The Lord of the Rings the property that has become a founding mythology of modern geek culture, returned to San Diego Comic-Con on Friday with Amazon showing a new trailer for the mega-budget power rings TV series. The panel opened with composer Bear McCeary and an orchestra (including a choir) performing music from the show before the Hall H crowd of 6,000.

The pageantry set the tone for emcee (and noted Tolkien fan) Stephen Colbert to take the Comic-Con crowd to Middle-earth. The rings of power takes place in the Second Age. The series is set thousands of years before the Peter Jackson films and focuses on the rings of power that allowed the Dark Lord Sauron to spread evil across Middle-earth. Colbert noted that the Second Age is one of the least explored aspects of Tolkien’s mythology. “It’s a story of loss,” Colbert said of the show, who added that he was struck by the “sincerity” and “love of this world” of showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay. .

#LOTR panel to #SDCC begins with composer Bear McCreary conducting an orchestra pic.twitter.com/kIDErEN6FE

—Aaron Couch (@AaronCouch) July 22, 2022

Payne proved his Tolkien bona fides by speaking phrases in Elvish and went on to explain why the team decided to focus on the Second Age and the rise of Sauron.

“If we’re going to tell 50 hours of story, we want it to be worth it,” Payne said of the series. “We wanted to find a massive Tolkian mega-epic. Amazon was wonderfully mad enough to say, “Yeah, let’s do that.”

Payne was particularly struck by the story of the fall of Númenor, which is akin to Tolkien’s Atlantis. ‘It’s deeply painful,’ he said, but noted there might be ‘something we can learn’ from it – given it’s the story of a divided society . During the panel, there was a clip showing the grandeur of the island city which was at its height at the time.

The team has been working on the series since 2018, with the creatives – including producer Lindsay Weber – pouring over Tolkien’s published appendices. They sometimes developed a few paragraphs into full-fledged characters and races, such as the harfoots – ancestors of the Hobbits. McKay noted that as a fan of Tolkien, the team felt immense pressure to deliver. “We have been the fans who have been let down time and time again – and we didn’t want to let you down.”

The team showed off a new trailer, which included what could be a balrog – the fiery enemy Gandalf caught in Jackson’s first film. The footage was so packed that even Tolkien scholar Colbert couldn’t catch it all. joked the Last show host: “I don’t know who the hell some of these people are.”

Of the major cities, Weber noted that they had built up a large proportion. “A lot of this happened behind closed doors. It was a labor of love of thousands and thousands of crew members,” Weber said.

The crowd also saw a clip showing the unlikely friendship between Elrond (Robert Aramayo, replacing Hugo Weaving in the Jackson films) and Durin (Owain Arthur). Elrond visits a dwarven mine and they take part in an endurance test in which the two hammers rock until they can’t hammer anymore. The cost of losing? Elron will be banished from the dwarven lands forever. If he wins? He will receive a single boom from the dwarves.

Actress Sophia Nomvete was applauded when Colbert acknowledged she was playing the first female dwarf portrayed on screen. “Thank you all for the nice response,” Nomvete told the crowd. She then revealed that she was only two days away from giving birth when she auditioned for the role of Disa. She learned she had landed the role when her daughter was five days old. She went on set when her daughter was eight weeks old and noted that her costume opened up so she could breastfeed her daughter. “That’s the power of a dwarf,” she said to loud applause.

Later in the panel, another clip showed the harfoot characters encountering a mysterious man known as The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) who sits in the middle of a fiery pit, as if it were a meteor crashing from the sky. “He has a strong sense of purpose,” Weyman said of his character. Colbert said he wouldn’t dwell on the actor with his own theories about who The Stranger was (Gandalf? Sauron?).

As the panel drew to a close, an action-packed scene showed the elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) helping to free a group captured by goblin-like creatures, one of the moments the actor noted that he had studied martial arts to succeed.

Galadriel actor Morfydd Clark noted that she was 11 when the films were released and had many conversations and jokes with her family growing up about the character.

The last time Tolkien’s world traveled to Hall H was in 2014 2014 for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies the third and final episode of Jackson’s the Lord of the Rings prequel movies. Those Hobbit movies never hit the big time Jackson’s Oscar-winning original the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Amazon is betting big on its new series, which is billed as the most expensive TV show of all time, spending $465 million on the first season alone. (Part of this was the cost of acquiring the rights of Tolkien’s estate.)

Amazon bets big power rings , with an eight-episode first season debuting September 2. So far, despite the sprawling cast, it lacks an obvious choice. One fan, during the Q&A portion, received the biggest applause from the entire panel as he asked the showrunners to commit to giving him a role.

The showrunners said, “The answer is yes.”