The Hobbit extended editions, edible testicles and all, unleashed Peter Jackson

26.12.2023 - 15:50 / polygon.com / Peter Jackson / Fox

Ten years ago, Stephen Fry ate balls in the Hobbit films. If that doesn’t ring a bell as something from Tolkien, don’t worry. Not only is it from the second film in the culturally forgotten Hobbit trilogy, but this specific sequence only exists in the Extended Edition.

That’s right. The Hobbit films, an eight-hour trilogy of movies best known for being perhaps needlessly padded adaptations of a 300-page children’s book, have an even longer cut. And unlike the Extended Editions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which fill out those masterpieces with nearly three hours of more character and world-building, these ones are all about PJ letting his freak flag fly.

The Hobbit Extended Editions are a welcome return to form for an auteur who got his start making self-proclaimed “splatter” films. That’s Bad Taste, a $25,000 sci-fi film about aliens attempting to harvest the human race for fast food; it’s also Meet the Feebles, a puppet musical wherein a busty hippo carries out a mass shooting while a fox sings about sodomy; and it’s Braindead, in which the protagonist massacres an army of zombies with a lawnmower.

Fry references those films in his behind-the-scenes interviews on the under-discussed testicle eating scene. “He’s developed a reputation as a sort of filmmaker of great flair and artistry,” he says. “But ultimately he’s the same Peter Jackson who made Braindead, Bad Taste — movies of the goriest, most disgusting mud-splashed, blood-splashed [sort]. And that little part of him is still alive.”

Frankly, it’s been hard to tell. This isn’t to say that Jackson’s road from indie rebel to Hollywood mogul has stripped him of his charming freakishness. Indeed, one of the most magical things about the Lord of the Rings trilogy is its combination of epic bombast and personal idiosyncrasy. A giant talking tree floods an anti-environmentalist empire, but still finds time to dunk his head in the water when it catches on fire; the tide of one of the greatest battles in cinematic history is turned when a dwarf reticently allows himself to be tossed.

Still, making some of the most iconic films of the 21st century has a way of changing a man, and by the time Jackson made King Kong and The Lovely Bones, a depressing sort of anonymity had crept into his work. The rogue who stretched his measly budget to hack off as many limbs as possible had developed a reputation as a hired gun tackling long-gestating IP, a criticism not helped by the fact that he didn’t even want to direct his only other post-Rings narrative features, the Hobbitfilms.

As many die-hard Rings fans know, Guillermo del Toro was initially hired as the director, and spent a full two years of pre-production work on the films before disputes