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Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

these omissions could work, the book is probably as hard to slim down as Lord Of The Rings, besides stuff like the vogon poetry is better left a little ambiguous as no one would be able to write poetry that badly
 
Entia non multi said:
these omissions could work, the book is probably as hard to slim down as Lord Of The Rings, besides stuff like the vogon poetry is better left a little ambiguous as no one would be able to write poetry that badly
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Craig Charles does, I saw him live a few years ago!
 
Looks like all the bits that have been removed are references to religion and British place names. Why is it that we Brits have to put up with incomprehensible dialogue, gags that revolve around obscure NFL commentators and constant barrages of brand names/ pseudo-religious moralising whilst the mention of Croydon is deemed too confusing for US audiences?

Oh, cos they pay for the films.

That seems utterly fair.

Bastards.
 
well in true Marvin style, we are intelligent enough to have our stories stolen by the yanks, mutated by the the yanks and sold back to us by the yanks.

holywood script writers second against the wall come the revolution, after all we know who is first
 
dot23 said:
Looks like all the bits that have been removed are references to religion and British place names. Why is it that we Brits have to put up with incomprehensible dialogue, gags that revolve around obscure NFL commentators and constant barrages of brand names/ pseudo-religious moralising whilst the mention of Croydon is deemed too confusing for US audiences?
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Kind of like how the trans-Atlantic FTMBers feel on here, then.
 
Entia non multi said:
holywood script writers second against the wall come the revolution, after all we know who is first
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James Randi?
 
They have also removed The Guides entry on towels. Excuse me but how can they miss that out? The Guide is quite clear that the most important item a hiker can carry is their towel. And they are not even going to mention it?

*purses lips* :grrr:
 
Heckler said:
Entia non multi said:
holywood script writers second against the wall come the revolution, after all we know who is first
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James Randi?
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in true hitchikers guide style
"Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
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Leaferne - indeed, I suppose cultural references are a big problem in making things universal. I also think they help us to understand each other better, in the long run, and much with any other kind of jargon, recognition only comes after repeated exposure.

This was my point really, how are yanks going to understand true british comedy and culture if the weird bits are cut out?
 
Hitchhiker's guide in your pocket

Soon you will be able to carry around a real version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The mobile edition has been made by the BBC rather than "the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor" who, in Douglas Adams' book, created the original.

Owners of smartphones and handheld computers will be able to access the guide while they are out and about.

The portable edition contains 7,000 articles from the H2G2 site covering life, the Universe and everything.

The original idea for Earth's very own version of the guide put together by anyone who had time to contribute came from Adams himself.

Mostly harmless

Mr Adams' own company managed the project in its early days but in 2001 the BBC took over and moved it to its current website.

In some respects the way that the H2G2 website was put together pre-figures the idea of the wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, that is also written, edited and checked by ordinary web users.

Phone and PDA users can get access to the mobile version of the guide by sending "H2G2" in a text message to 81010 or simply visiting http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/h2g2.

Visitors can browse the entries, search for specific topics or hit a Surprise Me! button that takes them to a random database entry.

"Douglas Adams was years before his time," said Tony Ageh, BBC controller, Internet. "But thanks to modern mobile technology, what was once only a harebrained idea has now become a startling reality."

Mr Ageh said that the entries picked for this edition were the most relevant and useful for mobile users.

"We cannot take for granted what any of the mobile interfaces are," he said, "but its a reasonably pleasant experience on most mobiles."

"We're quite pleased that we have delivered the vision that Douglas had in the first place," he said.

In Douglas Adams' first book the Earth only merited a single short entry in the guide but the phone edition holds information about a huge variety of subjects; everything from how to hypnotise a chicken to hangover cures.

Entries under "Life" cover animals, plants and humans. Those under "Universe" concern geography and space, and "Everything" deals with everything else.

The mobile edition of the guide has been timed to coincide with the release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film.

Also being updated is the Radio 4 Hitchhiker's website that is offering new versions of the game of the book and radio series.

The BBC is also planning to broadcast the last ever radio instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on 3 May at 1830BST.


--------------------------------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/t ... 447885.stm

Published: 2005/04/15 10:56:08 GMT

© BBC MMV
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I do not have a mobile...Thank the Eight Million Gods and Melek Taos too...
 
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

*** Cert PG

Peter Bradshaw
Friday April 22, 2005
The Guardian


If Jorge Luis Borges had written an episode of Blake's 7, the script might resemble Douglas Adams's 1970s radio masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which became a less good, but still decent TV serial and also a globally bestselling novel. Adams's inspired absorption of influences - Kubrick, Lucas, Python, Carroll - would not have been possible without the strength of his own insouciant comic originality; and on his death in 2001 at the unfunnily early age of 49, we lost a playful virtuoso of ideas. When Richard Dawkins, in the television programme accompanying his book The Blind Watchmaker, presented his computer simulation of how natural selection works, modifying imaginary little animals, the benign inspiration of Adams was obvious.

Article continues
So much of his energy had been expended on trying to get a longed-for movie version off the ground. For years, nothing at all happened and the only sci-fi comedy, incidentally, which had anything like the Adams spirit was the very funny Galaxy Quest. But here the film version finally is, and the author and co-writer has a melancholy posthumous exec-producer credit as well as a final dedication to "Douglas". The film is no disgrace, and honours the Guide's gentle, low-tech BBC origins. But it doesn't do justice to the open-ended inventiveness of the original. The inevitable Anglo-American accommodations of casting have muddled its identity and the performances of the new American stars can be uneasy. It somehow seems heavier-footed and slower-moving than Adams's concept; the gravity is stronger.

Arthur Dent is the put-upon English bloke enraged to find that his house is to be demolished to make way for a new bypass, at exactly the same time that Earthlings discover that the same thing is to happen to their insignificant little planet: a giant cluster of alien construction ships is massing just outside the ionosphere ready to reduce it to dust. With magnificent bureaucratic scorn, they announce that the plans have been available for inspection for over 50 years now at Alpha Centauri and it is too late to lodge an official complaint.

Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office) is inspired casting as Dent, and delivers exactly the right note of futile English sarcasm in the face of complete and utter planetary destruction. His best friend, the oddly named Ford Prefect, tips him off about what is about to happen; together they escape and hitch-hike across the Milky Way, armed with their invaluable book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, voiced with lucid serenity by Stephen Fry.

Prefect is played by Mos Def, and a wisecracking American figure is arguably the right choice to guide our clueless and innocent Brit out of trouble. Zooey Deschanel plays the woman to whom poor Arthur loses his heart, and this casting, too, works reasonably well, though female roles were never particularly strongly conceived in this comedy galaxy. The problem is with Sam Rockwell playing the bizarre figure of Zaphod Beeblebrox, that arrogant inter-galactic adventurer who has somehow become a kind of itinerant universal president and the figure responsible, with one negligent signature, for the annihilation of Arthur's home planet.

Rockwell sashays about gamely, but largely uncomprehendingly, sporting a glam-rock costume and unreliable grin, but the character never really connects to anything or anyone else on screen. He's virtually on autopilot. There's a visual difficulty, too, with his two faces. When Mark Wing-Davey played Zaphod on television, he had an extra face floating waxily alongside his real one. Rockwell's Zaphod has his second face shooting up periodically from under his chin like some sort of Exorcist possession, the hidden id to Zaphod's ego. It is somewhat odd, and when Mos Def, Rockwell, Deschanel and Freeman are rattling around together in the one scene, they look baffled by each other's existence.

The real star has to be the Book, here re-styled as a hi-tech laptop, with witty onscreen graphics illustrating Fry's voice. Its presence is a little slimmed down but the film nicely portrays one of the most surreal sequences: imagining the thoughts of a giant sperm whale, suddenly magicked into existence in the sky, and left to drop thousands of feet to the ground. My favourite character is the Babel Fish, which shoved into your ear will translate any language. The film, sadly, misses out the Book's devastating aside - that the Babel Fish, by making everyone understand each other perfectly, has been responsible for more and bloodier wars than anything else in history.

The savour and flavour of the Adams original, its playfully ruminative feel, has been downgraded in favour of a jolly but less interesting outerspace romp.
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Source
 
I didn't find the radio programmes funny and I didn't find the books particularly funny. IMO it was thin university humour for a prog rock generation. Brian May probably liked it. And people who found meaning listening to 'Dark Side of The Moon'.

So the answer to everything is 42. Ho bloody ha! Very funny.

I always thought that it was like thin Monty Python set in space. And Monty Python wasn't nearly as good as people remember it either.
 
I havent but im not a cinema goer so I wont.

Its going to be eclipsed by Star Wars, anyway.

(HA gets out her eclipse viewing projector)
 
melf said:
so has anyone seen it yet?
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Yes, and, without being hillarious it's really quite watchable. Big changes from the book, so if you can't hack that stay away, but some of the scenes were really well done and the verbose guide entries are plentiful and damned well-done.

I'd say go and give it a chance.

Good cast all round. Left set up for an obvious sequel.
 
Humour is subjective, Alb. One man's Goons/Python/Q6/Pete'n'Dud maybe another man's Old Mother Riley/Jim Davidson/Bernard Manning/Joe Pasquale. :D

Anyhoo, I saw the H2G2 flick earlier tonight and was left ...ambivalent.

The best lines were all the classic ones from the radio show/TV show, and as such they were too familiar to be ever as funny again as they were the first time round. Not even the sperm whale (Bill Bailey doing Eddie Izzard for some reason). And some of the best lines are drowned out by awful timing/delivery. (Bill Nighy especially guilty there, IMO.)

But watch it as a celebration of Adams' work and maybe you'll like it.

Watch it never having encountered any other version before and maybe you'll even chuckle a time or three the way the audience at the showing I attended did.

Watch it expecting to wet yourself painfully the way you did all those decades ago when you first heard Marvin talk a battle-robot into blowing the floor out from under itself ('They just don't think, do they!?!'), and you'll be awfully disappointed.

And if you prefer the books to the radio show or TV version, I suspect you won't like it at all.
 
Well im off to see this later.Dont really know too much about the radio/tv show so will see...
 
I went to see it today, apart from an audience that other than myself consisted of 30/40-something dads and their unruly offspring, it was really good.

It missed the restaurant at the end of the universe scenes, but the zaphod head thing worked quite well, wasn't that bothered with the way it ended but I suppose ending it with the question being revealed would be a little too odd, the romance thing between Dent and Trillian was a bit boring, but the new scenes on the Vogon planet were a welcome addition :)
 
Yeah, ditto to the love scenes, to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with Trillian, I thought she was a bit drab . . . and I realize that Arthur is drab, and so therefor his taste probably is too, but to remember someone so fondly after only meeting them once it would have to be someone pretty memorable, whereas Trillian didn't seem to be . . . she is filled with this want for adventure yet seems to be so boring and uninteresting herself, why should she expect it of anyone else?

On the other hand, I thought Mos Def was fantastic as Ford . . . he hit that boozing, partying vibe perfectly.


-Fitz
 
They repeated the entire TV show on Paramount the other night so it was interesting to compare ... especially as the film crew swore they never even saw the BBC version! Copyrights I think.

The dialogue of the movie and the TV version is almost identical, apart from where the middle section deviation starts.
I thought they did it quite well considering the radio play, book and tv show were all pretty lumpy to start with. It was unfortunate that they didn't find a better way of getting from A to C, but it was adequate for mild enjoyment.

I think they must be hoping for a restaurant at the end of the universe film if it all goes reasonably profitably.

It's typical that H2G2 geeks everywhere complain that the dialogue is stale, imagine the fuss if the screenwriter had kicked out all the familiar stuff!
Overall I think this will be most enjoyed by the NEW Douglas Adams demographic , IE those that didn't experience the radio or TV show at the time. This is the H2G2 for them, not me (even so, I enjoyed it)

The jokes are timeless, it's me that's aging badly!

BTW: did anyone else notice that when we first meet Trillian her teeth really needed brushing? urgh!
 
Hitchhiker film takes £4.2m in UK


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie has taken £4.2m at the UK box office, mirroring its "answer to life, the universe and everything" - 42.
In a coincidence to delight fans, the film took £4,223,150 in the UK between Thursday and Bank Holiday Monday.

It is based on the stories of the late Douglas Adams, which state that the answer to life is simply "42" without giving any further explanation.

The movie also topped the US box office chart, taking $21.7m (£14.2m).

Robert Mitchell of UK distributor Buena Vista International said film-makers were "delighted" with the movie's "incredibly strong opening".

He said the Hitchhiker's movie beat action film XXX: The Next Level at the UK box office, as it had already done in the US.

To beat off the hottest weekend of the year so far in the UK and strong competition from XXX in the US to record these figures is a phenomenal achievement," Mr Mitchell added.

The XXX sequel, which sees rapper Ice Cube take over from action star Vin Diesel, made one third of Hitchhiker's takings despite opening at almost 400 cinemas in UK and Eire.

Last week's number one, Nicole Kidman's thriller The Interpreter, dropped to three but continued to perform, its third week takings of £749,529 taking its total UK box office haul to more than £5m.

Romantic comedy The Wedding Date fell to four while the Amityville Horror remake slipped to five.

Elsewhere in the chart, Downfall has now become the most successful German-language film ever at the UK box office with total takings of £1.33m.

The Adolf Hitler drama - in 12th place after five weeks on release - beat the £1.24m accrued by 2003 comedy Good Bye Lenin over the weekend.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainmen ... 509721.stm
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I have seen the movie and really enjoyed it. I watched a re-run of the first episode of the BBC series and actually ended up prefering the new movie. All film adaptations are very limited accounts of the original material and I think they did the job quite well. It wasnt as funny as it could have been but the characters were better in the film than the Beeb version. By the way, my aunt made the false head for the BBC version and it wasn't that bad honestly, well not when I had a look at it years ago.
You have to remember the BBC was run on very little money then and shows like that had tiny budgets to work with so I think folk should give pre 90's BBC programs a lot of credit for how they are given the resources allocated them to begin with.
 
The movie is very, very good
:D
thankyou DA, wherever you are...
:(
 
I've told my kid, I might take him to see it, if he reads the first book first. :)
 
mothman1 said:
I have seen the movie and really enjoyed it. I watched a re-run of the first episode of the BBC series and actually ended up prefering the new movie. All film adaptations are very limited accounts of the original material and I think they did the job quite well. It wasnt as funny as it could have been but the characters were better in the film than the Beeb version. By the way, my aunt made the false head for the BBC version and it wasn't that bad honestly, well not when I had a look at it years ago.
You have to remember the BBC was run on very little money then and shows like that had tiny budgets to work with so I think folk should give pre 90's BBC programs a lot of credit for how they are given the resources allocated them to begin with.
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The TV show was rubbish in comparison to the radio show. It must have been "dumbed down" for a television audience or something as all the speech was slowed down and stuff. Hard to make something sound witty when you are speaking so slowly and carefully. :roll: The actual effects were fine, it doesn't need them. Well it shouldn't need them. And you must listen to the radio show to hear about the Shoe Event Horizon. :D well if you want to that is..

Friends of mine who went to see it walked out after 20 minutes. :shock: But then someone else has just said it was quite good. :? Hmm, may go for the Saturday morning half price option so as to be wasting less money if its pants.
 
I nearly walked out, unfortunately I'm not very good at doing that 'cos I'd spend the next year wondering if something good happens that I missed.

Big IMO

It looks dated, like Monty Python attempted to make a feelgood version of it in the 70s and someone stuck it in a cupboard for 30 years. I've never heard the radio play, just read the first 2 books when I was a kid and saw the BBC version, maybe once every 10 minutes something happens that seems 'right'. Beyond that, I'd say about a 3rd of it is vaguely amusing and the rest disinteresting.

Arthur Dent is ok. Ford Prefect isn't bad. Zaphod looks like he's going for an audition for Pirates of the Carribean, and Trillian's played like a female version of Arthur. Marvin is ok, but there's not enough of him. The Vogon beaurocracy joke isn't funny anymore, less so if you've ever worked for the civil service, and it just makes me feel like watching Brazil again.

The only big plus point was they showed the trailer for the new Tim Burton film and it looks a lot better than the short teaser version, looks like he might have done a good job with some of the darker elements of the story:D
 
Which parts look dated, the effects were very good I thought, or do you mean the feel of the movie as a whole?
 
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