Beorn Fights Gundabad Orcs in GW Hobbit Pre-Orders
March 25, 2014 by dracs
I loved the Desolation of Smaug, the second in the Hobbit movie trilogy. One of the best characters in it was the mighty Beorn, who, along with some orcs and an elf king, is now available to pre-order from Games Workshop!
For the most part I think Games Workshop have done a pretty good job in capturing the look of these characters, especially with Beorn who I think looks both calm and imposing.
Oddly enough the only one I take issue with is Beorn's bear form. It looks like it's about to throw up and the proportion of the limbs look odd, although this may be due to the angle of the photo.
Have you played The Hobbit tabletop game? Will these minis be appearing on your wishlist?
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I would love Beorn – but it’s a tad expensive. I still would love to get into the game properly. I have a mass of Dwarves now amongst other characters. Just need to convince people to play it with me!
BoW Ben
If I was George Lucas I would sue Peter Jackson for stealing the idea of making a prequel trilogy which has none of the charm of the original and has just degenerated into a series of overblown effect sequences.
What the hell is Thranduil doing anyway?
I think that’s a bit harsh. Unexpected Journey is a good film with some nice character development and a few additions to the original story that were needed for a spice of background. The scene with Bilbo & Golem was brilliantly well done as well. Desolation of Smaug was certainly more of an ‘effects-fest’ and they took a few more liberties with the story than I would have liked them to, namely with the Dwarves and the confrontation with Smaug, but I still think it was a good movie. The fight down the river, while never happening, was a very… Read more »
Personally I love the Hobbit movies and I am glad they added in the things from the Silmarillion and other background pieces. I have been dying to know more about characters like radagast who previously only appeared as name drops.
Sam, Jonny and myself play LoTR. Lets sort a game in Castlerock in the next month!
Do you have an army?
I have The Hobbit rules but we tend to use the last version of the rules, along with the new army books.
Cheers Tony
I disagree. I think Peter Jackson has absolutely no respect for or even understanding of Tolkien’s work. Desolation of Smaug did not take a few liberties with the book, it totally butchered it and danced on its twitching corpse. The Lord of the Rings trilogy are good films because they are 80% Tolkien and 20% Jackson. The Hobbit movies are more like 20% Tolkien and 80% Jackson. I’m pretty sure that if Tolkien were alive he would have detested Jackson’s version of the Hobbit as much as Christopher Tolkien does. I don’t think that you have to fill a movie… Read more »
I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one then. I love The Hobbit and have pretty much read it every year since I was about 10/11 and I’ve loved both of the films so far. What I do is simply hang them up on the coat peg of ‘adaptation’ and understand that if I really want to delve into The Hobbit again I can just read the book. If I fancy a different interpretation of it I can check out Jackson’s work. It’s the same way I feel when I’m playing Lord of the Rings… Read more »
I hear Tolkien wanted to rewrite The Hobbit at some point because he wasnt completely happy with it .. could be wrong though. What is there not to understand about the original book though? Its not a complicated, difficult to comprehend piece of writing. Some bits are simply not that enjoyable to read despite being written by Lord Tolkien.
You’d think so wouldn’t you, yet Jackson manages it. I’m not talking about misunderstanding the plot, I’m talking about getting the tone and feel of the book so utterly wrong. The book is a charming and whimsical story which draws on European myth and folklore for its influences. The film is a mindless action film which draws on the Three Stooges and Alien 3. They are not terrible films in their own right, but they are terrible adaptations.
Im not saying the movies are masterpieces, but the supposed rewrite would partly be motivated because of the more childish tone compared to the lotr.
I think George is in a league of his own though, i mean he completely ruined something spectacular he created all on his own. It takes a special kind of stupidity to pull something like that off, its like he himself had missunderstood all his previous work.
Lucas never had a bunch of cavalry charge down a SLOPE into massed ranks of infantry and have them win, nor did he have 4 guys on horses charge out into massed ranks of infantry and win, nor did he have cavalry decide to charge headfirst, STRAIGHT AT GIANT ELEPHANTS.
NOR DID HE HAVE A CHARACTER USE A SHIELD AS A BLOODY SKATEBOARD WHILST SHOOTING A BOW AND ARROW.
Why does Jackson think that all dwarfs have to be comedy dwarfs?
No, he gave the world Jar Jar Binks. The ultimate fail.
The Phantom Menace was so bad I’ve still to this day never seen the rest of that trilogy. I’ve watched both Hobbit movies and will see the third one so can safely conclude I think it’s a better set of films. That said, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed them much. The first one was waaay too long and not much of it was interesting, the second one is all over the place and can’t decide what movie it wants to be. It has some good bits but too many poor bits. I have no great desire to see Tolkien’s books… Read more »
I think the bear is just coughing up a piece of Ork.
That middle Ork spearman looks like the guardsmen from the mummy.
I don’t know why they didn’t just make the Gundabad Orcs as a plastic kit – but then again they did the same thing with the last lot of releases. You can tell that Games Workshop really couldn’t care less about The Hobbit because they are continuing to release the pieces in finecast. If they cared about getting people to play it then this stuff would have been plastic. They could have got exactly the same amount of detail from the models with their casting as it is now. Their plastic clamp packs are brilliant. Instead they have marketed these… Read more »
Making miniatures in hard plastic is only cost effective if you sell a lot of them. The fact that we are not seeing Hobbit miniatures in plastic is probably an indication that GW are not selling enough of them to make investing in plastic worthwhile.
They’ve not exactly made much of a song and dance about it though and shown it off in any real way.. Feels almost like they’re doing these miniatures now because they feel they have to.
Are they not selling because GW won’t promote them properly or are they not being promoted properly because they won’t sell? It’s easy to look from the outside and conclude GW are to blame but these minis obviously haven’t got anything like the crossover appeal that the LotR minis had. Those things flew off the shelves with very little work on GW’s part. If GW are to devote more resources to manufacturing and promoting The Hobbit line, then not only do they risk losing money if it’s a sales dud, but you also have to bear in mind that it… Read more »
By song and dance you mean they haven’t advertised them properly in any real way, shape or form? Well no.. they haven’t, and no doubt will continue to do the same until they get over the insanity of thinking that not marketing something makes it sell better.
It’s a shame, really.
These are all perfectly good sculpts but I can’t help but yawn at them. They just seem meh. Good wound markers in a game, but hardly something you can put in your display cupboard.
The armoured orks (I assume) would be great if they were plastic and cheaper, and in bulk.
They would – those Orcs would be awesome in plastic and in bulk. Would make a brilliant start for a massive army of Azog.
the bear model looks really bad can tell if its the model or the paintjob,
The bear looks weird. I can’t decide whether it is Trish’s “ideosyncratic” style of doing monsters (their mouths particularly always seem to be a little unconvincing) or whether it is the original visualisation of it from the films (which I recall being somewhat unbearlike, but I only saw the film once and don’t recall very well now.) I could chuck in a load of hate for Jackson’s “cartoonisation” of the story and also GW’s high prices for Hobbit models, but lets just take that as read shall we? Regarding the game, I played LotR pretty intensely from the beginning up… Read more »
Its a real shame, GW have become prohibitively expensive and have priced out there market. I have gone from spending £1,000 a year on their LOTR models to zero. I am not willing to pay £5 for troops, particularly in finecast! They have neglected the range with only occasional mentions in WD and I appreciate that the miniatures are manufactured in the free world, and licences have to be paid, but this is ridiculous!
@brennon – totally agree. If these orcs came as a plastic kit I’d have bought them – same with the Lake Town Guards. £15 for 3 regular troops is absurd.
I just had a massive rush of nostalgia by suddenly remembering that one of the very first White Dwarfs I ever bought (way back in the 80s) had an article about fighting the Battle of Pelennor Fields using Warhammer rules and published a list of suitable miniatures taken from the catalogues of a whole range of manufacturers. How times have changed.
Mithril Miniatures still do some nice figures as they holf the licence for the Tolkein figures based on the books rather than the films, maybe still not cheap but some nice models in the ranges
http://www.mithril.ie/
Used to collect the mithril lotr minis as a kid … they had spirit, something i cant say about GWs stuff. The ents are especially sweet sculpts.
Hmm need to learn how to spell as well
Thranduil does Yoga… Girion salutes The Invisible Giant… the rest are fine apart from the exorbitant pricing.
For anyone interested in the lotr/ hobbit stuff, it has been on a bit of a mini-revival recently thanks partly to the GBHL guys on youtube ( do check them out http://www.youtube.com/user/GBHLPodcast ). Sbg is a great tight game and it’s a tribute to the ruleset that it has been adopted by the historical community for skirmish games covering all types of period. Just a pity that it has had zero support from Gw in the hobbit era and it’s been left to a dedicated group of players to keep it going. Of course it doesn’t help that people have… Read more »
I recently watched their intro tutorial for the game – it has certainly got me more buzzed to go back into it as a viable hobby choice.
BoW Ben
I would think the plastic kit of orc soldiers is reserved for the third film, I seem to remember something about a batte for five armies at the end of the book, and it is really no big siurprise of half (or more) of the last film will feature this battle prominently…
then again, if the hobbit range is failing as utterly as it seems, maybe not.
Well today I just bought a total of 150 gw lotr minis with more on the way. But I was really lucky because these were the larger packs of 20 and 24. Now the packs have been halved in size to 10 and 12 for more money.