News Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy coming to Hulu

Christopher...you're doing that thing you do again.

 

And Gaiman kept it as true as possible out of devotion to keeping Pratchett’s material intact. If we found someone willing to do that, we could have something special.

 

The novels, which I read after watching the 1981 TV series, were hilarious. The TV show was good, made at the right time, but merging all three books into a 6-episode series wasn't the best approach.

Didn't care for the movie. Reverend said it already (and best) about there's more to a movie than the f/x. Script and actors' interplay are the core, always and forever. The visuals can sweeten the whole thing but without actors elevating a script by understanding the essence and soul of the material...

 

The third book didn't come out until 1982. The TV miniseries was pretty much a direct, episode-for-episode adaptation of the original 6-episode radio series, with a few tweaks. The first novel (like the first LP version) adapted episodes 1-4 of the radio series, and the second was an expanded adaptation of episodes 5-6.


I honestly wasn't that fond of the first couple of novels. Sketch comedy doesn't translate well to prose, so those two books are rather superficial for my tastes, and I prefer the radio, LP, and TV versions. The next couple of books had more substance, since they were prose first (more or less; Life, the Universe and Everything was adapted from an unmade Doctor Who script).

Although I hated Mostly Harmless, which I feel was misnamed, because it totally wrecked everything I liked about the fourth book and ended on a really depressing and frustrating note.

 

Although the James Goss novelizations of Douglas Adams Doctor Who stories certainly support the idea that one should not write like Douglas Adams unless they are Douglas Adams. And even he didn't always pull it off.

 

Eoin Colfer's "And Another Thing..." demonstrated to me that writing in The Hitchhiker's universe is a tricky proposition. I didn't care for Colfer's book at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Another_Thing..._(novel)

 

I'm not suggesting that anyone else could exactly copy him. That would be foolish to try. I'm saying that Adams's work was not absolutely unique but was part of a larger genre of SF humor, a stylistic branch that includes Sheckley, Adams, and others -- writers whose works have similarities but are not utterly identical, because each one brings their own distinct approach to the common elements. Therefore, it stands to reason that other creators could successfully work in that same general style, not by merely copying Adams but by practicing the style in their own way. Trying to copy the superficial form of another writer's work is always a bad idea, but you can be true to the spirit of their work by doing your own approach to the same style or genre that they worked in.

There is no such thing as an utterly unique creative voice. Every artist is influenced and inspired by earlier artists' work. If an author's voice is unlike anything you've ever read before, that just means you haven't read that author's own influences. That doesn't mean you can find an exact duplicate for a given author's style, but it means you can find close alternatives that are potentially just as satisfying in their own way. It's not guaranteed, of course -- Colfer's book wasn't very well-received -- but it's not impossible.

 

There are a few good jokes, but overall, yeah that wasn't really a very impressive entry to the series.

 

It wasn't exactly my favorite in the series either, but anything that at least tries to nullify the ending to Mostly Harmless is OK by me.

Spoiler: Mostly Harmless

Not only was the ending of MH a massive downer, but I had to laugh - and not in a good way - at the way it explained "Stavromula Beta".

 

I think I must be the only person who not only liked Mostly Harmless, but thought it was a great ending for the series.

I refuse to read that book and not just because he's not Douglas Adams: I tried reading the first Artemis Fowl book and it's one of the very few books I deliberately stopped reading because I hated the main character so much. I was very disappointed when Colfer was announced as the writer for And Another Thing...

Based on what I've read about the basic plot and the reviews of the book overall, it doesn't sound like I missed much.

 

I honestly can't remember if I've read the Colfer book. I think I listened to the radio adaptation of it, but I'm not sure, and it apparently changed a fair amount of stuff from the book.

 

I'll be honest, all the books and shows are a bit of a blur for me so I can't even remember what happened in that one.
The whole series in general starts to get a little fuzzy in my memory around the time of the "forgetting to hit the ground=flying/randomly vanishing girlfriend" part and the armies of cricket robots, or whatever that was about.

Honestly, the stories just kinda tapered off and the best, most memorable concepts were in the first few books. Indeed I think the TV show left it pretty much in the ideal place.

 

I read it. But literally the only thing I remember about it is that I read it.

 

I can't remember a lot about the original radio series, it was a looooong time ago. Something about bird people living in the nose of a massive Arthur Dent statue?

I read the original trilogy of books (also a long time ago) and watched (then) and own (now) the 6 part TV series.

I could only hope for a more faithful (ie: longer) adaptation of the book trilogy, if for no other reason than to make a longer TV series.

I remember Marvin outwitting some sort of battle tank, tricking it into shooting the floor out from under itself. I don't know why that stands out more than other points.

The movie was OK, I felt it tried to be faithful to Adams' vision, but like others said, the cast chemistry wasn't quite there.

Say, what if Peter Jackson adapted the trilogy to film/TV? That would be long.

 

Yeah, that was in the second radio series. There's a lot of stuff there that never got adapted into any of the other versions.

I think they should remix the elements in a new way rather than just try to exactly copy a previous version. I mean, everything up through Magrathea is pretty much the same in every version, but after that, and particularly after prehistoric Earth, the different incarnations tended to go off in their own directions or put the pieces together in distinct ways. And I like that -- I think it's part of the franchise's character that the different versions are unique rather than just the same thing over and over. I was actually rather disappointed that the radio continuation from a few years back adapted the later books as exactly as it did. I think it would've been more interesting if they'd taken more of a new approach. (I did like the way it retconned the ending of Mostly Harmless to be less depressing and ghastly, though.)

It seems to be common in British multimedia franchises of this sort that each version is different rather than a direct adaptation. Red Dwarf is similar, with the novels telling alternative versions of the episodes' plots and eventually veering off into original material. I think I've heard of at least one other franchise where the books based on the show were pretty different from the show, though I'm not sure what it was -- maybe Blackadder?

 

And then there's Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which to me read like "What if Hitchhiker's, but just London and fantasy instead of space and sci-fi, and the Arthur Dent proxy kinda falls in love with an adolescent Manic Pixie Dream Girl?"

 

The second radio series was broadcast in 1980, so yeah, I certainly could've heard some of that. I'm not sure where the person who had the tapes got them being as we're Americans.

 

It was broadcast on American radio (probably NPR) at some point. That's how I first heard it.