If you watch one thing today, make it the Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings.
According to BBC, the “low-budget production” aired on Russian television in 1991 after the Soviet Union had collapsed. Now, the show has been uploaded to YouTube by channel 5TV, which is reportedly the ‘successor’ to Leningrad TV, the original company who produced the show back in the ’90s.
Upon clicking the link to the show, prepare to expect the unexpected, with the director’s interpretation on the characters clearly being a very different interpretation to what Peter Jackson had in mind…
The film titled Khraniteli is an adaption based on J. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring and having released in 1991 means that it actually went to air a decade before Peter Jackson’s acclaimed movie trilogy, as per The Guardian.
Naturally the film is certainly accurately described as not well known (unless you eat, sleep and breathe Lord of the Rings). Now all of that obviously about to change thanks to the nature of the internet. According to Russian publication, World of Fantasy, “Fans have been searching the archives but had not able to find this film for decades.”
The first ever secretly produced Russian translation of The Fellowship of the Ring was done in 1966, with their first official translation being released in 1982. The sequels were never translated. According to The Guardian translated versions of Tolkien’s work were hard to come by in the Soviet Union, with the word on the street being that stories of men befriending elves and dwarves “fighting a totalitarian eastern power” had essentially banned.
Khraniteli is known as the only fully completed adaption to have been made in the Soviet Union. Ironic, considering that it sounds like there was and still is a huge appetite for Tolkien’s mythical stories.
For more on this topic, follow the Film & TV Observer.
Watch the Lord of the Rings Soviet TV version below.
