Perhaps one of the biggest missteps Peter Jackson made in An Unexpected Journey came at the very beginning, where the scenes introducing us to Bilbo Baggins and his traveling dwarf companions seemed to drag on for an eternity. The boring songs the dwarves entertain one another with certainly didn't help, and many in the audience sat their impatiently glancing at their watches as they waited for them to be over and done with. They're hardly catchy and entertaining musical numbers (and if they had been that too would have felt out of place), and had they been removed some of the issues of pacing previously mentioned would have been alleviated. Perhaps the best place for these songs would have been on the soundtrack - for one thing, they might have livened up all those traveling shots...
