Don't forget
Tim Benzedrino for Tom Bombadil
Tim's song:
Toke-a-lid! Smoke-a-lid! Pop the mescalino!
Stash the hash! Gonna crash! Make mine methedrino!
Hop a hill! Pop a pill! For Old Tim Benzedrino!"
Though mad with fear, all strained to the rising melody sung by someone who sounded like he had terminal mumps:
"Snorting, sporting! Speeding through the arbor,
Pushing till the folk you burn toss you in the harbor!
Screeching like a dying loon, zooming like the thrush!
Follow me and very soon, your mind will turn to mush!
Higher than the nowhere birds grooving in the air,
We'll open up a sandal shop where everyone will share!
Flower folk are springing up, wearing bead and boot,
And if you down me you can stick a flower up your snoot!
To Love and Peace and Brotherhood we all can snort a toast,
And if the heat is on again, we'll all split to the Coast!
The most memorable character in Bored of the Rings, was, (for me at least), Tim Benzedrino, a spoof of the most memorable character in The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil. I remember the rumors and speculation prior to the release of Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring about who would play Tom. Robin Williams was the favorite front runner in the rumor mill, but, alas, poor Tom was entirely dropped, to my everlasting disappointment.
The long-missing Effovex opined that perhaps Tom was intentionally left out of the movie so that loyal fans of the book version wouldn't be outraged by the fact that the movie version didn't live up to the book version, but I have to disagree. Film is a perceptually one-dimensional medium. They show you something, and there it is. But literature lets the mind of the reader fill in more depth than could ever be intentionally shown; when can a film ever live up to that?
To wit; a film can show you a beautiful stream, where a subtle bit of writing can show you a an ice-cold stream, sparkling and skipping its way through a wintr'y granite bed, folding ice and snow in upon itself as it gathers strength, smelling of innocence and spring and babies, as the slightest hints of newborn grass spring to life in its wake. As much as I love cinema, there's just no way it can produce the sensations that even a mediocre, heavy-handed bit of writing like that can evoke.
So, disappointing fans of the book can be no excuse for leaving Bombadil out. If that was what they were afraid of, they might have been better served to leave Gollum out. The wonderful thing about the characters in Tolkein's masterwork was that he left most of the work to the reader's imagination, hinting at details like hairy feet and round bellies, providing an outline but leaving the reader fill in the whole, to imagine the perfect vision of a hobbit, perfectly suited to the reader's experience and preferences.
The advantage of film, I suppose, is that it doesn't tend get get NEARLY as far off-topic as this thread.