You want to talk about your very specific kinds of nostalgia...
The clip above brings me back to summer ’99 or 2000 at a kiosk next to the food court at Crossgates Mall. Road Runner reps were showing off their fancy new cable modems and the handiest demonstrator was the first video diary that’d been released ahead of Fellowship of the Ring. Creatively, they offered the clip in various file sizes that corresponded to Middle Earth creatures. Dial-up connections could only handle "Hobbit size" while only cable could handle "wizard size." Human and dwarf sizes fit somewhere in between.
I bring that all up because it’s the other end of the kind of deja vu/nostalgia that Peter Jackson’s going through while walking around the rebuilt sets of Hobbiton, Rivendell and the Misty Mountains. If you’re not especially concerned about spoilers, these are nicely diverting featurettes with the kind of amiable Kiwi hosting style that Jackson more-or-less perfected for the King Kong video diaries. It’s patently obvious that these new flicks will live up to all the standards set by the trilogy, so it’s now just a waiting game for the rest of us.
What’s funny about this one, in particular, is that the comments sound a lot like those Lucas and his crew were making for the first video diaries of his prequels. It’s a similar situation of picking a franchise up for story that takes place earlier in its history, only the break since the last one is about half as long. Here we go again...
