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Expedition 42 ISS Crew Embraces Douglas Adams
SchrodingerZ writes: In November of this year, the 42nd Expedition to the International Space Station will launch, and the crew has decided to embrace their infamous number. NASA has released an image of the crew mimicking the movie poster for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a film released in 2005, based on a book with the same name by Douglas Adams. Commander Butch Wilmore stands in the center as protagonist Arthur Dent, flight engineer Elena Serova as hitchhiker Ford Prefect, flight engineer Alexander Samokutyayev as antagonist Humma Kavula, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti as Trillian, and flight engineers Terry Virts and Anton Shkaplerov as two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox. The robotic "Robonaut 2" also stands in the picture as Marvin the depressed android. Cristoforetti, ecstatic to be part of this mission stated, "Enjoy, don't panic and always know where your towel is!" Wilmore, Serova and Samokutyayev blasted off September 25th for Expedition 41, the rest of Expedition 42 will launch November 23rd.
The 2005 movie was pretty bad and marred Hitchhiker's Guide in my mind. The 6-part miniseries was a really great portrayal. Too much to ask for it be something that can be condensed to 90 minutes, yes. Yet, for some people it Hitchhiker's Guide isn't some stupid "42" meme. And what is better than the miniseries is the book. I read Hitchhiker's Guide out of boredom starting in a public library and after page 1, I could not stop reading it and it brought immeasurable joy. [And Douglas Adams has been gone quite a while now, what a shame ...]
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The books did a decent job portraying the original radio broadcast as well.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I've read all the books multiple times and I don't recall any such character, unless it was a very minor one.
Ezekiel 23:20
My first exposure to HHTG was around 1980. It was available on this thing we had back then called "radio", which was kind of like wireless multicast audio streaming, only with a very limited selection of content streams.
Here's the thing: a film is never going to compete with whatever you imagined reading the book or listening to the "radio" plays. At best it can show you what you've already imagined. And when you see what you've imagined it's getting a pleasant hit of external validation. Why else would a Harry Potter fan go to see a Harry Potter movie? They don't go for a *different* experience than they imagined. And Harry Potter and HHTG are written in two very different narrative styles. I think most people who read Harry Potter picture more or less the same thing, but everyone who reads HHTG picture very different things. So the movie was bound to be a disappointment if you went to it expecting to see what you've pictured in your mind up on the screen.
On top of that the "radio" play is 13 hours long, and the books have even more material. The movie runs less than two. That means a lot of your favorite bits inevitably got left out.
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I've misread it as "Expedition 42 ISS Crew Embarrasses Douglas Adams", so go figure.
Ezekiel 23:20
Is represented by...?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
anything that references that Disney movie and not the BBC version must die a horrible death.
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Well... sure, the original radio series was fine, but I once met Adams before the it aired, and he described it to me.
That was really the best version, in my opinion.
You can't blame them for having their fun when the number "42" came up. And you don't have to have liked the movie to acknowledge the photo shoot as a testament to Douglas Adam's creative genius.
Though I'd like to see a journalist interview them to see how many of them actually know where their towel is.
Yes, but that's not the whole story (sorry about the pun).
Douglas Adams once said that every new medium he adapts to is a rewrite for him. He, quite deliberately, did not repeat the same story in a different medium, but rather wrote a new story loosely based on the same plot and characters.
Some of the differences between the movie and other adaptations were clearly not a dictation of the medium, but rather an artistic decision. Two random examples: in other portrayals Zaphod's heads were side by side and the heart of gold, at least in the books, was shaped like a sneaker shoe. The only reasons to change those are artistic, not medium related.
Yes, when you adapt a story to a new medium it was never told in before, changes are inevitable. To me, the best case scenario is that someone who understands and loves the original story embraces this fact, and tries to recreate a new story that captures as much as possible that was good in the original.
In fact, those movies which do try to capture the original books as accurately as possible are those I enjoy less. When I see them, I've either already read the book, or it is a few clicks away. By all means, give me a different story in the movie.
Shachar
Each mediam was made with the author who was well aware that they are different mediums, so the stories were adapted to each medium.
So the books did not portray the radio broadcast. The movie did not portray the books. If anything, it is a 'based on' movie and book.
I have the audiobook which is read by Adams himself, which is not a standard for audiobooks. Great for listening while in traffic instead of the mindless radio stations.
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Each medium was made with the author
Except for the movie. They had to wait for Adams to die so he would no longer be able to stop them from mutilating it.
Some fun quotes from various points it the movie's development:
Reitman thinking that forty two is NOT a good answer, and that instead the movie needs a big finish, Douglas understands that he is trapped.
"It's the worst script I've ever read. Unfortunately, it has my name on it... whereas I did not contribute a single comma to it.... I'm appalled to think how much harm that script have done my reputation over the years."
And after Adams died:
Jay Roach has hired Karey Kirkpatrick, the guy who wrote or re-wrote the screenplays of "Chicken Run", "James and the Giant Peach" and "The Little Vampire" to rewrite douglas adams draft.
Each mediam was made with the author who was well aware that they are different mediums, so the stories were adapted to each medium.
Bah! You are all wrong! For the REAL die-hard fan, get a hold of the radio scripts. They add a lot of commentary on how different things came about, how he was busy scribbling details right until air time, how he grabbed the janitor at the last second to play a part he just added in. The commentary is almost as funny as the script itself.
It describes how, at the end of one episode, he threw our heros out of a space lock and had the floating in open space with seconds to live.
He then goes on the discuss how he struggled for that next week trying to decide how to free them. Anything he came up with seemed to highly improbable.
So... he came up with the Improbability Drive (tm Sirius Cybernetics).
BTW: I agree, each medium was adapted as necessary. I enjoyed all of them. At first, the movie seemed a little too slapstick for my tastes, but it quickly grew on me. I think Douglas would have approved.