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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...'"
That was the Question that came out of Arthur's brain, when pulling random letters from the Scrabble tile bag in pre-historic Earth. But as Ford and Arthur pointed out just before they did so, Arthur escaped from the Earth just before his planet was destroyed. So whatever comes out probably won't be the correct Question, but it should be close.
And in fact, 6 x 7 = 42, so 6 x 9 was off by 2. :-)
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.
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