I may have my timeline mixed up here, but the "They're Taking The Hobbits To Isengard" remix is one of the first viral videos I can remember, right there with "Lazy Sunday" as a video passed around among people either before YouTube or right at the beginning of the service. Something about Orlando Bloom's weirdly stiff performance in the Lord of the Rings trilogy seemed to lend itself to this kind of dance remix. And Bloom, bless him, has enough of a sense of humor to play along, just as he finishes playing the character for the very last time.
The video you see above was posted by Peter Jackson to his very active Facebook page, along with this message:
A day after saying goodbye to Gandalf and Tauriel, it was time to farewell Legolas. What a great day it was, with Orlando battling a serious Orc for all 12 hours of shooting - part of the Battle of the 5 Armies for the third Hobbit movie.
In case you've never seen the original mega-viral video-- at least, separate from the crazy blurry version you can see Bloom singing along with-- here it is below.
You may have thought you were done with on-set videos from The Hobbit, given that the first film of the series came out in December and we had been seeing tons of photos and videos from the set for years now. But as you might expect when a two-part film series turns into three, some reshoots and additional scenes were required, so Jackson, Gandalf and company all trekked back to New Zealand for a few more weeks.
Given that we haven't seen Bloom's return as Legolas at all yet-- though he's been heavily promoted as part of the forthcoming Desolation of Smaug-- it's intriguing that he's been such a big part of the reshoots. Or maybe Jackson just likes featuring him in videos so much because they've known each other for so long? I'm not sure what memes have broken out about Martin Freeman's performance as Bilbo, but it's time to make one if you want to see him joking about it on set before he wraps up reshoots too.
The Desolation of Smaug-- whose awesome first trailer you can watch below-- is coming to theaters December 13 this year, while the trilogy ends with There And Back Again on December 17, 2014.
