+anima junkie

Volcano stock image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/white-clouds-over-snow-covered-mountain-tLxGw_ITs7k (the image is free to use)

OH OH I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS ONE.

So, when Lilo & Stitch the Series was still in production, the tv.com forums (originally tvtome!) were my very first internet fandom home.

Behold the face of madness.

TV.com had a thin veneer of officialness to it and one of the show's producers, Jess Winfield, had a forums account where he would talk to fans. We would yell at Jess for anything in the show we did not like. We were not nice. We were chaotic children in the 2000s era of the internet and we were not nice.

I was on the forum when the title of the episode 'Snafu' in the upcoming season was announced btw and lots of people did not believe it was real. But it is, and Lilo says the word 'snafu' 500 times or so in that episode.

(Fun fact aside! Here's how you know I'm totally legit honest: There is a credits scroll in Leroy & Stitch with a ton of names for experiments we never saw in the show; one is named Jesstifer. Jesstifer was Jess Winfield's tv.com forums handle, and burned into my brain for eternity.)

"Okay! What does that have to do with LOTR?" you may ask. Well, you need to understand the following:

because of TV.com's semi-official status and the L&S forums in particular being populated by gullible children, and the presence of a real producer who could give real fake news, rumors there were wild and rampant and mixed easily with real information.

There were real crossover episodes with other Disney Channel shows (that sounded fake when they were announced but turned out to be real)

Lilo & Stitch the series was insane.

The TV.com forums at once time produced the following bit of apocrypha:

There was going to be a LOTR parody episode about an experiment called 'Precious' that needed to be thrown into a volcano. But it got axed due to rights issues.

I do not know whether this is true. I don't remember whether the information came from Jess; I suspect it was from a random forum user who was lost to time. If true I have no idea what stage of production (if any) the episode reached. I do know that this is not an episode that was ever made or aired. I could easily believe this was something they wanted to do. (This was when the Peter Jackson LOTR movies were at their peak of popularity and riffing on them was a national pastime, and the Lilo & Stitch the Series team was chaotic enough to do anything the Disney Channel let them do.)

TL;DR no this did not happen in the series, however, allegedly, it almost did, and it would be extremely easy to misremember it as having actually happened.