My kids all watched LotR as kids, but my youngest, who is now 13 (yeah, the baby...) is just finishing reading Return of the King and wants to watch the movies again for the first time in a decade. She remembers very little of the first viewings. We watched the Rankin Bass Hobbit, which she thought was really bad. I'm planning to show her Bakshi's LotR just for the sake of posterity. So, do I then show her the Theatrical or Extended cuts of PJ's LotR?

I always felt that the EE's were far superior and that I would never willingly go back to the TE's, but time has dulled my memories and I'm not sure now. For every "Arwen at Aragorns Grave", there's a Skull Avalanche. So, hive mind... what say you?

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The Vinyamars on Stage! This time at Bag End

Extended, definitely. Wasn't the scene of Boromir sparring with the Hobbits in the extended edition?

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Dark have been my dreams of late.

IMO, the Fellowship EE is superior, though the TE works better as a single-sitting film. Towers' is kind of a wash, and King's is (far) worse.

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"You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts."

It has been a long time since I have watch them, but I definitely felt that the extended editions were better for all three films (as long as you are willing to fast-forward through the miserable Paths of the Dead scenes).

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

I don't do fast forwarding! If we watch a movie, we watch it all. So with that caveat, which is stronger? Do the additions make up for the detractors?

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The Vinyamars on Stage! This time at Bag End

I don't do fast-forwarding either. But I make an exception for Paths of the Dead. Because lord that thing is awful.

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

Here's a list of the extra scenes as far as I remember. (And the asterisked ones are the scenes I consider terrible, poorly executed or pointless)

FotR
Concerning Hobbits
The Green Dragon duet
Passing of the Elves
Midgewater Marshes
Gilraen's Grave
The Departure of the Fellowship
Mithril in Moria

TTT:
Elven Rope
Sauron's Orcs vs the Uruk-Hai
Battle at the Fords of Isen
Treebeard's Song*
Gandalf and Aragorn's conversation near Fangorn
Treebeard and Old Man Willow*
Theodred's Funeral
Aragorn tames Brego
Faramir's Monologue
Boromir and Faramir flashback
Huorns' ambush at Helm's Deep
Flotsam and Jetsam at Isengard
Faramir warns Sméagol*

RotK:
The Voice of Saruman
Éowyn's Dream
Decline of Gondor
A crown at the Cross-roads*
Sam warns Sméagol at the stairs
Skull avalanche***!!
The Corsairs of Umbar*
The Witch-King faces off Gandalf**!
Gothmog's death
Éomer's mourning on the fields
The Houses of Healing
Aragorn takes the palantír
The Mouth of Sauron
Sam sees the star of hope


I usually suggest going with the EEs for FotR and TTT and the TE for RotK (because some of the EE scenes are really bad and overall it's too darn long - 4+ hours!)

FotR EE also adds that little conversation between Gandalf and Frodo outside Moria, which is the only scene from that EE I dislike.

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"You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts."

The scene where Éowyn offers Aragorn bad soup is from the EEs too, right? I don't know why that little scene always bugs me so much but after PotD, I recall it being my least favorite of the added scenes.

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

Because how in Mordor do you make a stew so horrible that someone who traveled through the wilderness for weeks refuses to eat it? I would normally appreciate the characterization of Éowyn as not domestic, but that was just stupid.

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Dark have been my dreams of late.

I thought the additions to FOTR enhanced it, and most of the additions to TTT and ROTK made them far, far worse. My ideal viewing sequence would be:
FOTR Extended
TT Theatrical
ROTK Theatrical

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Thanks guys. I feel like everyone agrees on Fotr EE and RotK TE, so its just Two Towers I'm confused about now!

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The Vinyamars on Stage! This time at Bag End

I much prefer the TTT EE over the TE, for what it is worth. Despite the soup and the interrogation of Gollum.

Sent from my LG G6 using Tapatalk

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In gratitude forever … .

For a longer-term project, how about watching all the TE's, taking a break, and then watching all the EE's? That would make for some interesting family discussion. Everybody will have their own opinion!

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Gollum wasn't in TE? I forgot.

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Dark have been my dreams of late.

I am late to this party ... but I'll play.

I prefer the FotR EE to the FotR TE - although I do hanker for the opening sequence of FotR TE, with the main title appearing under Frodo reading his book ... That worked so well!

I very much prefer RoTK TE to RotK EE. I hate nearly all the extended scenes in the EE: they add absolutely nothing to the characters and the storyline. One of the few exceptions is Merry offering his fealty to Théoden, but this canonical scene is not enough to compensate me for the stupidity of other scenes. The skull avalanche left me speechless, and not in a good way. Likewise with Aragorn dropping Arwen's pendant, which shatters, because he's so freaked out by Sauron telling him that 'Arwen's life is tied to the fate of the Ring', which MAKES NO SENSE. I actually yelled at the DVD when I watched this, I was so infuriated by Aragorn's wussiness and the lack of plot-logic.

I prefer TTT EE to TTT TE. Again, it's a curate's egg. Some of the extended scenes are terrible, like Éowyn's bad cooking (pointless and silly), but the extended sequence of Boromir and Faramir ("for Gondor! for GONDOR! FOR GONDOR!") is wonderful, especially as it fleshes out the backstory of the two brothers.

It's been quite a long while since I talked about the films. Good memories of our many excitable discussions!

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"Frodo undertook his quest out of love - to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could ... "
Letter no. 246, The Collected Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
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I LOVE the Rankin Bass Hobbit cartoon! Truer to the books than the movies at any rate, IMO. Same for the Bakshi LotR's (pantlessness aside)

I even went and bought both on DVD to preserve them as watchable (my old VCR finally died and I just couldn't bring msyelf to get another one for the couple of movies I still have, I re-bought them on DVD instead.)

I find them charming and love the poems turned to songs. They just feel more in the spirit of the books to me. I confess I haven't watched the movies probably in 15 years. Maybe in another 10 I'll watch them again, but I felt so disappointed with so many aspects of them - I can't even bring myself to watch the last Hobbit movie.

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The dumbest thing I've ever bought
was a 2020 planner.

"Does anyone ever think about Denethor, the guy driven to madness by staying up late into the night alone in the dark staring at a flickering device he believed revealed unvarnished truth about the outside word, but which in fact showed mostly manipulated media created by a hostile power committed to portraying nothing but bad news framed in the worst possible way in order to sap hope, courage, and the will to go on? Seems like he's someone we should think about." - Dave_LF

Voting for RotK TE and EE for the other two. TTT's EE isn't quite as consistently strong in its additions as FotR as I recall, but it has some great stuff like Sons of the Steward, some nice minor additions like Aragorn and Brego, and nothing I consider actively bad. Though I know some disagree on the stew - not the greatest scene but it doesn't really bother me. To my memory though, Arwen over Aragorn's grave is theatrical.

It's a pity because RotK EE does have some nice little scenes. Faramir especially gets some great moments to show nobility of character, Éomer mourning Théoden, Gandalf on the decline of Gondor. I'll even confess to a soft spot for some of the questionable borderline things like Saruman (yes it's clumsy, but there's some great verbal sparring between Hill and Lee). But it has some indefensibly awful low points of the trilogy and adds almost an hour to a movie that already rivals Lawrence of Arabia or Godfather II in length. I think that after everyone liked the first two EEs, PJ just went hog wild adding stuff that was cut for a good reason.

The Gimli-stepping-on-skulls sequence in the Paths of the Dead is even worse than the avalanche itself, by the way. It's like the Sideshow Bob rake joke from the Simpsons, only not funny and completely out of place. The beheading is also really, really stupid and fundamentally un-Tolkien, and that's coming from someone who doesn't really have a problem with movie Aragorn otherwise.

EDIT: Ok, I just noticed how late I am haha...I'm sure your kids have seen them by now!

Planning a rewatch, so I'm glad to have these recommendations.

Only problem is, I don't own the RotK TE. I automatically bought the EE.

OtOH, it ought to be easily available streaming.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Its on Netflix here anyway Prim. As it happens, we're still finishing the rewatch of Harry Potter so Rings is next, and she has expressed an interest in watching the originals first! So TE all the way for the first run!

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The Vinyamars on Stage! This time at Bag End