Dead Racists Society

So a while back--the Friday before last--parents, sibling and I went to Indianapolis to see their Lord of the Rings exhibit on loan from New Zealand. They had a bunch of the clothes, weapons, models, etc. on display, and a lot of stations where you could read placards or watch short videos (a few minutes each, sometimes less) about the making of the movies. One placard told us that Viggo Mortensen was so dedicated to filming that at one point he got a tooth knocked out, and he insisted that they just superglue it back in so they could continue filming. This was all in one room.

In the next room they had a model of a building that took days to construct and was on-screen for scant seconds. It was part of the town Edoras, which they had to build themselves to get the location just perfect--in fact, they had people in helicopters scouring the countryside to find the best area for it. They filmed in that town for eight days, if memory serves. They also had a row of mannequins sporting the various armors and clothing of the different peoples seen throughout the movie.

But on the wall just next to the doorway joining these two rooms, they had a sketch of silhouettes of the various races: hobbit, dwarf, human, elf, Uruk-hai, mountain troll. They may have also had Wizard and Ringwraith, I don't recall. These outlines were all proportioned correctly to give you a sense of the different heights of the various races. And they had set up a contraption, suspended from the roof, so that if you stood under it, it would judge your height and a recording would tell you what race you were. I believe my step-father was declared to be either human or elf, Benji was a human (I think) and mom was a tall dwarf. After they went, I stood at the marked spot, drew myself up to my full height, and raised my hand as high as I could, covering myself with the guidebook they'd provided us with. The voice then declared that I was "an Uruk-hai on steroids, or possibly a ring-wraith."

Yeah. So don't mess with me.

Oh, right, one other tidbit that Benji had to point out to me. The mountain troll in the mines of Moria? He's anatomically correct. So be grateful for the loincloth.