The greatest Lord of the Rings orcs. 1: "Meat's back on the menu" Uruk Hai. 2: Olympic torch runner Uruk Hai. 3: Sloth from Goonies general. 4: "Took a little tumble" warg rider with bolted-together face.

The fact that the warg rider orcs were hideously scarred, presumably from dealing with their vicious mounts, was such a nice little touch. They were the Joe Exotic employees of Lord of the Rings.

Honorable mention to the "late, as usual" Return of the King orc who wears a skull on top of his head for some reason. In an audio commentary, Jackson & Walsh suggest that it's his mom's head he wears. Jackson's horror-comedy roots really come out in the LOTR orc designs.

It's unfortunate that the attempts to rehabilitate the surviving Uruk Hai by turning them into child care professionals wasn't a complete success...

If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand the decision to change orcs from being burly guys in imaginative prosthetics in LOTR to CGI creations in The Hobbit. It felt like a giant step backward to me.