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Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Greenlighted 411

Posted by timothy from the gold-brick-cast-in-velvet dept.
Overly Critical Guy writes "According to Chud, the Hitchhiker's Guide movie is a go." It's too bad DNA won't be around to see it, but good news for his fans. I hope they can borrow Weta Digital's render farm to perfect some of the characters, though anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects.
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Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Greenlighted More

Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Greenlighted

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  • FSP (Score:4, Funny)

    by glenkim ( 412499 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:20AM (#7136151) Homepage
    Forty-Second Post!

    • Re:FSP (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:53AM (#7136225)

      Spyglass/Disney

      Uhhh... so Arthur will look like a male-model, and be a go-getting captain of industry. Ford Prefect will become Ford Mustang. The Guide itself will be a multi-billion dollar company staffed by hard-working employees who really do believe in their MISSION STATEMENT... instead of a bunch of perma-drunk wastrels.

      Ahhh... America... gloriously missing the point while throwing millions of dollars around for SFX.

  • A Music Video Director ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shayera ( 518168 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:20AM (#7136153)
    So.. The Guide will be really shaky, oddly cut, using all the current 'trendy' angles.. In other words.. Really really annoying ?

    I'd probably have preferred Jay Roach on the project.. alas..

    So who do y'all see as possible casts ?

  • Hmmm (Score:3)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:21AM (#7136154) Journal
    Yes, it is sad DNA passed away a premature death, but I'm sure he'd be happy to know that people still enjoy, and will for a long time, his excellent and humorous style of writing. I saw a few stills from the BBC Version of the film and I can say . . ."Woah" I really do hope the new people in charge redo a few characters. I've always invisioned Marvin as something like a Bender from futureama.

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Funny)

      by TheToon ( 210229 )
      Marvin like Bender? How can that be? Marvin has a head the size of a planet!

    • Re:DNA would enjoy... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @08:15AM (#7136519)

      You know, I always got the feeling that "Mostly Harmless" was deliberately written by a bitter man to piss his fanbase off so that they'd stop bugging him to write sequels to the first four books.

      This is the same author, after all, who wrote the whole middle of "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" in response to the publisher's demands, but then prefaced the section with a note that the middle of the book was crap, please skip to the end which has a nice bit about Marvin in it.

      I shudder to think how he was planning to sabatoge the movie, which he must have regarded as a worse sellout than books four and five.

      • Re:DNA would enjoy... (Score:3, Informative)

        by Verteiron ( 224042 ) *
        Actually, DNA desperately wanted the movie to happen. For once, it was everyone around him dropping the ball, over and over again, that kept it from happening. Read "A Salmon of Doubt".
        • Exactly, this needs more modding up... DNA DID want a movie to happen, worked really hard at it in fact, and it's so very sad that it took his death to kick it into action.

          In this [umich.edu] interview he said:
          Question: When will we here in the US be able to see [one of] your books put to movie?
          DNA: The Dirk Gently books are currently in development as a television series. The "Hitchhiker's Guide" is currently under development. I'm very confident that it will actually go into production any decade now. When... I

      • Re:DNA would enjoy... (Score:5, Informative)

        by bigdavex ( 155746 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @12:46PM (#7137714)

        You know, I always got the feeling that "Mostly Harmless" was deliberately written by a bitter man to piss his fanbase off so that they'd stop bugging him to write sequels to the first four books.

        Douglas Adams spoke to this himself in a 1998 interview [theavclub.com]

        Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and I just lost it. For some reason, I couldn't get it going, so I had to put it aside. I didn't know what to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly thought: Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don't match. I've tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don't want to write another Hitchhiker book at the moment. So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will write another Hitchhiker book, because there's an awful lot of material sitting 'round waiting to go in it. Another reason is that the last one, Mostly Harmless, is a very bleak book. People have tried to read all sorts of complicated reasons into it, and the reason was that I just had a lousy year. Just for all sorts of personal reasons, from a terrible death in the family to... Every kind of area, whether it was personal or professional, had just gone sour on me, against a background in which I had to write a funny book, which turned out not to be very funny. So I'd quite like to maybe do another Hitchhiker book that sort of perks up the tone again.
    • I've always invisioned Marvin as something like a Bender from futureama.

      I always imagined Marvin to be like a depressed version of Twiki (the 80s Buck Rogers TV show one), not the big square packing carton in the TV series.

  • Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Yrd ( 253300 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:21AM (#7136155) Homepage
    If this isn't yet another false hope...

    WAHOOOOOOO

    And of course the special effects will be better than the BBC version's were. That was made in 1981, after all, and on about the same budget that Doctor Who had at the time, so it's not exactly unexpected is it?

    The DVD release of it is, of course, wonderful, because the TV series' animated sequences still stand out as some of the best I've ever seen. Hand-drawn too. I hope they preserve that look for the film, although no doubt these days it'd be done on a computer.

    Music will be critical for the atmosphere too. Fingers crossed...

    • Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      ...on about the same budget that Doctor Who had at the time

      ...and with a lot of the same people. Douglas Adams for one, who worked on Doctor Who. Simon Jones for another, plus the production crew.

      Cheers,
      Ian

      • Douglas Adams for one, who worked on Doctor Who

        Indeed, some classic Doctor Who episodes were actually the work of Douglas. Not Douglas the Writer - Douglas the Producer.
        • Douglas did of course write a few Doctor Who stories as well, although I have to admit I haven't seen any of them.

          * mentally urges the BBC to release more Doctor Who DVDs *

          • Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)

            by xA40D ( 180522 )
            To my knowlege, he wrote two episodes, "Pirate Planet", and "Shada". Unfortunately filming of Shada was interrupted by a striking technicians and was never made... Douglas later recycled some of the plot in the first Dirk Gently novel.

            However, during his time as producer, Douglas had a very hands-on approach, rewriting stuff if he felt it could be better. Indeed, my favourite Doctor Who story of all time, "City of Death" was rewritten by Douglas it almost entirely.

            • 'Shada' was recently made as an audio-only production by BBCi and is available online for free, starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. He's not nearly so annoying in audio form.

              There's also a version with accompanying Flash animations, which are actually quite classy.

      • Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rethcir ( 680121 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @07:43AM (#7136424)
        Secret cameo: You know the cow who wants to be eaten at the restaurant at the end of the universe? That's Peter Davison, the 5th doctor. (AKA the Shark-jumping doctor)

        • Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)

          by prbt ( 651156 )

          "AKA the Shark-jumping doctor"

          Now, that's not quite fair on Peter Davison. The quality of the scripts took a severe nosedive towards the end of his reign, and bumped along the ground for the whole of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's tenure.

          IMO, some of the 5th Doctor's early adventures were amongst the finest in the whole Doctor Who canon.

    • Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Mattb90 ( 666532 )
      Music will be critical for the atmosphere too. Well, I'm hoping on a scene which includes Radiohead's Paranoid Android - the name of the song was a tribute to the DNA character, so maybe they could return the favour. I think it would also fit in with the moment of Marvin's death - although as that is in book 4, I'm not sure whether this film will cover it.

      • Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Yrd ( 253300 )
        No, it probably won't... Marvin's death wouldn't make any sense without a significant amount of story to establish how many times the poor guy has to live through the entire life of the Universe.

        Really, the resilience of those diodes down his left side which were never replaced is quite impressive. Perhaps the manufacturers could put a sticker on the box saying

        'Guarenteed to last thirty-seven times longer than the Universe itself'
    • Am I rare or just stupid in that I love the BBC version...

      Yay hollywood. Meh.

  • Gaiman didn't want to (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Emexies ( 470069 ) <warpedeye AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:21AM (#7136156)
    Neil Gaiman was here in Stockholm the other day, holding a q&a with his fans. One of the questions was "How come you aren't involved with the Hitchhiker's movie, writing the script and directing it?"
    His answer?
    "If Douglas [Adams] couldn't do it, I can't either."
    He also said that the best Hitchhiker's movie is and will always be the book, or the radio show. "Hollywood can never render Ford turning in to an infinite number of penguins better than you can in your head," as he put it.
    • Had he read the book? Ford only turned into a single penguin. There were an infinite number of monkeys with a script for Hamlet though.
    • I certianly don't discount the value of books' entertainment, I have shelves full of fiction novels that I enjoy thourghly. However, that doesn't mean that movies are without value or that books have some kind of inherant superiority. There are advantages to both formats. It is often nice to see another person's vision of something, how they would realise it. Also there are thing you can communicate with a visual medium that you cannot with text, or can only with dificulty.

      I think that well done movies of
    • > "Hollywood can never render Ford turning in to an infinite number of penguins better than you can in your head," as he put it.

      Although it will no doubt make me smile just a little bit extra to know that those infinite number of penguins will have been rendered by a finite-but-large number of linux-boxes. I wonder if the animators will make the rendered penguins look just a little bit more like Tux, than a realistic penguin...

  • Don't think so. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CGP314 ( 672613 ) <CGP@ColinGregor y P a l mer.net> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:22AM (#7136159) Homepage
    but good news for his fans.

    I'm not so sure about that. For me, almost all the 'goodness' and 'funniness' of HHGTTG in is Adam's writing style and narration. I imagine watching the events on screen would be rather flat. HHGTTG is very well tailored to the book medium.

    • Gee, it's not like this will be the first video version of HHTG ever done. The one the BBC did was pretty good, even if it wasn't as good as the books or the radio play.

    • Re:Don't think so. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xA40D ( 180522 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @06:08AM (#7136251) Homepage
      HHGTTG is very well tailored to the book medium

      The Radio Series came first.

      IMHO the further you get from the Radio Series, the worse the books get (don't get me wrong they are all brilliant).

      If you ask me the Radio Series is the definative version. It's the original medium. It's the one which Douglas wrote the story for. The whole experience was designed to sound like a rock album... and it did.

      In some respects, turning a Radio Series into a Film is easier. But it's also a lot harder. No matter how good the special effects in the film, on the Radio the pictures are better.
      • Couldn't say it better myself. Go out, buy the radio series on BBC cassette/CD, get a few cans from the fridge and enjoy the whole experience.

        • And if you want to be really geeky, read the scripts at the same time too.

          A word of caution. DONT start quoting large chunks of the scripts in public....
      • The ideas are brilliant, which is why it was successful as a radio show, book and TV show. So why shouldn't it be an equally, or more, successful movie?
        • Yes, in the final analysis it is the ideas. The actual sounscape of the Radio Series just made the experience more real.

          But the Radio Series was written by a Douglas under a lot of pressure. So in some respects the ideas were more distilled. The books are like the finest of fine wines. The Radio Series is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

      • The radio series was definitely IT.

        I heard it while driving around in France - that made it even better. Its ten times wierder listening to a wierd English thing on a car radio in France.

        I would have liked more variety in the voices though. They all seemed to similar.

      • The radio series was by far the best. I am just hopping the base the movie off them and go the full story to the Man who ruled the universe, and his cat. That is probably a movie trilogy to get that far properly 6 hours of Radio Series.
        The books were good to but they didn't have the same flair as the Radio Series and The TV show had little sole. Author Dent (Simon Jones) (He was the same guy who did the voices for the radio series) was good but Ford and Trillian stank, I still under the impression that Tr

  • Remember kids ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hektor_Troy ( 262592 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:22AM (#7136160)
    bring a towel to the opening premiere.
  • ...or i shall be very very upset.
    Hopefully if it's not at the end they will apologize for our inconvience.

    *downs a pan galactic gargle blaster for DNA

  • spectacular CGI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xpilot ( 117961 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:25AM (#7136164) Homepage
    This movie should have some spectacular CGI. A whale plummeting to its death, Ford Prefect turning into a penguin, and a humongous cavern where entire planets are manufactured. Now that I want to see.

    • and a humongous cavern where entire planets are manufactured. Now that I want to see.

      And folks thought that the tour of the Boeing widebody plant at Everett was impressive...!

    • I still think that a proper HHG2G movie should have been an animated one. Imagine a Pixar HHG2G? That would seriously rock. Then again they seem to have a pretty busy schedue right now.

      I still think that 2D drawn animation is pretty cool too...I wonder how a prestigious Japanese studio like Gainax would handle a HHG2G movie? They'd certainly make Trillian nice and bouncy for all the fanboys...^_^

      Seriously, there is so much in the book and in the radio show that really would lend itself well to animation.

  • Special effects (Score:5, Informative)

    by Colitis ( 8283 ) <jj.walker@NOSpaM.outlook.co.nz> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:25AM (#7136166)
    As they say..."The BBC Special Effects department. Neither special nor effective".

    Blake's 7 fans know all about this. And anyone who managed to watch the Doctor Who story "The Green Death" without being a gibbering wreck after seeing the giant fly effect has my undying respect.

    As someone noted earlier though, I liked the graphics for the Guide entries - lovely style.
    • That said, the BBC Radiophonics Workshop were producing *genius* work for the time, as anyone who's heard the BBC Radio Series will vouch - amazing sound effects, produced in the real world and just recorded, for the most part... very very very little computer-generated sound at the time.

      • anyone who's heard the BBC Radio Series will vouch

        Heard??? I *have* the BBC Radio series on CD. Six of 'em. Hell, if it wasn't for the RIAA, I could give y'all copies as MP3s... :-)

        But yeah, you're right. Awesome. Lunchtimes, doubly so.

        • Oh, I've got 'em too :) Everyone should. It's a fundamental requirement for civilised life...

    • The BBC series was my introduction to Douglas Adams. The sometimes cheesy special effects were part of the fun, I thought.

      I hope they can borrow Weta Digital's render farm to perfect some of the characters, though anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects.

      I have to wonder: can someone who frets about the special effects ever really appreciate the Hitchhiker's Guide? Let your imagination out for a little air!

    • And anyone who managed to watch the Doctor Who story "The Green Death" without being a gibbering wreck after seeing the giant fly effect has my undying respect.

      Hey, a link to the episode [bbc.co.uk] would be nice, for those of us who managed to repress this really, really bad 3rd Doctor episode. Here's an analysis from the Discontinuity Guide:

      'Old Jones the Milk says they're going to blow up the mine.' Still remembered as 'that Doctor Who story with the maggots', The Green Death patronises the Welsh (lots of cha

  • pleeeaseee.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by stonedCoder ( 650101 )
    from the article:

    The novel was previously adapted into a cheap-looking BBC series, which you can see on DVD and anticipate slightly better special effects for the new version.

    This sounds cool as long as it doesn't turn into some Hollywood style space jaunt full of effects and no character. The BBC effects were straight from Dr. Who's reject cupboard but I thought it suited the underlying sarcasm of the book ;) Besides, the BBC DVD version has some great interesting subtitles of where the stuff was recor

  • The ideal casting... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oren ( 78897 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:26AM (#7136169)
    Would have been the Monty Python gang. Terry Gilliams as Zaphold (and as a director, of course!), Eric Idle as Ford, and John Cleese as Arthur.

    Alas, it is too late for that... A pity. We take comfort in that, at the time, there was a finite (im)probability for this movie to exist, so we you need to do to obtain a copy it is a time machine and hot cup of tea.
    • I'm guessing that you're an American and aren't familiar enough with plummy Englishmen to understand how different John Cleese is to Simon Jones, the very actor who played Arthur Dent and in fact the character was BASED on. As I've posted elsewhere, James Fleet [chud.com] of Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Vicar of Dibley fame would be perfect.
  • I have seem just too many books/comics made into films that totally massacre the story, and in many cases: the atmosphere of the world that the story inhabitates.

    I'm placing high hopes on this, but I'll hold off any rejoicing until I've seen it.

  • He's been working on this for over 10 years, at least it wasn't for nothing! It is really a shame he's not there to see it though...

    At least he beat the inifinite improbability of ever getting the movie through Hollywood :-)

  • Mr cynic says ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by madpierre ( 690297 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:27AM (#7136174) Homepage Journal
    What a surprise now the suits .

    a) Dont have to pay the author anything.
    b) He's not around to maintain quality.

    Conclusion. It will probably suck.

  • Casting? (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by Xpilot ( 117961 )
    I've always thought Hugh Grant played a hapless English gent well. Of course I'll probably be flamed to death for saying that...

  • I'm not so sure... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by OzTech ( 524154 )
    You have to remember that the BBC series was the original. The book(s) was(were) written after the BBC series. Having read all of them, you could tell that DNA had run out of puff half way though book-4, where it became a cash-cow and a real hard read.

    Some things are best left at their natural ending.

    Personally, I like the original BBC series and I think they will have a hard time capturing the overall theme. In the same sort of way that they lost the plot with "Lot in Space". Besides, I think

    • Re:I'm not so sure... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by girl_geek_antinomy ( 626942 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:50AM (#7136216)
      The BBC *radio* series was the original. I believe you can buy it now as mp3 CDs. The BBC TV series was basically just a filming of the radio script, with a few minor adjustments. And then in the books he fine-tuned many of the jokes to absolute perfection.

      For me the radio plays will always be the highlight, though, with the books in second place. The animations on the TV series were *wonderful* but everything else looked wrong. Trillian is a sight classier than that, for a start (she's an astrophysicist ffs, not an airhead Essex blonde). Ford and Arthur looked nothing like they did in my head. And Zaphod... spare us. And as someone else said, Marvin doesn't really look like *that* does he?!
    • He didn't do well after book 4 because a relative died (his mother I believe). The book he was writing when he died was to make up for that.

  • No way (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SirFlakey ( 237855 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:47AM (#7136208) Homepage
    I don't think that they can improve on the original. For exactly the same reason we still watch ST TOS - we love the style of the original stuff - I'd say you couldn't remake it if you tried.

    Having said that I am all for the project - and I will be taking my towel (just in case).

  • I'm cautious. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xA40D ( 180522 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:48AM (#7136210) Homepage
    I'm of the opinion that the reason HHGTTHG: The Movie was snarled up for 20 years was Douglas himself. He had a vision, he wanted to translate it to the screen. But I'm of the opinon that he didn't really know what it was he wanted.

    Given enough time he'd have given us something I'm sure. It would have been totally different to anything he'd already given us. Would it have been any good? I'm not sure. But I'd have rushed out to the cinema to watch it.

    Okay. So now Douglas is no more. And somebody is going to translate his works into a movie. If they and take what they need from the various HHGTTG source material, adding just a dash here and there to get the pieces to mesh - great. But if they start rewriting vast tracts of Douglas's work... hideous.

    So for now I'll be cautions. I'll hope for the best. But I'm not going to celebrate just yet. After all, the movie business has a past record of raping decent stories...
    • See the /. interview [slashdot.org], in answer to the question 'Comedy or Tragedy?':

      I've hit a certain amount of difficulty over the years in explaining [Arthur] in Hollywood. I'm often asked 'Yes, but what are his goals?' to which I can only respond, well, I think he'd just like all this to stop, really. It's been a hard sell. I rather miss David Vogel from the film process. He's the studio executive at Disney who was in charge of the project for a while, but has since departed. There was a big meeting at one time to d

  • R.I.P. Peter Jones - the voice of The Book (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:52AM (#7136222) Homepage
    It's certainly a shame that Douglas Adams won't be around to see it (and steer it), but there's also one other key person missing.

    Peter Jones, the voice of the book. In fact, so key was he to the success that he was billed as the star (each radio episode always begins with "Starring Peter Jones, as the book"). He was utterly superb, and again gave one of those performances that fixes a thing in my mind.

    It's going to be hard for anyone to match him. Best of luck to the person that eventually gets the job, but they have some work to do.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • I think, provided Hollywood dont mess it up.

    A chance to get some decent actors in - I was never that impressed with some of the cast used in the BBC TV series..

    The animations used for the guide itself were pretty neat though.

  • Noooooooo not Disney! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles DOT jones AT zen DOT co DOT uk> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @06:02AM (#7136243)
    I can just see it now:

    Disney's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

    I'd sooner watch the BBC version than have a Disney funded film. Who cares about the FX anyway? the strong points of the novel and TV series are the story and all it's humour.
    • I'm a bit scared looking at Karey Kirkpatrick's [imdb.com] previous work: The rescuers down under, James and the giant peach, Honey, we shrunk ourselves, Chicken run, The little vampire. I'm really hoping he does a good job tho, H2g2 is my favorite book of all time.

      DNA on voters [slashdot.org].

    • Not long after the BBC took a chance on giving Douglas Adams the go ahead to try to make a science fiction comedy radio series that sounded like a pink floyd album, Disney were taking a chance on a couple of little known animators who wanted to make a feature length movie set inside a computer using live action and a completely untried rotoscope technique called backlight compositing. That film was, of course, Tron, and it shows that Disney's perfectly capable of innovative science fiction moviemaking. Don'
  • Not sure who to cast as arthur dent, but i think zaphod could be played by btruce campbell. michael dorn as a vorgon.
    john leguizamo as the fly

    im sure others will think of better
  • ... if it only had a budget of 10 million. Imagine if they had to focus on the telling of the story instead of the big money maker effect.

    Call me pessimistic, but I'm of the belief that movies are better when there are limititations are overcome.

  • Special Effects (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @06:27AM (#7136286)
    anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects

    I dunno. They tried to improve Red Dwarfs special effects and ended up making it worse. Sometimes, flashy new special effects are not what you need. A decent and funny story is much much more important.
  • Who will be cast as Trillian? Mmmm....Trillian....

  • HHGG the movie (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2@earthsh ... minus herbivore> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @07:13AM (#7136368)
    The whole point of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was that it was on the wireless, and therefore there were no pictures outside of your own head. This meant you had to work harder to suspend your disbelief.

    Adapting it to TV was always going to be difficult because some of the people who had heard it on the radio would have developed their own ideas of how the characters looked and acted, which would not tally with the TV producer's ideas. Now, I know the BBC's special effects were a little on the cheesey side, but a TV licence was cheaper in those days - especially as there were still many people watching in mono and paying an even cheaper licence. {Stating the obvious, the BBC is funded from TV licence fees and does not carry advertising. This means, in theory at least, that the programmes it shows are ones that people have paid to watch, rather than ones that advertisers have paid to show in order to interrupt}. Again, you had to suspend your disbelief: make a conscious effort to believe that that lampshade dangling on a length of fishing line was really a spaceship.

    Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I can't imagine Hollywood making anything but a massive pig's ear of the story. Today, a mass of special effects are generally used to cover up a thin plot {invariably with some kind of sex angle added} and/or one-dimensional characters {and ac(tors|tresses) who were chosen more for their unrealistic conformance to the ideal of Conventional Beauty than anything else}. In mediaeval paintings, before anyone had worked out that light travels in straight lines and so distant objects appear smaller than close ones, the most important character in the scene was painted the biggest. In Hollywood movies, the most important character is either the "prettiest" or "ugliest" depending on whether they are a "goodie" or a "baddie". Plots, too, are reduced to a simple battle of "good" versus "evil". This doesn't work for complex characters, so sometimes characters are distorted so as better to fit the stereotype. {Can you imagine Hollywood's take on something like "Trainspotting"? All the characters are basically on the same side. Disney probably would make them all the Baddies, and introduce a young orphan boy for the Goodie. Or it might be more politically correct to have a girl this time. Uh, yeah, maybe we could use that baby instead of making her a cot death victim. [Never mind that the whole point of that scene was that you were hoping all along that she wasn't dead, but at the same time you knew she was anyway - and the confirmation knocked the wind out of you]. Said child meets a Special Friend - an improbable character, who {after a little playfighting and banter} helps them break into an underground laboratory and poison a batch of junk. Renton and Sick Boy are seen cooking up in the Mother Superior's flat. Child looks out of window. Dead bodies lie still. Solitary church bell rings. Tommy [not dead of AIDS] and Spud solemnly promise never to touch junk again. Tearful scene in which Special Friend departs forever, while outside the sun is shining. The end}. And, while my imagination is generally capable of making up for poor SFX, I find plots and characters harder.

    For an example of what I mean, look at Star Wars Episode I. There are just too many things out of that film that don't gel when you come to think about them afterward. Explosions, obviously. Pod racers? Someone's having a giraffe. What keeps the outside part of those engines from rotating? Battle droids? Come on, if you're going to make an entire army of foldy-uppy robots, you should at least give them proper weapons. The original Star Wars {now re-named Episode four - A New Hope} stood up far better to post-movie analysis.
  • Let's hope Adam fares better than Asimov. I can just see it now:

    Will Smith as Arthur Dent
    Jackie Chan as Ford Prefect
    Vin Diesel as Marvin

    On set interview with Will Smith: "Well, we just finished filming the big scene for the beginning of the movie, where my character uses all his skills to destroy an incoming Vogon fleet. Then Jackie, Vin and I all get together to hunt down and kill the mastermind of the attack. This is going to be a great action movie that really sticks to what the author's themes were."

  • Unfair (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jazman ( 9111 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @07:51AM (#7136446)
    "anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects."

    Oh come on, that's not very fair. It was made with the best effects available at the time, including some groundbreaking work. (Watch the extras on the DVD set for more info.)

    LOTR was made with the best effects available, including new stuff. If the effects don't look primitive in 20 years time I'd be very surprised. That doesn't mean they're crap. If LOTR is remade in 20 years, it's highly likely that anything will be better than WETA's current abilities.

    At the time nothing was better than the BBC special effects. Of course it could all be done now with a PC in half the time and looking 10 times better, but that's the nature of technology.

  • In related news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by keebler ( 182372 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @08:14AM (#7136516) Homepage
    George W. Bush. Vogon. [cnn.com]

  • So to sum up the comments so far ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fractal Dice ( 696349 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @08:28AM (#7136543) Journal
    This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

  • Hugo Horton [noticine.com] from the Vicar of Dibley.

    CLEARLY the best candidate to play Arthur.
  • DNA?? Who the hell calls Douglas Adams "DNA"? Laaaaaaaaaaame
  • ...They can get Trilian right this time. The TV bimbo-fied character was terrible.

  • I'll say it again... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Schnapple ( 262314 ) <tomkidd&gmail,com> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @10:20AM (#7137011) Homepage
    ...like I did last time we had this discussion:

    Ideal Director: Terry Gilliam

    Ideal Narrrarator: John Cleese

    Ideal Arthur Dent: Cary Elwes

    Ideal Ford Prefect: Tony Slattery (watch old Whose Line Is It Anyway? episodes on Comedy Central to see what I mean)

    Ideal Slartibartfast: Sean Connery (imagine "It was made from the rib cage of a stegosaurus!" in a Scottish accent)

    Everyone else is negotiable.

  • THGTTG the TV series, according to Neil Gaiman. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Civil_Disobedient ( 261825 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:53AM (#7137463)
    There are lots of good reasons to dislike the BBC's TV series (mangling of the storyline would be tops on my list) but I honestly doubt the movie will have a better Ford, Arthur, or Narrator (the Guide). Douglas Adams felt that the casting for them was perfect (and clearly nobody will ever be a better "guide" than Peter Jones). If I were to cast it, I'd put Jack Davenport (of BBC's Coupling) as Arthur, and hope Peter Jones is still alive to do the Guide.

    Also, the "Computer Graphics" of the guide will never, ever be topped. To quote from Don't Panic - The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galazy Companion written by none other than the great Neil Gaiman:

    "The graphics...were incredibly detailed, apparently computer-created animated graphics, full of sight gags and in-jokes, and presumably designed for people with freeze-frame and slow-motion videos, since there was no way one could pick up on the complexities of the graphics sequences in a single watching at normal speed. Would one have noticed, for example, the cartoons of Douglas Adams himself, posing as a Sirius Cybernatics Corporation Advertising Executive, writing hard in the dolphin sequence, and in drag as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings? Could one have picked up on all the names and phone numbers of some of the best places in the universe to purchase, or dry out from, a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? One of the phone numbers in the graphics of Episode Six was that of a leading computer magazine who phoned Pearce Studios, responsible for the graphics, to ask which computer it was done on, and whether a flat-screen television was built into the book prop used on the show. The comment beside the phone number was not flattering."

    The reason the TV series was, in many ways, very good, is because Adams realized with the medium of television, he had a whole new outlet for his humor that was simply impossible to do on Radio. Also, there's simply no way you can condense the book into an 1.5 hour movie. THGTTG isn't an anecdote to be shortly told with expensive special effects... it's a Decameron, a Canterbury Tales collection of stories that gives the reader (or listener, or viewer) a rolicking feeling of traveling from place to place.

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