And then... then we shall depart on a quest the likes of which has not been witnessed since the Third Age!!! To Denny's*!!!

Now that I am done writing this blog post, I forget why Steve and I decided to bring one of you along with us. It seems weird, in retrospect. But hey, it's your lucky day, I guess, since I don't feel like rewriting this entire post. So enter away! The contest, such as it is, ends in a week, on October 31 at 5 pm. That should give you plenty of time to either write a truly phenomenal comment or come up with a dick joke about Shire sausage.

* "No one is going to want to have breakfast with you guys." —Mercury Arts Editor Alison Hallett

** "Alison is full of shit. Also, I once ate five meals at Denny's within a 24-hour period." —Mercury Editor-in-Chief Wm. Steven Humphrey

Novelty 3D glasses that are even stupider than normal 3D glasses are nothing new, but these—for The Hobbit, The Hobbit II: Here's Some More of That Hobbit!, and The Hobbit III: A Major Motion Picture Based on a Post-it Note We Found in One of Tolkien's Old Tweed Jackets, It Might Be a Grocery List, Give Us Your Money—take the cake lembas bread. Boasting a "hammer-forged steel look," they continue Warner Bros.' surprisingly successful efforts to turn me against The Hobbit—a movie based on one of my favorite childhood books, a movie that follows up three of my favorite movies, a movie I should be really excited about—before it even comes out.

• Via TheOneRing.net

Clunky, blocky, faux-stone 3D glasses hewn from cheap plastic that you'll have to wear on your face for three straight hours: They're the only way to feel as if you're really in Middle-earth! And also the only way to look like you're a bad guy from a PlayStation 1 game.

• "LOOK INTO MY EYES! THE LOVELY BONES NEVER HAPPENED! OR KING KONG EITHER! NOW LET US COMMENCE 'P.J.'S HOBBIT-HOLE DANCE PARTY 2011!'" OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ

Those hobbit-loving nerds at Ain't It Cool have the news:

New Line, MGM, and Warner Brothers have announced that Peter Jackson's Hobbit films are titled The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, to be released December 14, 2012, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again, to be released December 13, 2013.

The titles are very much from the books, and appropriate for the films, I'd say. So much of the cast from The Lord of the Rings is returning—some of them who weren't in The Hobbit originally, but I trust Peter Jackson and I think he'll make the characters work in these films.

I trusted Peter Jackson before The Lovely Bones made me want to shout "FIRE!" in the theater, preferably after starting an actual fire so that the print of Lovely Bones would be destroyed. It doesn't help that despite my deep, deep Lord of the Rings nerdiness, I can't shake the feeling that this second Hobbit movie—which is supposed to bridge the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—is gonna be nothing than a bland cash-in ("And then Aragorn... y'know... strode around for... a while."). Well, that, and the versions Guillermo Del Toro was working on before he left the project sounded awesome. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll be magical. Or maybe it'll be a mystery. BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!

• Via the New Yorker.

I've already made my shameless man-crush on Guillermo del Toro abundantly clear, but Daniel Zalewski's New Yorker profile of the guy kicks it up another notch. Del Toro talks about his childhood, long-gestating projects like At the Mountains of Madness, his mansion-sized office/museum, Bleak House ("It was as if the 40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget," Zalewski writes), and more:

“Some of the most immortal things in our glossary of images come from movies with not necessarily the greatest screenplays.” [Del Toro] refers to a script as a “libretto”; horror, he said, is special because it “excites a nonverbal part of us.” He mentioned Kubrick’s The Shining: “You’re reading, ‘Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors.’ You just don’t get it—how lonely they are, the rhythm of the prrr, the change of frequency in the wheels, the pattern in the carpet going frh, frh, frh, the lens enhancing the field and the perspective, and the moment he turns the corner the twins being there. You can’t explain that in words.” Del Toro often spends months planting “visual rhymes” in his movies; the tunnels that Ofelia travels through in Pan’s Labyrinth, for example, all have “feminine apertures.” What others call eye candy del Toro calls “eye protein.”

The piece is also moderately heartbreaking for anyone who had been looking forward to del Toro's adaptation of The Hobbit. Brace yourselves, nerds:

The most difficult part, [del Toro] said, was “making peace with the fact that somebody else is going to have control of your creatures, your wardrobe, and change it, or discard it, or use it. All options are equally painful.” He added, “The stuff I left behind is absolutely gorgeous. I’m absolutely in love with it.” He suddenly became animated, waving his hands in the air like a conductor navigating a treacherous passage of Mahler. “We created a big exhibit in the last few weeks, in preparation for a studio visit. I had color-coded the movie: there was a green passage, a blue passage, a crimson passage, a golden passage. In Tolkien, there is a clear season for autumn, winter, summer, spring in the journey. And I thought, I cannot just stay in four movements in two movies. It will become monotonous. So I thought of organizing the movie so you have the feeling of going into eight seasons. So a certain area of the movie was coded black and green, a certain area was crimson and gold, and when we laid out the movie in a big room, we had all the wardrobe, all the props, all the color-coded key art. When you looked and saw that beautiful rainbow, you could comprehend that there was a beautiful passage.” His scheme would probably be abandoned, he said later: “Not much is going to make it. That’s my feeling.” Would his art be returned to him? “I hope to get maquette visitation rights.” But he was grateful not to have them already at Bleak House; they would be a torment.

There's more: Descriptions of del Toro's designs for The Hobbit's Smaug; a visit to del Toro's favorite special effects house to work on a sculpture for a potential Frankenstein film; and the word "uxoriousness," just in case you forgot you were reading the New Yorker for a minute. Read the whole thing here. Thanks to Grant for the heads up!