Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
|
redirected from Main.TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy
alt title(s): The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy; Hitchhikers Guide; Mostly Harmless; Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy; The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy 
Why are people born? Why do they die? And why do they spend much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
Don't Panic!
A franchise of different media, all telling variations on the same story by Douglas Adams.
To boil it down to the essentials, Arthur Dent, a fairly normal if feckless Earthling, wakes up one Thursday and, after a series of confusing events, is spirited away from Earth by his friend, Ford Prefect, right before the planet is destroyed. He then hooks up with Zaphod Beeblebrox, former President of the Galaxy, current fugitive, and all-around cool guy; Marvin the Paranoid Android, a sarcastic and chronically depressed AI, and Tricia McMillian, AKA Trillian, The Chick and the only other human being left. Zaphod is on a quest to find The Truth, and everyone else gets pulled along for the ride.
There have been many adaptations over the years, each one starting from this point and then branching off in a different direction. Adams himself has been part of most of these, and thus, they all have some level of "officialness"; it's less a single "original" with an Expanded Universe, and more a string of multi-media Alternate Continuities.
The first version was the radio series, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The first series was broadcast on BBC Radio in 1978, with another series coming not long after, and a Christmas episode linking them. This material went on to become the foundation of the first two books. However, it has several bits not seen in any later version, including the full-length "Shoe Event Horizon" story. After Adams's death, three more series were broadcast, adapting the plots of the last three books.
Next came the book series, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, probably the best-known version. Originally, it adapted the plots from the radio series, but took off afterwards, becoming five novels in all; Adams had said, near the end of his life, that he wanted to do a sixth, but this was cut short by his sudden death. A sixth book by Eoin Colfer, entitled And Another Thing (not to be confused by a character dispensing important info just as they're about to leave) was published on October 12, 2009.
The books, in order, are:
A six-episode TV series version was shown on The BBC, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. This, too, was based on the first radio series, and used much of its cast. It was innovative, particularly in its use of pen-and-ink animation to simulate the "electronic" entries of the titular Guide, but suffered from low budgets.
There was an Interactive Fiction game, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, that was also largely written by Adams. It's known for being fiendishly difficult, yet a classic of the genre. A fully playable Java version of the original exists on Adams' own website, and can be found here , while the BBC website has two different illustrated 20th Anniversary Editions available on their website, here. The games have less plot than any of the other tellings, ending when you first set foot on Magrathea. A sequel was planned but never made.
In 2005, a big-budget Hollywood movie version, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, came out. The script was based on a previous Adams-written script, and contained several new ideas by him, including the POV Ray and the Vogon homeworld. Reviews were mixed, with some appreciating the wit and ideas, while others grumbled at the large chunks of plot cut out to squeeze everything into two hours.
The series has also been adapted into stage shows, albums and comic books.
It now has a character sheet
This whole bunch of stuff provides examples of:
- The Ace (Zaphod, arguably a subversion)
- Adaptation Decay (intentional by Douglas Adams, who changed the story every time it entered a new medium)
- Adaptation Displacement (Most people are familiar with the series as a
five six-book trilogy, unaware that it was first a radio program. For those people who know about the radio series, this makes the complaints of the book-only fans about the 2005 movie absolutely hilarious.)
- Ambiguously Human (almost every alien in the series, since Adams wasn't big on description)
- Aliens And Monsters
- Alien Animals (white mice and possible dolphins)
- All There In The Manual: The film doesn't explain things like the importance of towels, or how the Improbability drive works.
- Alternate Continuity: The official stance by fans is that the franchise has no canon, only suggestions. Each of the various formats the franchise covers (radio, novels, TV series, game, movie, etc.) directly contradicts all the others.
- Anti Hero (Arthur, in the "befuddled" sense)
- Applied Phlebotinum
- Arc Number (42. See also Memetic Number below.)
- Arthur Dent (Trope Namer, obviously)
- Author Existence Failure (Adams died while working on the sixth book; his last published collection of pieces, The Salmon of Doubt, contains an early draft of a Dirk Gently novel that Adams was hoping to rework into a Hitchhiker book)
- Ax Crazy (Random)
- The Blind Leading The Blind: Ford trying to teach Arthur about advanced scientific principles, most notably Time Travel in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
- Bolivian Army Ending (Mostly Harmless)
- Brick Joke (Fenchurch is mentioned in the prologue to book one, but only shows up in book four)
- ...which wasn't even conceived until after the third book had gone to print.
- There is a more mundane example in the original radio series. It is revealed after missiles are launched that the only damage to come to anyone are 2 mice being freed and a bruised arm. The episode proceeds. The End Credits stinger? "I'm sorry, but I'd probably be able to cope better, if I hadn't bruised my arm."
- Speaking of the missiles, the one that turns into a potted plant says "Not Again"; while philosophers have pondered that we would understand a lot more about the universe if we new why the plant thought that, we actually get the answer in a later book This is one of several of this being's lives that Arthur has an inadvertent role in ending
- Catch Phrase ("Life! Don't talk to me about life!")
- Cool And Unusual Punishment (Vogon poetry)
- Cool Starship (the Heart of Gold, the Starship Bistromath and several others)
- Confusing Multiple Negatives (The only way Marvin is capable of complimenting Trillian)
- Crack Pairing (Trillian and Wowbagger in And Another Thing...)
- Crapsack World (Mostly ignored but no one seems to mind blowing up a planet and the legal system seems brocken. Played For Laughs)
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome (Arthur asking a freaking THUNDER GOD if he "wants to make something of it?")
- Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming (In the radio adaptation of the fifth book, Quintessential phase: Remember dolphins? They got their ability to disappear from babelfish. The babelfish in Arthur's ear brought everyone (Ford, Arthur, Tricias, Random) to Milliways, where Marvin and Fenchurch were waiting, and Zarquon gets Crowning Moment Of Awesome by insulting the immortal guy who insults everyone and making him mortal. Also, Jeltz can tick the box. The alternative endings present in extended edition (from iTunes or Audible.com) are more depressing and more improbable, with only Arthur or Arthur and Fenchurch surviving.
- Crowning Music Of Awesome ("Journey of the Sorcerer" by the Eagles, the theme song from the radio series. The full version is nearly seven minutes long.)
- Dangerously Genre Savvy (Arthur Dent during the events of Life, the Universe and Everything... until it's all stripped from him during So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. He does, however, return to a Genre Savvy level by the fifth book, which... yeah...)
- Dropped A Bridge On Him Poor Fenchurch
- Downer Ending (The end of Mostly Harmless. Earth Explodes, Everyone Dies. Adams later admitted "I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background." He had intended the sixth book to give the series a better conclusion.)
- The radio adaptation rectifies this with a beautiful Ass Pull.
- Considering how "by a staggering coincidence" is practically narrator's Catch Phrase, and it explains how dolphins left the earth, it makes sense. Besides, the only way to survive the ending was Ass Pull.
- You call that an Ass Pull? Read And Another Thing. The first chapter makes the ending of the radio series seem plausable.
- The Drag Along (The characters usually take turns depending on the situation, but Marvin is always this)
- Earn Your Happy Entire Book (Arthur was due the huge break life gave him in So Long. Too bad it didn't stick.)
- The End Of The World As We Know It (Subversion: The series starts by blowing up the planet.)
- Earth Is The Center Of The Universe (Averted at the beginning of the first book, then played straight for the rest of the series.)
- The Eeyore (Marvin)
- Electric Instant Gratification - in the radio series and in Mostly Harmless.
- Empty Shell
- Encyclopedia Exposita - Not only are there lengthy exerpts from Guide articles, the radio series, television series, and The Movie make it plain that the story is being told by the Guide itself.
- Evil Minions ("Resistance is useless!")
- Exactly What It Says On The Tin - The Point of View Gun.
- Fish Out Of Water
- Fiction 500 (the "plutonium rock band from Gagrakacka Mind Zones," Disaster Area; and Magrathea, the planet that became so rich the rest of the galaxy's economy collapsed.)
- Fridge Logic: You know, if those Pan-Dimensional beings that created Deep Thought were so smart, why didn't the ask it "What is the meaning of life?" instead of demanding the "Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything?" It would save one hell of a lot of trouble on everybody's part.
- Justified, sort of: They've played Brockian Ultra Cricket (which is basically hitting people with stuff and running away at random) so much that they might not be as smart anymore.
- It's also possible that asking for "the meaning of life" wouldn't yield the result they were looking for. Better to be more vague on the whole matter.
- Funny Aneurysm Moment: The radio show's Tertiary Phase gives the role of Agrajag to the late Douglas Adams. This makes almost every one of his lines about death, reincarnation and his 'final body' to be more than a little uncomfortable to many listeners.
- Future Imperfect (Trope Namer but not a direct example)
- Gargle Blaster (the Trope Namer)
- Genetic Memory (Humans created Cricket out of a racial memory for the Krikkit wars)
- Giftedly Bad (The Vogons, at poetry)
- Gravity Is A Harsh Mistress (The art of flying lies in the ability to abuse W.E. Coyote's Rule of Cartoon Inertia.)
- It involves throwing yourself at the ground and missing. This can only be accomplished by distracting yourself from the fact that you're about to hit the ground.
- Guide Dang It (The game)
- Think it is hard enough? Try passing a link of it to friends who have both never read the series, nor tell them what it is a game of.
- Hand Wave
- Herald (Ford)
- Heterosexual Life Partners (Ford and Arthur)
- Hey Its That Guy- Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox. Plucky comic relief indeed.
- Hilarious In Hindsight (While the Radio Series' Shoe Event Horizon was funny back then, the rise of the Starbucks coffee chain means the world seems to be heading the same way in Real Life.)
- Huge Rider Tiny Mount (the Vogons and their gazelle-like creatures)
- Human Aliens
- Humans Are Bastards (Subverted: humans are just victims of some very bad circumstances that make everyone in the galaxy basically hate our guts. Surprisingly, the only thing that gets the earth blown up is because it's actually a supercomputer that was about to figure out the meaning of life, and somebody got the Vogons to destroy it to make sure that never happens.)
- I'll Take Two Beers Too (Zaphod ordering Gargle Blasters)
- He's got two heads, and thinks that "having only one drunk head" is awful. Probably justified.
- Insignificant Little Blue Planet (Probably the most famous example, but Earth actually doesn't stay that way for long.)
- It Runs On Nonsensoleum (the Heart of Gold and the Bistromathics drive, among other things)
- For instance, a giant cup made out of solid marble being held up fifteen miles in the air by art.
- The Bistromathic Drive is far more efficient than all that mucking about in hyperspace or Improbability Factors because it runs off a form of mathematics based off the calculation of restaurant bills.
- Hey, when you break the laws of physics everything becomes absurdly simple nonsense. It's how bistros stay in business, so why can't we do the same for Casual Interstellar Travel?
- Then there's the literally flying party...
- I Would Say If I Could Say
- It Was His Sled ( 42)
- The Jimmy Hart Version (of "Tunnel of Love" by Dire Straits, in the radio adaptation of SLaTfAtF.)
- Just Ignore It (The Ravenous Blugbatter Beast of Traal)
- Kill Em All
- Large Ham (In most versions featuring audio of some sort, Zaphod is often played as a fresh large ham)
- The print version pretty much portray Zaphod this way as well. It's even more obvious when you know that when Douglas Adams wrote the original radio play, he based the character of Zaphod on similar characters played by actor Mark Wing-Davey, who played Zaphod in the radio show and television series. Large Ham is a quintessential part of Zaphod's nature.
- Deep Thought. A multi dimensional super-computer is able to take hamminess to levels that are not normally physically possible.
- Left Hanging (partly because Douglas Adams is now, you know, living-impaired.)
- Life Imitates Art: The Amazon Kindle has instant-access to Wikipedia, which in case you aren't familiar is an information source of near-limitless scope and questionable accuracy. Remind you of anything?
- Lights Off Their Eyes
- Medium Blending (the yarn scene in the movie)
- Memetic Number: 42. Pretty much defined the series as a whole, and also became popular online, much thanks to Memetic Mutation.
- Memory Gambit (Zaphod setting up a scheme to learn who the ruler of the universe is, which involved giving himself self-imposed amnesia so that he could become president, allowing him to steal a ship equipped with the Infinite Improbability Drive so that he could find the hidden planet used to hide the aforementioned Ruler of the Universe. Subverted, as the entire plan fell apart because the new Zaphod just doesn't care.)
- Fell apart? He succeeded; the ruler of the universe lives in a shack with his cat. And the way he sees the universe calls up Schrodingers Butterfly
- Message In A Bottle (A fossilized towel, in the original radio version)
- Mile High Club (Arthur and Fenchurch, sans plane)
- Does the fact that they did it on the wing of a plane, in full view of the old lady with the seat by the wing count for anything?
- Not really, since the majority of their aerial "activity" occurred in free flight. The time they spent on the wing of the plane was a minority of the total.
- Mr Exposition (The Book, and to a lesser degree, Ford and Slartibartfast)
- Mutually Exclusive Powerups (The Ultimate Question and Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Except you CAN have both of them at once, but you end up ending and restarting the universe. Again.)
- Nobody Poops (Lampshaded in the new radio series adaptation of Life, The Universe, and Everything. "You know, in all this time I have never once ''flush'' ).
- Actually, the second book does mention the restaurant having bathrooms for dozens of alien species.
- Noodle Implements (Twice in the book series: Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged became that way due to an accident involving a particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The other was due to an incident with a time machine and a contraceptive. I think.)
- The second one is the reason that Zaphod's direct ancestors are named in reverse order; his father is Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, his grandfather the Third, and so forth.
- Fenchurch's discarded underwear were also noodle implements in their own right as they massively changed lives for reasons not gone into.
- No Respect Guy (Arthur)
- Note To Self: Zaphod.
- The Nudifier (Finite improbability generators were doing this in their early versions)
- Omnicidal Maniac (Hactar. And because of him, also the people of Krikkit)
- Pajama Clad Hero (Arthur)
- Pardon My Klingon (Apparently, "Belgium" is the most offensive word in the entire galaxy, suitable only for use in serious screenplays.)
- That's an edit; the original version is "most gratuitous use of the word "fuck".
- The Belgium passage originated in the radio series, but had new material added to it for the American version of LtUaE. ("They must be thinking of Ostend Hoverport.")
- Power Perversion Potential: The Improbability Device
- Why does that link's quote mention making love in the air?
- Precision F Strike (in So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless)
- Puff Of Logic (the Trope Namer)
- Recycled Script (Life, the Universe, and Everything originated as the script of an unproduced Doctor Who episode starring Tom Baker, but was reworked into featuring Arthur, Ford and Slartibartfast instead. It's arguably much better for this.)
- Ridiculously Human Robots
- Robot Buddy (subverted with Marvin the Paranoid Android, and just about everything made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation)
- Sanity Ball: Arthur starts off as the sane one. Ford quickly takes over this role. You know things have gotten weird when Zaphod becomes the sane one (temporarily)...
- Science Is Wrong
- Sealed Evil In A Can: Krikkit
- Security Blanket: Always know where your towel is.
- Seen It All (Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged)
- Seekers (most of the core cast, really)
- Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism (Firmly cynical, with a brief one-book excursion to visit the idealistic side.)
- Shoot The Shaggy Dog (So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. Not the book itself which has the happiest ending of any in the series, but what Mostly Harmless, the next book in the series, did to this happy 'ending'...)
- Sinister Geometry (the Vogon ships in the movie)
- Somebody Else's Problem (Trope named by the Somebody Else's Problem Field)
- Sound Effect Bleep (in the radio version of Life, The Universe And Everything, "Most Gratuitous Use of the Word *engine roar* in a Serious Screenplay")
- Sound To Screen Adaptation
- Special Effects Failure (Zaphod's second head in the TV series notoriously didn't work properly)
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien (the mice, the Magratheans)
- Ted Baxter (Zaphod)
- They Changed It Now It Sucks (the movie)
- Think Nothing Of It (Zaphod takes this literally.)
- Thirteen Is Unlucky (The evil Guide-bird was kept on floor thirteen.)
- Time Travel
- Tear Jerker (At the end of the fourth book, Marvin, who (thanks to time travel) is forty-five times older than the universe and has had all of his body parts replaced multiple times (except for the diodes on his left sides that have been paining him for all his existence), dies .... But not before reading God's last message to his creation saying, "We apologise for the inconvenience." His last words? "I think.... I feel good about it."
- Time Travel Tense Trouble (Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's handbook willan haven been the quote-giver)
- It should be noted that the Guide itself doesn't even bother with the tenses, and simply mentions that they don't use the future perfect tense, because it was found not to be.
- Too Soon (an in-universe Too Soon: the sheer tastelessness of a genocidal war being reduced to an entertaining British ball game has caused most of the galaxy to shun humanity)
- Also, The BBC provided a content warning when the episode involving the attack on the Guide offices (a giant H-shaped skyscraper) was aired shortly after 9/11 - to their credit they didn't postpone the broadcast altogether.
- Translator Microbes (Lampshaded with the Babel Fish.)
- Tricksters (Zaphod and, to a lesser degree, Ford)
- Trope O Matic (Ford's Sub-Etha Sense-O-Matic, the Kill-O-Zap guns, among others.)
- The Wall Around The World (Wonko the Sane constructs a wall around his home to fence in the world, which he calls "the Asylum." )
- (Actually, he built the entire house inside out. If the outside of the house is on the inside, then everything on the outside (which is to say the inside) is safely contained. See, he told you he was sane.)
- Warrior Poet (The Vogons, in a depressingly literal fashion.)
- Weenalized (Trillian in the movie)
- To be fair, the books said that she had once been a love interest, but was now involved with Zaphod. They could also be trying to set up for Mostly Harmless, when the two of them have a daughter together (Trillian decided to go to a sperm bank to get a donor, then realized when they said there was only one donor that matched her species that it was probably Arthur).
- And Life, The Universe, And Everything teased a relationship between them. Which promptly went nowhere so he could find Perfect Happiness with Fenchurch in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish
- Weirdness Magnet (the luckless Arthur; more literally, the Infinite Improbability Drive, which creates weirdness)
- What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome (In the fifth book, Arthur is practically worshipped as a god for his incredible skills at... making sandwiches)
- Who Wants To Live Forever (Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged)
- The Wonka (Ford Prefect)
- Write Back To The Future (the towel in the lava flow on prehistoric Earth)
- Unknown Rival (Agrajag and Arthur)
- Unusual Euphemism (Belgium!)
- Watching The Sunset
- Xanatos Gambit (In ''Life, The Universe and Everything Hactar takes advantage of his apparent failure to trick the people of Krikkit into destroying the universe to instead plant the real supernova bomb on Arthur and manipulate him into nearly doing so.)
- Xanatos Gilligan (The aforementioned Gambit fails because Arthur is absolutely the worst cricket bowler ever.)
- You Can't Go Home Again (because, as has been mentioned, it exploded)
- Doesn't stop them from doing so. Twice.
|
|
