"Oooh!" the twelve-year-old whispered, clearly excited. "Death Knights!"

We were watching the movie The Fellowship of the Ring. The Nazgul, the Ringwraiths, the Dark Riders, the terrible servants of the Dark Lord Sauron had just appeared on the screen for the first time. I am transported to Tolkien's Middle-Earth. But the twelve-year-old saw The Lord of the Rings as a knock-off copy of the computer game Warcraft, itself a descendant of Dungeons and Dragons, itself a descendant of Tolkien's universe. I looked over at the twelve-year-old. He was clearly loving it--but the "it" wasas much what he sees as a renaming and a translation to the screen of the battles between the Horde and the remnants of Azeroth and Loredan that he has fought on the computer, as much as the raw power of the vision of Tolkien's fevered brain. He sees the Ringwraiths as the anti-paladins of the Horde from Warcraft.

Afterwards there was much discussion of whether a ranger like Strider could "really"--with the canons of reality set by the "rangers" in Warcraft--be as competent and as powerful as he is in the movie.

I wondered: is he being cheated? It's supposed to be hard for people to appreciate Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" today because so many of his narrative devices and visual set-pieces have been copied in innumerable, worse movies. On the other hand, the themes and stories are damned powerful--that's why they resonate, that's why they have been copied so often.