steepholm

I wonder whether we could put it thusly. An adaptation that attempts to graft something alien onto a text is likely to leave our sense of the text relatively unaltered, because it will be recognized as not belonging, and so discounted. Conversely, an adapation that "takes" is likely to do so by fixing on something that really is in the text, but exaggerating, selecting or distorting it in some way. So, in the case of LOTR (where the visuals were far more faithful than the verbals, I think), while I take B's point about verbal aesthetics, I still suspect that Gimli and Pippin, for instance, are far more "comic" characters in many people's minds after seeing Jackson's film than they were before. Nevertheless even in the text there were comic moments available for Jackson to build upon, and on re-reading people may be more attuned to them in the light of watching Jackson's film. By contrast, had he attempted to make Elrond the butt of a string of elf jokes it just wouldn't have taken.