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The Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy Returns With the Original Cast (arstechnica.com)

Jonathan M. Gitlin reports via Ars Technica: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy deserves a special place in the geek pantheon. It's the story of hapless BBC radio editor Arthur Dent, his best friend Ford Prefect, and the adventures that result when Prefect saves Dent when the Earth is unexpectedly destroyed to make way for a galactic bypass. Written by the late, great Douglas Adams, THGTTG first appeared as a radio series in the UK back in 1978. On Thursday -- exactly 40 years to the day from that first broadcast -- it made its return home with the start of Hexagonal Phase, a radio dramatization of the sixth and final book of an increasingly misnamed trilogy.

Although Adams died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2001, the universe he gave birth to lived on. Beginning in 2004, the original radio cast was reunited to dramatize the third, fourth, and fifth books. In 2005, a film adaptation was released, and then in 2009 came a final novel in the "trilogy," And Another Thing..., written by the novelist Eoin Colfer. It's this story that the BBC is now dramatizing, again using many of the original cast, along with newcomers like Jim Broadbent, Lenny Henry, and Stephen Hawking. Yes, that Stephen Hawking.

5 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. You can say what you want by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    but Trillian was the object of many fantasies!

  2. "exactly 40 years to the day from first broadcast" by Snufu · · Score: 5, Funny

    The BBC couldn't wait two more years?

  3. Re:Hashtag sorry-not-sorry by mwvdlee · · Score: 3, Funny

    You might want to have somebody LOOK into that random caps-lock KEY of yours.

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  4. Douglas Adams : Killed by OS-X by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Funny

    https://www.engadget.com/2014/...

    I was going to wait till the summer to install it, but I succumbed and installed it last week. It takes a little getting used to, old habits are hard to reform, and it's not quite finished (what software ever is), and much of the software that's out to run on it is Beta.

    But...

    I think it's brilliant. I've fallen completely in love with it. And the promise of what's to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome...

    A few weeks later he was dead.

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  5. Unexpectedly? That is a lie and you know it! by portwojc · · Score: 3, Funny

    Unexpectedly destroyed? Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz makes it quite clear that all the planning charts and demolition orders were on display for fifty Earth years.