Sunday, September 22, 2013

Happy Hobbit Day

Well today is Hobbit Day in celebration of Bilbo and Frodo's Birthdays. All around the world folks are celebrating with food, drink and merriment. Unless you live under a rock and have never read any of my blogs, tweets or Facebook posts you know that I love everything about Hobbits. One of these days I will live in a Hobbit hole.

I have missed recent celebrations of Hobbit Day here in Los Angeles as my birthday is the next day on the 23rd and the past few years I have had parties to celebrate that. But this year I decided on no parties and planned to attend the L.A. gathering of Middle Earth fans at Griffith Park sponsored by The One Ring dot Net. According to their Facebook invite there were going to be over 200 fans there but I only knew 2 of them and those were folks I have never met in person only through Facebook.

I'm not good in large crowds of people that I don't know. That's when my social awkwardness really shines. I planned to dress up in my Hobbit outfit, you know I never pass up any opportunity to dress up but my current feet have several tears and I am awaiting a new pair of feet and I really didn't feel like shaving my beard either. So I decided not to attend this event, thought I do regret it a bit, I think I wouldn't have had as much fun if I had gone with some friends. Maybe next year I can convince a few of my friends to go with me.

So instead I celebrated Hobbit Day by wearing my Hobbit feet and watching Rankin & Bass The Hobbit cartoon that I had never seen before. I thought I had but it must have been the Lord of the Rings animated movie that I'm remembering.

The Hobbit cartoon was extremely abridged. They left out a ton of information and characters. The character designs were so bizzare. I mean the Dwarfs looked okay and the goblins were fine but the wood elves were scary looking and Gollum looked like a humanoid toad creature... it was very distracting. Smaug looked like a cross between a Dragon and a cat. I liked the music and the animation was okay. I'm glad I watched it and own it on DVD as I'm sure I'll want to watch it again from time to time.

So I didn't exactly celebrate Hobbit Day as planned but it was still a good day and next year I'll do a lot more pre-planning. Maybe I'll have a Hobbit Day / Birthday celebration weekend.