Douglas Adams chat and listening

you know folks thats the beauty of being a Time Lord, you can travel back in time and de-dingbat your posts, its worth the intergalactical war and dalek dodging just for that.

"the best way to get fresh air in New York is to open a window and stick your head inside a buidling"- Douglas Adams.

The making of the tv show from the dvd release.

 Some kind soul has uploaded the entire Htchickers radio to youtube.

Here is the link to the original series that started it all-

Primary Phase-



Secondary Phase-



And the series made after the sad loss of Douglas Adams but with the original cast and crew-

Tertiary Phase-



Quandary Phase-



Quintessential Phase




Comes with the Petty Tyrant seal of approval and crabbit salving equal to a night on the buckie, guaranteed!

oooh

Sadly no Scottish dates on the tour

Whilst looking up the Marvin and the tank vid I discovered the guy as animated some more of the scenes from the radio play- enjoy-

The BBCiplayer (radio section) has just begun airing Hitchhikers from the start and if you have access is heartily recommended.

Some kind soul as uploaded the Hitchhikers audio books to youtube- the first book is read by Stephen Fry and he's pretty good as you'd expect, but the rest are read by Martin Freeman and he is frankly bloody brilliant at it (for a great example of how good he is jump to 23 mins into Restaurant at the End of the Universe for the 'seance' scene- the voices he uses are just brilliant)

reupload of Martin Freeman reading Restaurant at the End of the Universe, proof if it were needed of how underused his talents were in TH-

It's amazing he can do that voice!

All the voices are brilliant.
His Zaphod is clearly based off the performance of Sam Rockwells' in the film version, but its excellently done (Zaphod's great grandfather is simply brilliant though)

By a strange coincidence I was just reading some stuff about Hitchhickers and in particular an early, highly successfull (critically and with the public) stage version.
It had an ingenious way to do Zaphod and his two heads and three arms- so ingenious I wish they thought of doing it for the film- they got two actors to play him in one suit- basically a human pantomine horse.
It apprenty worked brilliantly.

BBC America are making a new serie sof based on the Dirk Gently books.

However, much liek the BBC4 version I suspect we will not be getting adaptations of the two books, but taking his characters and style and going in new directions with htem. If that is the writer's words (Max Landis) are anything to go by-

'Douglas Adams work must be reformatted; you cannot just puppet his concepts and expect it to work, you have to rejigg the experience.....If there is anything previous Douglas Adams adaptations have taught us, it's that you cannot adapt Douglas Adams by adapting Douglas Adams.'

However I feel he can never had heard the BBC radio adaptation of Holistic Detective Agency- which rejigs the presentation, makes some changes but by and large sticks to the original story line very closely. It also has a brilliant cast featuring Harry Enfield, Billy Boyd, Olivia Coleman and Andrew Sachs.

Unfortunately I cant find it on youtube- only a promo vid for it-



But its a great example to my mind of how you adapt tricky complex material, make changes for the medium and narrative and still completely honour the original and the original story and characters- changes to suit the dramatic needs of radio story telling, but not which go against the grainor mood, or feel of the originals.

But it demonstrates to me, that with care and a good enough cast, the books characters and stories as they stand can be very successfully adapted.

{{{The original cast of the radio version of Hitchhikers are reuniting for one last time to do another Hitchhikers radio show- this time base don the last of the hitchhikers stories, 'And Another Thing' published after Adams sad death and written by Eoin Colfer with the blessing of the Adams estate.
I was not a huge fan of this book, not that it was bad as such, and it captured much of Adams style of writing, but it lacked his particular world view and perspective on things that made his books his.
However I am hopeful with the original cast handling the material, and it being once more produced by Adams producer of choice, Maggs, that this will be a fitting finale to the radio series. }}}

That would be nice. I felt that his hitch-hiker books became less off-kilter and more touchy-feely at the end. I wasn't too keen on Arthur Dent having a long-term relationship. Stability is not funny. But the original cast and crew are geniuses nearly on the level of Adams himself, so I'm sure they can put the right spin on it.

{{ I thought they did a pretty much perfect job of adapting the final Adams books after his death to radio with this same team, so my hopes are high. They not only made excellent adaptations of the actual books, they did a fantastic job of doing them in a manner which also fitted perfectly with the original radio series run too.

Here's the first episode from the last set they made, starting with adapting Life, the Universe and Everything (one of my personal favourite books). Share and Enjoy! }}}

For some reason I'm feeling a bit of crabbit about all this. Odd...

Pettytyrant101 wrote:"the best way to get fresh air in New York is to open a window and stick your head inside a buidling"- Douglas Adams.

I think that's currently true more of Beijing than NYC, but still applicable.

This game is absolutely... infuriating

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition

{{{ I played that back on release!! And yes, a very hard game- there are plenty walkthroughts available online if you get stuck though- back in the day there was just you and repeatedly banging your head of the desk Might have another go on this new fangled version- though I seem to remember even getting out the house at the start alive is a tricky deal! Is written by Adams though and was produced by infogames at the height of their text adventure prowess, so does have that still going for it}}}

{{Nick Page, who did the short animations above somewhere of scenes from the radio plays has done the entire first episode, so share and enjoy! }}