See also JustForFun.Forty Two.
Film - Animated
- A teaser
for Chicken Little opens the same way as the teaser for the film version... until the screen falls back when it gets to the "Don't Panic" text, revealing "Panic". (Both were released under Disney, the Hitchhiker's Guide film by Touchstone Pictures, Chicken Little by Walt Disney Animation Studios).
- Ciaphas Cain: From The Greater Good one of the books that Inquisitor Vail admits to using while editing the Archives is Sekara's Travologue "Interesting places and tedious people" which has a single line entry "Dreary Beyond Belief" in reference to one of the planets Cain visits.
- The Dresden Files: In "B Is For Bigfoot" Irwin is reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Harry first sees him, triggering a prompt flurry of Vogon jokes and other references from Dresden.
- The Rivers of London novel False Value is set in a tech company called the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. All the departments, buildings and offices are also named as Hitchhikers references (security are the Vogon Enforcement Arm, HR are the Magrathean Ape-Descended-Lifeform Utilisation Service), and the words "Don't Panic" are written on the front of the building in large, friendly letters. The employees call themselves "mice", which sounds self-deprecating, but in this context is quite the opposite.
- The Star Trek Encyclopedia entry for Earth ends with the words "Mostly harmless".
- The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes has a quick bit that goes, The food dispensers aboard ship can give you something that is not entirely unlike coffee.
- The Big Bang Theory: In "The 43 Peculiarity", Howard and Raj find a room where Sheldon goes every day in secret and find 43 written on a chalkboard.note Raj suggests it's "the meaning of life" from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Howard corrects him, saying that it's actually 42.
- Burn Notice: In "Last Rites" Nate and Sam are pretending to be CDC field agents when a subject walks in on Nate opening a phone receiver to bug it. The excuse to cover for this? Nate's handling the very bacteria the CDC was looking for — in other words, he's a phone sanitizer.
- Civilization: Beyond Earth:
- The achievement for razing 100 alien nests is "Making Way for a Hyperspace Bypass".
- In this same vein, the achievement for researching every single tech in the game is simply "42".
- COVID '99: Paddle Royale: The second-lowest threat level is "Mostly Harmless".
- Goat Simulator: Near the dam in Goat City Bay is a crashed spaceship. On the hotel balcony is a towel with the number "42" printed on it. Combine the latter with the former and you become Hitchhiker Goat, which has the power to summon whales from the sky.
- The Impossible Quiz:
- In the first game, Question 42: "What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" The answer, of course, is the 42nd 42.
- The second chapter of the third game, The Impossible Quiz Book, is called The Phlovomite's Guide to the Galaxy.
- Question 55 of the aforementioned chapter asks "Define Earth" and one of the options is "Mostly Harmless". It's correct.
- Hovering over Earth in Question 66 gives the description "Earth (Mostly Harmless)".
- Question 142 of the third game's third chapter also involves finding a 42, but here it's the fourth in the bottom row 42.
- Marathon: In "Rise Robot Rise", Tycho says, "Don't sweat the details, little monkey. Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains", a clear reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which Marvin complained, "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't".
- In Skin Horse, when Tip descends to the Annex-1 subbasements, filled with abandoned shadow government files, there's a just visible sign reading "BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD".
- In Questionable Content, when Faye's espresso dinosaur art project rematerialises just as the gallery owner was asking about it, Raven claims this is "Adams' Law — under certain circumstances, a super-improbably event can be MORE likely to happen than not. Basically, the universe has a sense of humor." The gallery owner asks if they can fix it before it turns into a sperm whale.
- Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers: The alien Fleeblebroxians are named in reference to the two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox.
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends
- Bloo plays a video game where the villain is named "Lord Beeblebrox".
- In "Bus the Two of Us", there's a hitchhiker wearing a bathrobe with a sign that reads "Magrathea".
- In "Good Wilt Hunting", the two nerds that discovered Coco are named Douglas and Adam; the latter has a blue shirt with 42 on it.
- In an especially obscure reference, the friends unite together to rescue a cat from a tree using what Frankie calls "Plan Z-Z-9-Plural Z-Alpha".
