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Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30
XaN-ASMoDi writes "Yesterday saw the 30th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Douglas Adam's seminal work, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", to mark this, Mark Vernon has written an article for the BBC News Magazine on the answer to The Question.
'It's 30 years since Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made its debut on BBC radio, but its most famous mystery is still waiting to be resolved...'"
...but wasn't the Ultimate Question "What is six times nine?" - thus proving that something is fundamentally broken with the universe? I remember these from the radio scripts, which were the first incarnation of HHGTTG.
wasn't 6*9, its that it is impossible to know the question and answer in the same universe, and doing so will cause the universe to be replaced by one infinitely more strange, and that this has possibly already happened.
meh
But the books later reveal the reason. It's Agrajag, who has been killed by Arthur many times.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They just picked it because it was the funniest number they could think of.
It created its own nerdy significance. :)
Actually, Douglas himself wrote a lot of the stuff for the Movie. He invented the new character Humma Kavula as well.
In fact if you read much of his stuff, including interviews (I have everything its possible to get in audio form), you learn that he definitely did not want the movie to be a copy of either the book or the radio series. Actually it never could be a copy of the radio series, because there were all sorts of problems over what Douglas had the right to use.
It's not fashionable to like the H2G2 movie, but I enjoyed it hugely. Had it been an exact rehash of the same old stuff I'd have been annoyed. I wanted to not know what was going on for as much of the film as possible. Casting Mos Def as Ford Prefect was an inspired move, he performed the role really well. I'm not so sure about Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, but we can't have everything.
And Marvin? Well he was amazing. I never did understand why such an advanced robot should look like the one in the tv series. The one in the movie was much closer to my mental image of the robot then I expected.
I don't write jokes in base 13.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Which series?
Radio - third series (Tertiary Phase) also good; missed the 4th one, so can't comment
Books - three is good, four is short (because he was locked in a hotel room with only a Mac Plus to write it on, rather than an of his 5 Mac IIs,because the publisher had let him miss too many deadlines already, and wanted a book. any book). Pass on five, unless you like downer endings
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It is unfortunate that the original radio series isn't as widely spread. The books are great, but the radio series is even better.
The cake is a pie
This is correct. According to every official source (and written by Adams himself), he said he needed a funny number, looked out the window, and said "yeah, 42, that's an ordinary number", wrote it down and continued writing.
There was no deep hidden meaning in the selection at all.
RIP, Douglas, we miss you.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Interestingly, the Belgium joke was added to the American edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. In the original British edition the Rory was an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious screenplay. Presumably the US publishers asked Adams to change it, so in the American version it's "Belgium." This led to a whole extra passage about how offensive the word Belgium is throughout the galaxy, and how funny it is that Earthicans (that's an unrelated Futurama reference - pay no heed) named a country after it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Interestingly, the Belgium joke was added to the American edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. In the original British edition the Rory was an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious screenplay.
Yes, but the Belgium joke actually predates that: it was in the second radio series, from which Life, The Universe And Everything was very loosely adapted. (Zaphod says it when about to fall out of the Nutrimatic cup.)
Peter