Famed Batman Writer Chuck Dixon Explains Why What Amazon Is Doing To The Lord Of The Rings Is An ‘Abomination’

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A prolific comic book writer known for his long stints on Batman, Detective Comics, and the Punisher recently shared his thoughts on why he thinks what Amazon is doing to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings is an abomination.

Source: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Dixon, who also adapted Tolkien’s The Hobbit into comic book form, sat down for an interview with European Lore, where he was asked his opinion on the current status of film and TV adaptations.

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Dixon replied, “The state of contemporary adaptation is pretty miserable, film and TV, because they want to change the job.”

“They find things in the original or the source material that offend them or that they think don’t fit our post-modern sensibilities and they change them. And it is a crime. It is a crime,” he added.

Source: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Dixon would then specifically address the upcoming adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power from Amazon’s Prime Video.

He said, “What Amazon is doing to Tolkien is an abomination. The people doing the work obviously don’t understand the original work. They add some very 2022 elements to it that, five years from now, are going to look laughable.

“They take a timeless tale and essentially place it in our contemporary zeitgeist. And that’s just plain wrong,” he explained.

Source: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

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Dixon continued: ‘So many of these things – I mean when they do stories that take place in history and they want to update the attitude of historical figures towards today’s moray eels. today it is not working.

“It’s not true. It’s not accurate. And in the end, it’s not entertaining because there’s a similarity in it all,” he said.

Source: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Along with his commentary on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and modern film and television adaptations, Dixon would also discuss the birth of his comic book adaptation of The Hobbit.

Dixon revealed, “How I got the job was that I worked a lot for a company called Eclipse Comics. They were based in California. And Dean Mullaney, the editor of Eclipse, was always on the lookout for public domain material. In other words, material that had no copyright on it.

“And he had a guy who did nothing but search the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., looking for copyright-free properties that could be adopted into comic books,” he said. revealed. “And the guy came across, incredibly, an old, copyrightless manuscript of The Hobbit.

Source: The Hobbit

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“So Dean contacted me and said you’d be interested in adapting it into a graphic novel,” he relayed. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay. That would be great.’ And while I was working on it – and the manuscript was very different from the published novel – while I was working on it, Dean was in communication with the Tolkien estate to tell them what our plans would be.

Dixon recounted, “And he said, ‘Listen, you can either license us and we’ll make an authorized version of the novel, or we’ll just make our own that you won’t see any money from.’ And so the Tolkien estate bowed, and then Dean called me and said, “Stop working on the copyright-free version and get your old paperback and start working from that.”

“So I think I only had 10 pages. I dropped everything I had done and started working on the authorized version. That’s how it went,” he explained.

Source: The Hobbit

What do you think of Chuck Dixon’s thoughts on what Amazon Prime Video is doing to Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power? What about his thoughts on film and television adaptations in general?

NEXT: Chuck Dixon: Marvel Comics ‘Have Disdain for the Punisher’ and ‘Deep Dislike of the Police and the Military’

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