Originally published at: "To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore" is a fascinating look at a comic madman | Boing Boing
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Lest we forget his greatest role…
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Brother Theodore was the other side of the coin of Don Novello’s character Father Guido Sarducci.
And it looks like @fergsboy beat me to it. I best remember him as Gollum.
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Gollem was going to be my comment as well. The Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit is well worth seeing if you’re a Tolkien fan; it’s a lot more faithful to the book than the Jackson movies.
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Amazon Prime video not available in Canada. 
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I remember reading a brief but tantalizing article on Brother Theodore from an early 80’s issue of Fangoria magazine, but never saw anything else about him until recently on the internet. The article was on one of the magazine’s black-and-white pages (only parts of the magazine were in color then), with a sequence of captioned photos of him going on about worms feasting on us all eventually, or something cheery like that! And he looked like a total maniac of course. I will definitely look up this documentary, thanks! This kind of thing is why I love BoingBoing!
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And speaking of Fangoria, here he is narrating the trailer for House by the Cemetery.
Perhaps a wee bit bloody
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My favorite quite of his is as misunderstood as Bukowski’s famous “don’t try” epitaph: “as long as there is death, there is hope!”
I used to think of the two as simply funny nonsequiturs, but there’s quite an awful lot of wisdom in both.
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And it has the advantage of being a reasonable length.
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Yeah, if anything, it could have used another 10 minutes of runtime, and included Beorn.
The deluxe illustrated edition that accompanied the release of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit had additional illustrations to cover the parts of the story that didn’t appear in the movie, including this one of Beorn (by none other than now-acclaimed fantasy artist Charles Vess).
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I was given my copy for my 10th birthday in '79. Still have it. The are pages falling out, but it’s still one of my most prized books.
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I was a huge Tolkien nerd when it came out (full disclosure: I still am), and girded my loins to pay the 30 bucks for it, which doesn’t seem like a lot now, but was certainly the most that 17-year-old me had ever spent on a book.
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I wholeheartedly agree. The Rankin-Bass hobbit cartoon is what led me to Tolkien’s books at a young-ish age and ultimately led me to becoming a writer. I’ve been meaning to track down a copy of it to watch again.
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