December 30, 2002

Extended Version DVD
Bob the Builder

I agree that the 30 minutes of extra footage were great and really enhanced the movie experience. However, that raises the question of why they were excluded from the theatre release. In one of the interviews with Peter Jackson in the DVDs, he mentions that he is really glad that the gift-giving scenes at Lothlorien were put back in for the extended version because they were important in making sense of aspects of Two Towers and Return of the King. Well, if that is the case, then they needed to be seen by theatre audiences as well as owners of the extended DVD version. What's the use of disrupting some of the continuity and context of the plot just for the sake of cutting a few minutes from the running time?