Although we geeks take our genre favorites very seriously, we also have a sense of humor, and can indeed take a joke, even about The Hobbit or LOTR.
After all, before Peter Jackson made the Hobbit, his horror films like Bad Taste and Dead Alive had a lot of laughs, to the point where his movies were called “splat-stick.”
So there’ve been several goofs on The Hobbit I’ve seen on the ‘Net already, and for a second, I actually got the impression that one was a stupid rumor that somebody took too seriously before it was refuted. That’s definitely what first came to mind when I saw the headline in the LA Times, “Gandalf the Gay.”
No, there’s not going be a gay Hobbit spinoff, or a porno for that matter. This came out of a joke question from Lord of the Rings fan Stephen Colbert. Colbert asked Ian McKellen, who has been out of the closet for decades, “Are you the sharp knife point of the gay agenda trying to brainwash our children?”
McKellen joked back that there’s going to be a Gandalf the Gay spin-off. “And you get to find out who is his favorite dwarf,” McKellen added. Colbert added, “I can’t wait to see it in3-D,” but what about 48 frames a second?
Several sites have taken some amusing jabs at the Hobbit as well, especially in terms of its length. Vulture ran one story about “Why The Hobbit Really Needs to Be That Long,” including extended sequences where Bilbo’s making tea, and the Gollum musical number, “My Precious.” Then SFWeekly ran a story that wondered how far could you get into reading The Hobbit while the Hobbit’s onscreen?
As Alan Scherstuhl writes, “Just to be fair, I wouldn’t count the movie’s 16 minute end-credits against its running time. So how far did he get? “By the time I reached the end of chapter six, where the film stops, just over two and a half hours had passed – I still had 20 + minutes to spare.”
The real question is could Tolkien have written The Hobbit by the time the end credits started rolling? See, even we’re joining in on The Hobbit fun.
