A History of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’
canadian goose jacket One night in 1971 a 19 year old English hitchhiker Canada Goose online named Douglas Adams lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria. He had with him a borrowed copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh. canadian goose jacket
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canada goose deals The First Radio SeriesAfter completing a BA in English Literature and working on various writing and performance projects2, Douglas started working on a science fiction/comedy radio series. Originally, he had the idea of writing a series called ‘Ends of the Earth’ in which the world was destroyed in various ways. However, as he Canada Goose Coats On Sale began to write the first episode he introduced an alien named Ford Prefect and in a flash of inspiration decided that he should be a researcher for the fictitious Guide, and the series was renamed The Hitchhiker’s Guide canada goose clearance to the Galaxy. canada goose deals
canada goose clearance sale The producer of the first episode was Simon Brett but he left and was succeeded by Geoffrey Perkins: canada goose clearance sale
canada goose store Douglas Adams knew from the start that he wanted to do something very different with the sound of the show. He wanted to apply the kind of production techniques used on, say, a Pink Floyd album to a radio show. Douglas canada goose factory sale recalled Canada Goose sale spending weeks in an underground studio with Geoffrey and the sound engineers, sometimes taking as long on a single sound effect as other people took on a whole series. Douglas later said:I felt that myself and the other people working on it. all created something that really felt ground Canada Goose Outlet breaking at the time. His problems rapidly increase, however, when he discovers that the entire Earth is about to be demolished by aliens called Vogons, ostensibly to make way for a hyperspatial express route. Arthur escapes with help from buy canada goose jacket his friend Ford Prefect3 and soon meets up with Ford’s semi cousin, the two headed three armed ex Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox, as well Canada Goose Parka as an astrophysicist named Trillian (or Tricia McMillan), a human who left Earth with Zaphod some time before the Vogons arrived, and a chronically depressed robot named Marvin, a prototype from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation with a ‘Genuine People Personality’. Ford has with him his electronic copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains entries on just about everything4. canada goose store
The Importance of Towels One of the themes of the series is the importance of towels:
Canada Goose sale A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with. Canada Goose sale
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas AdamsDouglas explained where the idea came from:
Canada Goose Parka I was vacationing with friends in Greece some years back. Every morning they’d have to sit around and wait for me because I couldn’t find my blessed towel. Douglas’s friend John Lloyd co wrote the fifth and sixth episodes. Later that year, a seventh episode was recorded canada goose uk shop and it was broadcast on 24 December. It became known as the ‘Christmas episode’ despite the fact that uk canada goose outlet it didn’t contain any references to Christmas. In later replays of the radio shows and releases of recordings, it was bundled in with episodes from the second series (see below). Canada Goose Parka
buy canada goose jacket The CastSimon Jones (Arthur Dent)Geoffrey McGiven (Ford Prefect)Mark Wing Davey (Zaphod Beeblebrox)Susan Sheridan (Trillian)Stephen Moore (Marvin)Peter Jones (The voice of the Guide)Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop provided music and sound effects for the series, including the theme music, a reworking of ‘The Journey of the Sorcerer’ by The Eagles. buy canada goose jacket
Canada Goose Outlet The Awards The series rapidly grew in popularity. It was also the only radio show ever to be nominated canadian goose jacket for the Hugo science fiction awards, in 1979, in the ‘Dramatic Presentation’ category. Canada Goose Outlet
canada goose clearance The First Book An English publisher, Pan https://www.topcanadagoose.ca Books, became interested in the series and commissioned Douglas to write a book based on it. It was published in September 1979 and soon reached number one on the Sunday Times mass market best seller list. Douglas was at this time just 27 years old. canada goose clearance
canada goose coats on sale By 1984, 1,000,000 copies of the book had been sold and he received an award from his publisher, a ‘Golden Pan’. The canada goose book was translated into a number of languages: Dutch, German, Hebrew, Finnish, French and Swedish. In 1996, it was selected by Waterstone’s Books/Channel Four for their list of the ‘One Hundred Greatest Books of the Century’, at number 24. canada goose coats on sale
canada goose The Second Radio Series In early 1980, Douglas created another five radio episodes, continuing on from where the previous ones had left off. They were again broadcast on BBC Radio 4, on January 13, 21, 22, 24 and 25. Unlike the first series, which had received no publicity, it was advertised on the front cover of Radio Times. Despite the name of the publication, it was almost unheard of by this time for a radio series to be promoted on the Radio Times cover. canada goose
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It is possible to track the movement of Adams’s life even between the first and second series of the radio show. In the first there were a lot of jokes about pubs and being without any money. Using Ford’s towel they escape and rejoin the others on the starship. The listeners discover the real reason the Earth was destroyed, Zaphod finds out why he convinced himself to run for Galactic President and he, Arthur and Ford meet the real ruler of the universe.
Canada Goose Jackets The Second Book Douglas wrote a second book titled The Restaurant at the end of the Universe, based on episodes from both radio series: 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 5 and 6 (in that order), which was published towards the end of 1980. The title refers to an extravagantly expensive restaurant (that appears in episode 5 of the radio series) that the characters visit in which they watch the universe explode for their pleasure. That idea came from a song, ‘Grand Hotel’ by Procol Harum. The book ends with the characters splitting up and Ford and Arthur being trapped on prehistoric Earth once more with a group of unwanted hairdressers, management consultants, ‘telephone sanitizers’ etc from another planet (episode six of the radio series). The book was as successful as the first one. Douglas received another ‘Golden Pan’ award for it and it was translated into five canada goose uk outlet foreign languages. Canada Goose Jackets
buy canada goose jacket cheap The TV Series In January 1981, the BBC broadcast a television mini series of six shows based on the first six episodes of the radio series. Alan Bell produced it while John Lloyd was the associate producer. Some of the actors from the radio series appeared on the television shows too. Arthur Dent, Canada Goose Online Zaphod and the Voice of the Guide were played by the same people. There were, however, some changes and additions to the rest of the cast: buy canada goose jacket cheap
David Dixon (Ford Prefect)Sandra Dickinson (Trillian)David Learner (Marvin’s body5)Also appearing were Richard Vernon as planet architect Slartibartfast, Peter Davison as ‘the Dish of the Day’6 and Douglas Adams as a man who gives up on modern life and returns to the sea(!). Music was once again provided by Paddy Kingsland.
AwardsThe series won three BAFTA (British Association of Film and Television Arts) awards for ‘Best TV Graphics’, ‘Best VTR Editing’ and ‘Best Sound’.
cheap Canada Goose The Third Book In 1982, Douglas’s third book, Life, the Universe, and Everything, was simultaneously published in England and the USA. The book is mainly about Arthur and Ford, but Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin appear in it too. It has a strong cricket theme. In the book, Canada Goose Outlet Arthur and Ford escape from prehistoric Earth by jumping on a passing Chesterfield sofa and meet up with their friend Slartibartfast, vice president of the Campaign for Real Time. They travel around the universe searching for parts of the Wikket Gate to save the universe from destruction by robots from the planet Krikkit. By the end of the year the book and the previous two books were all on the New York Times and Publishers’ Weekly bestseller lists. Douglas received another ‘Golden Pan’ award and the book was translated into six foreign languages. cheap Canada Goose
Canada Goose online The Computer GameTwo years later, Infocom, the computer game company, released a text adventure game cheap Canada Goose based on the first Hitchhiker’s book. Douglas developed the ideas and program flow while Infocom’s Steve Meretzky did the coding. It was the company’s first game based on a novel and was very successful, selling 350,000 copies and winning an award from Thames TV the following year. Its cheap canada goose uk difficulty level was ‘extreme’. The game starts with the player taking on the role of Arthur Dent waking up just as canada goose uk black friday a bulldozer arrives to demolish his house. Later on, the game diverges from the plot of the book and the player can then take on the role of other characters (it has to be said, the gameplay requires a strong sense of lateral thinking). The game was written as a data file which could be read by an interpreter program. Interpreters were developed for a number of different computers: Acorn, Apple, Atari, Commodore, Gameboy, IBM PC (DOS, OS/2 and Windows), UNIX systems etc. A version was also developed in Java canada goose store and can be played on Douglas’s website. However, it doesn’t allow the player to save the game as the other versions do. A newer, BAFTA Award winning canada goose coats game can be played at the Radio 4 site. Canada Goose online
The Fourth BookA fourth book, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish was published in late 1984. With typical humour Douglas still called the series a ‘trilogy’. This time round, Arthur Dent arrives on a version of the Earth that dolphins have retrieved from another dimension to replace the one that has been destroyed. Most of the book is about Arthur’s relationship with his new girlfriend Fenchurch rather than the wild and zany galactic adventures of the previous books. It ends with Arthur, Fenchurch, Ford and Marvin visiting another planet to view God’s final message to his creation. Douglas wrote the book because he had been asked to but said a few years later:to be honest, I really shouldn’t have written [it], and I felt that when I was writing it. I did the best I could, but it wasn’t, you know, really from the heart. The Fifth Book Douglas took a break from Hitchhiking to work on other things, but eventually wrote a fifth book in canada goose black friday sale the ‘trilogy’, Mostly Harmless, which was published in 1992. In it we meet two versions of Trillian: one living on Earth in an alternative reality and one working as a time travelling galactic reporter. Arthur wanders around uk canada goose the universe lost before settling down on a planet to make sandwiches, only to be confronted by a daughter whom he didn’t know he had. Meanwhile, Ford attempts to stop the Vogons from using a corrupted version of the Guide canada goose clearance sale to canada goose coats on sale destroy all of the parallel Earths across the dimensions. The book has a sad ending. Douglas said of it:it was a bleak book. Their aim was to create a real life version of the Guide. In February 2001, they handed over control of h2g2 to the BBC. In October 2011, the BBC handed control to Not Panicking Ltd, a company chaired by Stamp, former CEO of The Digital Village. People from all over the world can register as ‘Researchers’ and write short Canada Goose Jackets articles (or ‘Entries’) on different topics. Examples of existing topics are: ‘Etiquette for Chess buy canada goose jacket cheap Spectators’, ‘Evil from a Western Perspective’, ‘Alaskan Fish Plants’ and ‘How Soap Works’.