Sadly, Rankin/Bass’s Return of the King was not nearly as good as their Hobbit. This time around, the limited run-time really hurt in terms of coherence and character explanations. There is one very nice original moment, where Frodo has a brief fantasy about A Better World: he and Sam are walking along, and meet a couple of Orcs. They all exchange cheery waves and continue on their way.
When I first saw it at a young age, I had read The Hobbit but not the Lord of the Rings. They changed Gollum’s color-scheme slightly, and so I assumed that he was the original Gollum’s son, as Frodo had replaced Bilbo…
