It definitely could have happened, its just a moderately high effort joke. With the right class and building on shared buy in over a semester or more its not that wild that someone would come up with the idea to do something like this. After all even if it is fake someone came up with the idea just as a written joke.

And without him they were threatening to have the production leave NZ, which would’ve put a bunch of his friends out of the job.

On the hair?

Anybody know what set does leglesslegolegolas’s lego lass’s hair come from? It looks really cool.

That lack of time is a direct result of studio meddling. The studios pushed Guillermo del Toro out, threatened Peter Jackson with removing the production from New Zealand to force him into coming on as director, and tried to force him to keep to a similar timetable as the GDT production.

Because you can’t hike on an internet forum, but you can endlessly perseverate about gear.