It was 29 years ago this Christmas that my Grandma gave me that copy of The Hobbit, with hundreds of stills and sketches from the Rankin/Bass animated feature that came out in the late 70s or early 80s. It pretty much changed my life forever. Not to put too fine a point on it. I was already a Star Wars nerd but the thing about my generation is that we didn't have the ability to watch our favourite movies whenever we felt like. The VCR was still a couple years away, at least in my house. So the only thing a nerdling could do was read books. (And comics, of course.) I even memorized the poem Sam tells Strider and the other hobbits when they're camping out by the stone trolls- the one that starts "Troll sat alone on his seat of stone/ and munched and mumbled a bare old bone/ for many a year he had gnawed it near..."
After the Lord of the Rings movies came out I could pretty much die happy. Though I had the better idea of going to New Zealand and visiting some of the sites where scenes were shot. Like Hobbiton:



So all I really wanted was for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to be at least as awesome as this:



It was! And so much more. Especially since Sherlock and Watson are such key elements (though Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't have anything to do with this first movie).
We saw the 3D but not IMAX. As far as Frames Per Second goes, I don't really know what we had. Michelle asked me if it was the 48 FPS and I told her I only counted 36.