Old Forest
Old Man Willow, along with the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil, was not included in Peter Jackson's films of "The Lord of the Rings". Justifying the excision, Jackson asked rhetorically in "From Book to Script" "So, you know, what does Old Man Willow contribute to the story of Frodo carrying the Ring? ... it's not really advancing our story &amp; it's not really telling us things that we need to know." Of the earlier adaptations, Terence Tiller's 1955–6 radio play did include Old Man Willow and Bombadil, though no recording survives. Morton Zimmerman's unproduced 1957 highly-compressed script, criticised by Tolkien for rushing rather than cutting, similarly included them: Bombadil takes the hobbits straight from Old Man Willow to the Barrow-downs, all the action in the episode seemingly occurring in one day. John Boorman's unproduced c. 1970 script did not include them; the hobbits "getting high on mushrooms" instead. Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film omits the Old Forest altogether, setting a precedent for Jackson. Although the hobbits do not pass through the Old Forest in Jackson's film of "The Fellowship of the Ring", the map shown on screen earlier in the film does include Buckland, the Old Forest, and the Barrow-downs; however, in the extended edition DVD of "The Two Towers", the Ent Treebeard speaks a version of Bombadil's unlocking words to Old Man Willow in Fangorn Forest, so, argues John D. Rateliff, there can have been no Old Man Willow in the mapped Old Forest, and no Bombadil, as the action takes place elsewhere.