Is LOTR Racist?

While watching all 201 minutes of the final Lord of the Rings Trilogy movie, I realized something. There was no single Asian or African American or any other ethnicity to be seen. All of the main characters and supporting characters that were on the side of "man" were all white. Where was the diversity? And I'm not talking about elves and dwarfs and those crazy hobbits. Just my observation. I guess Middle Earth consisted of only white people? Weird.

Musical Books

Sometimes there are stories that just aren't meant to be musicals. I really would have a hard time taking certain books seriously if I knew that there was a cheesy musical film adaption of it floating in the world. This is what frustrates me about film adaptions of the story A Christmas Carol.

I found that a lot of the film versions of the story written by Charles Dickens had some how become overly cheerful cheesey musical versions of the text. In the case of the 1970's version of the story, named Scrooge, the effects of the musical were life scarring. Not that this 1970's musical version wasn't filled with cheerful songs about Scrooge's misery, but the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had an extremely frightening scene. Then again I was only 6 when I first watched it. Actually, that scene till terrifies me to this day, despite that the last ghost is a cheap Halloween skeleton in a cloak. If you would like to see the scene I'm talking about, it starts at around 6:00 in the youtube clip, when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pushes Scrooge into his own grave (complete with horrible special effects).

It takes a really talented bunch of people to pull of a musical adaption to a novel or book without being cheesy or totally ruining the story. I think that The Muppets Christmas Carol did a good job of using puppets and humor to retell the story, without being so cheesy you want to cry.This movie has just the right amount of puppets and singing, and they kept as close to the story as they can while using puppets, and making the movie enjoyable for kids without insulting adults, and vice versa. They also did a wonderful job coming up with really cheerful songs about Scrooge's miserable life. I really enjoyed this movie, and I think you would too. I'm sure everyone could do with seeing a little bit of puppets in some film adaptions of classic literature.