Explaining things with technobabble was the norm on TNG and Voyager, but huge portions of the Original Series and DS9 operated on the principle of, “It’s space magic, we’re not going to explain it any further.”

How do you trick the brain into seeing the illusion then? I’m not sure if I look at too many air photos or something, because I can’t get the ambiguity to flip.

Maztica needs some love :)

Thanks. Now I have to go design a D&D adventure, and we’re two games away from getting back to D&D.

Yeah, I think it’s more of a branding thing than anything. If you just release two or three “some subset of the avengers!” movies every year, they’re going to start seeming redundant and skip-able. How will casual fans decide which ones they should see?

One of the most disappointing trailers ever!!! Why not have a 30 minute wizard/elf/Sauron battle and take out the love story and other crap!

Agreed! I can’t wait for “The Hobbit: The Compressed and Cohesive Edition”.

There is a shortened version: https://ahobbitsholiday.wordpress.com/

You mean this? https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com

This is the cut you seek.

Yes, we need a fan edit urgently that condenses all three movies into one good one.

See, THAT’S how they needed to end Desolation of Smaug. They either had to end the Smaug arc or they needed to show the Battle of Dul Guldur and proceeded to show...neither. I still can’t understand beyond “we need Smaug in the next one”.

Cuts out a bunch of stuff added for the movies (Legolas, Tauriel, etc.), but doesn’t exactly glue what’s left together into a cohesive film.

I managed to get them down to a bit over three hours. Really don’t think it would be possible to get any shorter and still make any sense.

Yeah, if they’re going to bloat out the story, at least build on the sweet wizard conflict. I never thought to myself, You know, this book would be great if only there were a really good dwarf bathing scene.

It’s been done. Bittorrent is your friend in this respect. It cuts all three movies down to just under three hours (not counting the fourty-seven hours of credits.)

Peter Jackson seems to really have something against wizards in his movies doing any substantial spellcasting. All throughout the LOTR movies, Gandalf’s abilities were very understated. And in the material behind the scenes in the Hobbit he was not captured and held prisoner at Dul Guldur. The first time he was there…

Isn’t there some 2-1/2 hour fan edit that’s supposed to be awesome?

GOD. THIS. THIS SO MUCH.

There have been quite a few Hobbit fan-edits that bring down the runtime; mine is the shortest (that I know of) at two hours, ten minutes.