The Hobbit (Russian: Хо́ббит, tr. Khóbbit, full title The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit, Across the Wild Land, Through the Dark Forest, Beyond the Misty Mountains. There and Back Again is a 1985 Soviet television play, being a loose adaption of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s 1937 book The Hobbit by Vladimir Latyshev.

The play featured Zinovy Gerdt as “the professor” (a narrator stand-in for Tolkien), Mikhail Danilov [ru] as Bilbo Baggins, Anatoly Ravikovich as Thorin Oakenshield and Igor Dmitriev as Gollum. Smaug and the Mirkwood spiders were portrayed by puppets. Missing in this version are the trolls, Elrond, Beorn and the wood-elves. The goblins are human-like with little makeup, and were portrayed by dancers from the Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, as are the inhabitants of Lake Town.

The play was shot in 1984 as a teleplay and produced in the framework of the children’s TV series Tale after Tale (Russian: Сказка за сказкой) aired at the Leningrad TV Channel in the 1980s and the 1990s.

color, mono, fullscreen, in Russian with removable English subtitles.  DVD-R comes packaged as shown in color DVD case, wrapped in plastic!