But after Tolkien fan clubs urged the broadcaster to scour the archives of its Soviet predecessor, Leningrad Television, workers for Channel Five managed to find the footage last year. “Everyone believed that the recording of the performance was lost,” Channel Five said in a statement. The Russian broadcaster Channel Five, after recently finding and digitizing the footage in what it called a “long and painstaking process,” posted the two-part recording online in late March. Tolkien’s epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings.”įor the first time in decades, audiences can now watch this adaptation of the first volume in the trilogy, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” which aired for the first and last time on Russian television in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolved and the performance vanished into the archives of state TV. What’s unmistakable over two hours of video is the golden ring that can make people disappear: This messy, low-budget odyssey is both a time capsule of Soviet TV and, until recently, a little-known version of J.R.R. And the growl of an actor painted green does sound - sort of - like he might be saying “gollum.”

One man is clearly a wizard, though the special effects are, at their best, not very good. The hobbits and elves are familiar, if the Soviet folk-rock is not.

The lord of the ring