A long-lost version of The Hobbit by animation legend Gene Deitch
has resurfaced online in the past few days. Why did Gene produce this
12-minute “animatic” version instead of the feature-length version he’d
originally planned with Jiří Trnka? Why did he have just one month to
produce it? Why has nobody ever seen it? The crazy circumstances that
led to the production are revealed in this piece that Gene wrote on his website.
In short, the film was a financial ploy by Deitch’s producer William L.
Snyder to earn himself a nice chunk of change. Deitch writes:
The Tolkien estate had now been offered a fabulous sum
for the rights, and [William] Snyder’s rights would expire in one month.
They were already rubbing their hands together. But Snyder played his
ace: to fulfill just the letter of the contract – to deliver a
“full-color film” of THE HOBBIT by June 30th. All he had to do was to
order me to destroy my own screenplay – all my previous year’s work, and
hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview,
(but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all
within 12 minutes running time – one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to
get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get
it to a New York projection room on or before June 30th, 1966! I should
have told him to shove it, but I was basically his slave at the time.
It suddenly became an insane challenge.
The rest of the story can be read on Gene’s website. And just for the record, the delightful illustrations in the film were created by Czech illustrator Adolf Born.


(Thanks, Stephen Persing, via Cartoon Brew’s Facebook page)