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As with the previous two special edition box sets, this one is encased in an elegant, well-designed, and surprisingly sturdy cardboard slipcase with a fold-out digitpak inside. Also included is a useful insert booklet with a fold-out map of all the supplements and supplements-within-supplements, all of which are presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1).

Four feature-length audio commentaries
The extended edition of the film is spread across the first two discs, and it features four feature-length audio commentaries that cover every aspect of how the film was made. The first commentary, “The Director and Writers,” includes director Peter Jackson and screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. The second commentary, “The Design Team,” includes eight people: Weta Workshop creative supervisor Richard Taylor, Weta Workshop manager Tania Rodger, costume designer Ngila Dickson, production designer Grant Major, conceptual designers Alan Lee and John Howe, supervising art director and set decorator Dan Hennah, and art department manager Chris Hennah. The third commentary, “The Production / Post-Production Team,” includes a 14 people, including producer Barrie M. Osborne, executive producer Mark Ordesky, director of photography Andew Lesnie, editor Mike Horton, co-producer Rick Porras, composer Howard Shore, and a host of sound editors and visual effects people. And, finally, once again there is “The Cast” commentary, which includes a recording-setting 19 people, including Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Orlando Bloom, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, and Andy Serkis, who also speaks as both Smeagol and Gollum. As with the earlier versions, the discs use the subtitle feature to note who is speaking at any given moment, which is very helpful when there are more a dozen people talking.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Legacy of Middle-earth
As with the documentaries on the previous discs about Tolkien, this 30-minute documentary brings together a number of Tolkien scholars, linguists, and historians to discuss the author’s life and how it affected his creation of The Lord of the Rings. This one focuses on Tolkien’s creation of Elvish languages and the back history of Middle-earth, how his experiences in World War I influenced his work, the personal importance of the mythical love story of Beren and Luthien, which appears in the Appendix of The Lord of the Rings, and how Tolkien structured his books.

From Book to Script
This section is divided into two parts. The first, a 25-minute featurette titled From Book to Script: Forging the Final Chapter, discusses how the book was adapted to a script, which involved “ironing out” all the timelines and putting everything together chronologically, as well as dropping parts and reworking others. Jackson does a nice job of refuting the major criticism of the film, specifically that it is has “too many endings.” The second part, Abandoned Concept: “Aragorn Battles Sauron”, focuses on a sequence that was shot for the end of the film in which Aragorn sword-fights with Sauron at the Black Gate, but was eventually dropped. It gives us the animatic storyboard for the sequence, which is cross-cut with a storyboard for a variation on Frodo’s fight with Gollum in Mount Doom.

Designing and Building Middle-earth This is composed of five sections that detail the nuts and bolts of the film’s physical production. Designing Middle-earth is a 40-min. documentary that lovingly focuses on the six years of work that went into the artistry of designing the sets and locations. You gets lots of behind-the-scenes footage of sets and models being built. Big-atures (20 min.) looks at the amazing, tremendously detailed work done with miniatures, which are referred to as big-atures because they were so large (a city built at 1:120 scale is still pretty enormous). The most amazing by far is the miniature for Minas Tirith, which filled an entire room. Weta Workshop (47 min.) examines the work done by the make-up and prosthetic special effects department, which was responsible for not only the monster designs, but also all the armor and weapons. Much of this featurette focuses on the design and use of the armor, although some of the most interesting stuff is on the design of Shelob, the giant spider, and on the Army of the Dead.Costume Design (12 min.) focuses on, well costume design. Finally, the Design Galleries, which contain hundreds and hundreds of photographs and sketches, are divided into two parts, “The Peoples of Middle-Earth” and “The Realms of Middle-Earth,” each of which is further divided into subcategories. Some of the images have optional commentary by the artists who designed them.

Home of the Horse Lords
This 30-min. featurette is about the beautiful horses featured in the film, their trainers, and the actors’ relationships with the horses.

Middle-earth Atlas
This is the same interactive map of Middle-earth that was included on the Extended DVD Editions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. It allows you to trace four journeys that take place during the film: Frodo and Sam; Merry; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli; and Gandalf and Pippin. Again, they all use the map and trace out where the characters went, stopping at various times and inserting clips from the film.

New Zealand as Middle-earth
This section is divided into six mini-featurettes that each run 2–3 minutes in length and mix initial video footage shot by Jackson and company when scouting locations around New Zealand that stand in for important locations in Middle-earth, scenes from the film, and interviews with production personnel.

Filming The Return of the King
This section consists of Cameras in Middle-earth, a nearly feature-length documentary on the film’s production, and a gallery of almost 70 Production Photos that can be viewed individually or as a slideshow. Cameras in Middle-earth (1 hr. 13 min.) is a comprehensive making-of documentary that mixes interviews with cast and crew with extensive behind-the scenes footage. Much of the information in the doc is also in the various commentaries, so it serves as a kind of “greatest hits” of the film’s production. Jackson sums up the ethos of epic filmmaking very well at one moment when he tells Miranda Otto, “Pain is temporary. Film is forever.”

Visual Effects
There are two featurettes in this section. The first, Weta Digital (42 min.), focuses on all the computer-generated effects, particularly the enormous battle sequences. The folks at Weta produced 1,488 shots for Return of the King, which is an astounding three times as many shots as appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring, so there’s a lot to cover here. The Visual Effects Demonstration takes a 30-second battle sequence and shows it in eight different stages of production, including pre-viz, live action, digital animation, rough composition, and the final product. The viewer can use the angle function to move among the different versions of the scene, and there is optional audio commentary.

Post-Production: Journey’s End
There are four featurettes included here. In Editorial: Completing the Trilogy (22 min.), Peter Jackson and longtime editor Jamie Selkirk (who dates back to Jackson’s debut, 1987’s Bad Taste) discuss the massive job of editing the film. Music for Middle-earth (22 min.) documents the recording of Howard’s Shore’s musical score, as well as the various songs in the film (I was surprised to learn that Billy Boyd wrote the melody for Pippin’s song), while The Soundscapes of Middle-earth (22 min.) focuses on the sound effects, the creation of which included such fun activities as dropping massive rocks from 60-foot cranes and recording a horse in heat. Finally, The End of All Things (22 min.) looks at the overall hectic crush of postproduction in the final months, in which editing, shooting pick-ups, producing visual effects, scoring, and mixing sound effects were all taking place at the same time. It redefines multitasking, not to mention stress.

The Passing of an Age
This 23-minute featurette takes a nostalgic look at the end of the road, beginning with the world premiere of The Return of the King in Wellington, New Zealand, and moving on to other premieres around the globe, including an amazing show in a hockey arena in Oslo, which featured a professional troupe of 200 actors who had rehearsed for six months to re-enact the highlights of the first two films in full make-up with special effects, horses, and stunts. It finishes up with the by-now familiar story of the film’s run at the Oscars and then the work done for the extended cut, which, if you can believe it, actually including a little more shooting (this has to be the first time a filmmaker had continued working on a film after it won the Oscar for Best Picture).

Cameron Duncan: The Inspiration for “Into the West”
Finally, there is this homage to filmmaker Cameron Duncan, a close friend of Peter Jackson’s who died just before The Return of the King was finished. It includes his short films DFK6490 and Strike Zone.