
I joined my good buddy Sluder and his two boys Joshua and Caleb on a trip to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to check out the traveling Lord of the Rings exhibit that was on display. It was like someone took all of the special features of the DVDs and turned them into one giant pop-up book.
The exhibit was broken up into three main sections. The first section contained massive pictures of each of the major Middle Earth realms that were featured in the movies. I was hoping they would have had more town models (since they created so many for the films) but the only one on display was the nightmare version of the shire-turned-factory that Frodo saw. Still, it was pretty cool to see up close the level of detail.
The second section was all about the characters with their costumes, weapons and neat little factoids. They had lil' monitors with interview clips that looked to be taken straight from the dvd extras. The section on Saruman had a 12 foot tall model of his tower where as the cave troll section had a 1:1 scale statue of the big guy complete with (I'm using Josh and Caleb's words) "troll dong" just a danglin' there.
The last section was all about the special effects used to make the films. There were several interactive displays including a neat camera setup on how they made the wagon bench scene at the beginning of Fellowship. Sluder got a picture of his boys sitting in the bench with little Caleb towering over his taller brother. Another interactive display was a sort of scale comparison where you stood under a camera and it told you what Middle Earth creature you would be judging by your size. Caleb was a hobbit, Joshua a dwarf, I was a Uruk-Hai and Sluder could "almost" pass for human (which was a fair assumption).
There were many other displays that I wont get into (such as the Massive engine used for the battle scenes and of course the One Ring Room) not because I didn't dig em but because this post is already way too long. I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the films and willing to spend $17.50 on a rad museum exhibit.