Peter (cont.): [The Green Dragon] Now this is a scene that I really did regret cutting out of the theatrical version – and we did it only for momentum reasons – because I just love it – I love the song! Fran actually wrote the song for the boys to sing.

Fran: We did alter it a little, probably to the dismay of some of the fans. We played with it; we had a little bit of fun.

Peter: It’s a chance to see the hobbits in their true essence and their true environment before the adventure begins, and it’s also… it also uses these other hobbits, you know, with their typical, kind of, paranoid, suspicious rumour-mongering: it’s a Hobbit-trait that’s very, very dominant in the books, and another aspect of the books that we found difficult to incorporate into the film, but this is the scene that we shot that sort of gives us that feeling of hobbits all gossipy, and, you know, they love little stories, and they always are suspicious about the outside world, and all those kind of things that makes Hobbits very cute. And I love the way that Frodo reacts to those, sort of, the thought of adventures there.

Fran: But, in the end, why it didn’t survive in the theatrical cut was because there’s only so much time you can take establishing Hobbiton before you really move your plot ahead, and we felt we were lingering there too long, and it wasn’t furthering the story for us so it didn’t stay.