Por que Tom Bombadil não está incluído nos filmes?

Tempo, ritmo e foco narrativo

Citação de uma entrevista em 2000 com Não é Cool News ¹ :

"Also, will you be including Tom Bombadil? The Ralph Bakshi production cut it out, as did the BBC radio drama.”

PJ: At this point in time Bombadil is out. The main reason is not just time or pace, but one of simple narrative focus ... the Bombadil sequence has so little to do with Sauron or the Ring, it is difficult to justify the screen time. It simply doesn't give us any vital new information. A very simplest rule of thumb that I use in movie storytelling is to try and further the story with each new scene.

I'm flicking through our Fellowship script ... it is 138 pages long. The Hobbits leave Hobbiton on page 30, and arrive at Rivendell on page 63. Even that 33 pages on the road feels a little long and will probably get trimmed in our next draft.

Basicamente, Jackson não acha que Bombadil tenha avançado a história o suficiente para justificar gastar mais 30 minutos a uma hora com ele, o que é um href="https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/71893/ Fizendo-de-deixar-tom-bombadil-criar-qualquer-enredo-buracos-na-comunhão-do-ring-avaliação justo . No entanto, parte dos capítulos de Bombadil sobreviveram, embora tenham sido inseridos muito mais tarde na história e removidos da edição teatral; uma cena claramente baseada no encontro com o Velho Willow foi filmada e incluída na extensa edição do The Two Towers , embora Frodo e Sam obviamente estivessem ausentes e Barbárvore fazendo o resgate:

Parte do diálogo de Barbárvore aqui é tirado diretamente de Bombadil na cena original (ênfase minha):

Setting down his lilies carefully on the grass, he ran to the tree. There he saw Merry’s feet still sticking out - the rest had already been drawn further inside. Tom put his mouth to the crack and began singing into it in a low voice. They could not catch the words, but evidently Merry was aroused. His legs began to kick. Tom sprang away, and breaking off a hanging branch smote the side of the willow with it. 'You let them out again, Old Man Willow!' he said. 'What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!' He then seized Merry's feet and drew him out of the suddenly widening crack.

^{The Fellowship of the Ring Book I Chapter 6: "The Old Forest"}

Curiosamente, Bombadil foi incluído no jogo de cartas de negociação licenciado em filme:

Mas não tome isso como significando que há algumas imagens secretas de Tom Bombadil por aí; de acordo com um artigo publicado em o site da Decipher (quem produziu o jogo), Bombadil é uma imagem original e design de personagens criado pela Weta Workshop, especificamente para o jogo de cartas:

Decipher announced today that Weta Workshop, the Academy Award-winning special effects studio responsible for creating many props and special effects used in New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings films, will create unique photographic images that will be featured on cards in The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game.

[...]

The first four cards to feature Weta's original images are bonus premium cards from The Countdown Collection: Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, Radagast², and Glorfindel.

¹ Com muita gratidão à Máquina de Wayback

² Não interpretado por Sylvester McCoy, alarmantemente presciente como teria sido

    

De acordo com uma entrevista sem recursos encontrada em Yahoo! Respostas :

Originally Bombadil was going to be in the movie, but had to be cut out. Peter Jackson actually explained this on a televised interview not long after the release of the Fellowship of the Ring. I can't for the life of me find a transcript, but I can summarize.

Interviewer: Were there many scenes from the books that fans were looking forward to in the movie that were cut from the cinematic version?

Jackson: Yes. Unfortunately due to time constraints and budget limitations we had to take out a lot of great material written by Tolkien. Some of these scenes we are actually planning to release in Extended volumes, with the bonus footage we shot but couldn't use in the theatrical releases.

Interviewer: One of the things a lot of fans missed was a character named Tom Bombadil. Is it because of time constraints that you had to remove him?

Jackson: Actually, in our original drafts of the script we had included Tom. Our major concern though, that wouldn't seem to go away, was how to bring him in. In the book he saves the hobbits from a tree that tries to eat them...

Interviewer: [Chuckles] Really?

Jackson: Yeah, he got them out of a couple of situations actually... But at the time we knew we couldn't include this scene. It would completely take away from the momentum we'd been building during the whole first block of the movie. We just couldn't find a quick and convenient way to bring him into the story, so at the last moment the studio asked us to scrap the idea.

Interviewer: Too bad.

Jackson: Yeah. But, who knows. Maybe we'll put him in a special edition some day.

    

Enquanto sua seção pode ser facilmente extirpada sem interromper a história principal, eu tenho que assumir que qualquer diretor pensando em assumir o LOTR estaria correndo com medo de como fazê-lo de uma forma que não acabaria sendo cômica. Um personagem que quebra a música e a tolice como o Tom realmente prejudica a seriedade da missão do ringue. Se você deixar cair o canto, então poderia funcionar, mas os fãs do livro estariam de costas para isso.