Saturday, May 29, 2004

Bill is king o media scanning. With all of today's great movie technologies, they can't screw this up, can they: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- The Official Movie Website? They've got an actor from Croyden playing Slartibartfast! Maybe they can mess it up: Adams wrote so much of it to be futuristic and outlandish, but how close is a cell phone or a PDA to The Guide? Will they make it more futurama, or leave it a c.1978 view?

There's a link to a Babel Fish game at that site!

2 comments:

Bill said...

I think the key to a successful H2G2 film adaptation is less making it futuristic than making it bizarre. After all, the characters floating around Adams's universe are largely exaggerations of types found right here in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy -- only with far keener wit.

Though speaking of technological advances, I got a huge kick out of downloading and playing the original Infocom H2G2 text-adventure game on my PDA -- a game that used to require an entire computer. Playing H2G2 on something comparable to the Guide itself is positively mind-blowing (I fancy it's rather like drinking a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster).

Frankly, I think the greatest casting coup is Sam Rockwell as Zaphod. Alas, I can't imagine seeing anyone other than Simon Jones as Arthur, but I'll keep an open mind.

On a related note, I just got the original radio plays on CD (had to order them from the UK). Hilarious -- particularly when you see (or hear, rather) what elements were added or dropped for the television series, game, and books.

Lisa said...

I had that game -- possibly a bootleg version. I recall having no book or packaging. I could never get the damned Babel Fish in my ear.