In spite of what some of the other user comments state, this film, made for TV in 1980, has nothing to do with the never finished Lord of the Rings movie by Bahksi from 1978. <br /><br />That is, nothing except that it tries to tell the rest of the story. Unfortunately Bahksi did exactly half of the story, so when the return of the king continues with the last, third part, some of the most important pieces of the story are missing. <br /><br />Bahksi left most of the story intact but had such a bad result that he never finished the movie; <br /><br />Peter Jackson had nicer pictures but he actually got an Oscar for torturing a great story into something much less; <br /><br />The Rankin-Bass team managed to do both: they killed the story and it didn't even look good. <br /><br />The voice-overs could have been good but they take far too much time and they are too pretentious. The 'cast' of cartoon characters? Sam looks like a potato, Bilbo like a granny, Elrond is a Christmas tree, the nazgûl are akin to skeletors, gollum is a toad. Only Aragorn looks like something decent. There are only two soldiers and only two orks, just cloned a lot until there is an army of the two of them. <br /><br />And also there are some strange mistakes in the story logic, one example (NO SPOILER) that Frodo and Sam spend several days waiting for Aragorn to charge the Black Gate. And the songs... better not mentioned with one strange exception.<br /><br />This movie will always come last with a great distance after all the other adaptations ever made of Tolkien's work.