Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (review)
by MaryAnn Johanson
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Douglas Adams
It is revealed in Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams, the 2002 direct-
Longtime fans will find a lot to appreciate here, too. I can’t call myself a scholar of Douglas Adams’s life and work, but I’ve certainly read most of his writings, as well as much of what has been written about him. And so much of the actual facts here aren’t new to me — I already knew all about Adams’s aversion to deadlines, for instance — but writer/
Everything here is affectionately off-
Adams himself appears via numerous television clips and amateur videos of personal appearances, including a Tech TV interview shot only days before his death, all keepsakes of Adams’s indubitable charisma and wry intellect. I saw him in person once, at a press event for the release of his computer game Starship Titanic, and yeah, he was pretty much what we see here, which is supremely funny in a way that’s keenly watchful of the world and the human foibles that make it run or, very frequently, fail to do so. Scientist and science writer Richard Dawkins here says that Adams’s books are “full of scientific imagination and scientific wit,” and they are, but to me, it’s Adams’s observations on the peculiarities of people that make him so important a writer: like how computers serve the vital function in a writer’s life of enabling procrastination; or, more broadly, as Adams reveals for us here, his theory on the human relationship with new gadgets and new technology and how it changes over the course of our lives. I won’t tell you what that theory is: it’s worth seeing the film to hear him tell it himself.
“There was more to Adams than missed deadlines and bestselling books,” Gaiman reminds us, as if we needed reminding. No, he was also “fantastically tall.” This may have explained his aversion to sitting down at the typewriter/
Don’t panic
No newcomer to Adams should miss the aforementioned BBC TV miniseries, which ran in Britain in 1981 and in years immediately after on PBS in the United States, which was when I first had this measured cupful of insanity poured into my brain. That is worth noting, in fact, because with the many, many incarnations that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has seen — radio drama, TV drama, novels, computer game, big-
I am, in this as in most other things, something of an oddball in that while I discovered Adams first in print and second via the boob tube, I cannot bring myself to say without equivocation that these six kooky episodes should be considered inferior to the book. (I also have some rather unconventional notions on the Doctors Who, but that’s for another day.) I was, of course, in the early 1980s, when I saw this for the first time, at the point at which I was starting to think in a really geeky way about the possibilities of visual storytelling, and much of what wormed its way into my head back then were the performances. For while much of it is cheesy or at least wildly cheap-
So what if Zaphod Beeblebrox’s second head is in constant danger of falling off actor Mark Wing-
All this goofiness is now on DVD, naturally. The blue bread and green goop, done up Dentrassi style, that Ford feeds to Arthur are, in the nice transfer, particularly vivid shades of toxic cerulean and nuclear chartreuse, just like they loom in my memory. The remastered sound is a bit funky in places, but that twangy banjo on-
see also:
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the Hollywood flick)
• Space Junket: On Meeting the People Behind Hitchhiker’s
• Novel Approach: How Douglas Adams Got Defanged by Hollywood [at The Internet Review of Science Fiction]
Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams
viewed at home on a small screen
not rated
IMDB | buy the video
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
viewed at home on a small screen
not rated
IMDB
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