I’ve long been a fan of the work of Douglas Adam’s work. I read The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy sometime in 6th form I think, and I’ve enjoyed reading all of his stuff since then. So, when I heard that the long-awaited Hitchikers movie was finally becoming a Hollywood reality, and that Disney was involved, I was rather sceptical about how it would turn out…
It’s been in the works for a while, and the movie even has it’s own official weblog. The posts on there have been heartening, but I’ve not been watching it particularly closely, so I didn’t realise that the movie was going to be released so soon (April 23rd IIRC).
Coming back to the site, I also found out that a new movie trailer has been put up for download (as of the 28th of February), and it was this that prompted me to write a blog entry about it.
In short, it looks like they might not have messed it up. In fact, it looks like it might be pretty good. Maybe it’s just the excellent decision to use Stephen Fry’s voice for the trailer, or that it manages to take the mickey out of Hollywood movie trailers while still being a Hollywood movie trailer (if that makes sense). I know the whole point of a trailer is to make the movie look cool, but hey, I think the movie looks cool. For example, if you ever saw the TV version of Hitchikers, with Zaphod’s awful papier-mâché second head, the new Zaphod comes as something of a relief. See what you think.
Nostalgia Appendix#
On a rather different note, Adams once produced a text-based adventure game based on Hitchikers, which I remember getting throughly frustrated by at the time. This was largely because I didn’t really know how to play such games, and lacked the patience to find out.
Now, thanks to the BBC, I can relive the frustration while not having the time to work thing out. The original game has been given a flash makeover, with pretty pictures and everything, and can be found here. But it’s just not the same without that ‘chunky 8-bit text’ feel.