The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I loved the original radio series of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which I taped off NPR back in the mid-Eighties and listened to almost constantly during junior high (in between tapes of "Dr. Demento" shows and Bach fugues. Yeah, pretty much the quintessential junior high experience...) So, when the BBC announced that they were doing a radio adaptation of the final three "Hitchhiker" books, reuniting all the surviving original radio series actors, I was almost literally atwitter with excitement! Sure, the big-budget movie has their Alan Rickmans and their Sam Rockwells, but the radio series has Simon Jones, Mark Wing-Davey and Stephen Moore! My inner junior high geek hadn't been this excited since they announced the Lord of the Rings movies.
The CDs arrived last week from Amazon.co.uk, and I've been slowly making my way through them an episode a day. And, alas, it is with a heavy heart that I must report that I'm a bit disappointed. Nostalgia only goes so far, and in this case it got me about as far as episode three of "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" when it all started to come back to me: "Yeah, the last couple 'Hitchhiker' books weren't all that good, were they?"
No, they weren't. Looking back on the series in retrospect, the first two books were just so perfect on their own, intelligent and endlessly inventive, ending on just the right note, that they were essentially impossible to follow. Where do you go from the perfect ending? No place that isn't a disappointment, and each subsequent book was a bit more disappointing than the last. (I mean, by the final book, Douglas Adams was making tired jokes about Elvis being alive in outer space; jokes I heard Ray Stevens make on Dr. Demento almost a decade previous.)
The last three books would have worked so much better if they weren't part of the series at all; the same plots but with a different set of characters. (After all, "Life the Universe and Everything" started its life as the movie treatment "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen"). Don't know how much of a difference it would have made, but I'm sure it would have eased the frustration that greeted us die-hard fans when presented with each new installment.
Still, all my complaints aside, I am enjoying the CDs more than I enjoyed the movie...
The CDs arrived last week from Amazon.co.uk, and I've been slowly making my way through them an episode a day. And, alas, it is with a heavy heart that I must report that I'm a bit disappointed. Nostalgia only goes so far, and in this case it got me about as far as episode three of "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" when it all started to come back to me: "Yeah, the last couple 'Hitchhiker' books weren't all that good, were they?"
No, they weren't. Looking back on the series in retrospect, the first two books were just so perfect on their own, intelligent and endlessly inventive, ending on just the right note, that they were essentially impossible to follow. Where do you go from the perfect ending? No place that isn't a disappointment, and each subsequent book was a bit more disappointing than the last. (I mean, by the final book, Douglas Adams was making tired jokes about Elvis being alive in outer space; jokes I heard Ray Stevens make on Dr. Demento almost a decade previous.)
The last three books would have worked so much better if they weren't part of the series at all; the same plots but with a different set of characters. (After all, "Life the Universe and Everything" started its life as the movie treatment "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen"). Don't know how much of a difference it would have made, but I'm sure it would have eased the frustration that greeted us die-hard fans when presented with each new installment.
Still, all my complaints aside, I am enjoying the CDs more than I enjoyed the movie...
posted by Michael at 9:34 PM
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