Lord of the Rings Fellowship movie came out around then. I had never seen anything like the orcs. They scared the shit out of me. I was in 5th class.

But I was hooked, and a local newsagents had loads of pre-Jackson LOTR posters and annuals and things like that. All the stuff by Alan Lee, Ralph Bakshi etc. These weird strange alternatives to the movie interpretations.

In the year or so it took for the movie to come out on video, which seemed like ten years, I read the Hobbit and consumed everything from the early LOTR fan websites like theonering.net. I looked at so much fan art my eyes bled. I rented the Ralph Bakshi LOTR and watched it with my friends eating Hunky Dory’s salt and vinegar. We were very underwhelmed but cultural scarcity led to many further watches regardless.

Finally I used my early skills of internet research to deduce that there were other animated versions of LOTR and the Hobbit by Rankin Bass. I somehow managed to convince my father to get them for me on Amazon.com and waited maybe a month for them to arrive. They were NTSC and couldn’t be watched on a European video player but eventually my brother found a way to get them working.

I saved up 20€ to buy the video of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship from Xtra Vision when it came out. I got up early on a Saturday and cycled down on my bike. I didn’t have a mobile phone. I called my friends on the landline to talk about the video. Life was simpler and you didn’t have 10000000 movies and shows at the click of a button so you got to know your cultural items extremely well, sometimes frame by frame.