My thoughts of the original animated ‘The Lord of the Rings‘ film have been painted black now that I’ve learned that Mick Jagger at one point wanted to voice Frodo Baggins. Christopher Guard (‘Return to Treasure Island,’ ‘A Woman of Substance’) voiced the central character in the original film, but the infamous lead singer of The Rolling Stones was briefly after the gig. He couldn’t “get no satisfaction” by tackling the part as when his interest surfaced the voice work had already been completed.
During the 60s and 70s when the band was at its peak, J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels were making a huge splash in the music scene. The Beatles had tried to put together their own take of the film with Paul McCartney playing Frodo, and Led Zeppelin almost had done the soundtrack for the animated feature as the band had already written a few songs based on the work. With that in mind, it wouldn’t be too surprising to hear that another iconic musician would have wanted to be involved in the production.
In a recent interview, director Ralph Bakshi shared this fun tidbit and a few details about how it came up:
“So I get a call from Mick Jagger, he wanted to come up and see what we were doing on Rings. So I’m walking through the studio with Mick Jagger, and the girls start to scream and faint. I had 2,200-3,000 people working on four floors, and the word spread to each floor that Jagger is walking around, and people got from one floor to the other through the staircase, and there was thunder like horsemen coming down, shaking the staircase… So that was just hysterical. [Jagger] wanted to do the voice of Frodo. I told him I would have used him easily, but I was already recorded and everything. He’d be a pretty good Frodo, I guess. I don’t know.”
Jagger’s normal style of talking and singing isn’t what you might first associate with any take on Frodo Baggins or Hobbits in general, so this might not have been a missed opportunity. Of course, these days when one thinks about a cinematic take of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ all you can do is picture Peter Jackson‘s masterpiece and wonder how Amazon’s upcoming series could even possibly compare to it.
Would you have loved to hear Mick Jagger play Frodo in the original ‘The Lord of the Rings’ animated movie? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Source: THR
