Don't Panic!

So, a couple of years back my hubby found downloadable versions of the original BBC radio show broadcasts of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He surprised me with the series for my birthday that year (and won some major points with his gift!) and I've recently been re-listening to the series in my car as I drive about to work and such.

Over here in America, it seems like the majority of people are mostly familiar with the Guide in its novel form. Although since the recent movie adaptation a few years ago, there are quite a few people who have now seen the movie but never read the book(s).

Listening to the radio plays again got me thinking about this whole franchise, and about adaptation in general. Usually, when a book I've read gets adapted into a feature film, I tend to greet the news with either great excitement or extreme trepidation. My reaction generally depends on how many times I've read and how much I love the book, the people/studio behind bringing the story from book to screen, who is going to be in the movie, and how well I think the story can be adapted into a movie in the first place.

Movies based on Stephen King's work tend to make me nervous, because I feel like his writing is so complex and internal (people thinking rather than doing). On the other hand, television mini-series, or movies based on his shorter stories, leave me a little more hopeful. Those tend to have a much greater chance towards staying true to King's original creations.

Sometimes a deviation from the story can be a good thing though. Neil Gaiman's story Stardust was (in my humble opinion) perfectly written, but the ending of the movie was changed completely. Yet it totally worked. As Gaiman himself has said, you couldn't have had the ending in the book in a movie, it just wouldn't have worked. Things like this are reasons I tend to be reassured even further when I hear the author of the original work is closely involved in the script/filming process of adaptations.

But bringing this back around to the Guide, what got me thinking today was how truly different the story evolved on the radio than it did in the books once the first couple of "chapters" had wrapped up. I have a very good friend who to this day won't see the movie because she knows she will not like it, it is just so different from the books she knows and loves. I totally respect her choice in that matter, although, for me, there was no way I wasn't going to see it. I can't even remember now what movie my husband and I saw the first teaser for the Guide at, but we were standing up cheering when we realized what it was for. I mean, heck, we even went to the premiere in our bathrobes and jammies in honor of Arthur Dent and took our towels along with us, because you should always know where your towel is.

I love the movie version of this story, but the thing is, I totally could have hated it. This had the potential to be an even bigger disappointment for me than Eragon (which you don't want to get me started on). I think part of the reason I was able to go with the flow so well in regards to some of the plot changes and the like was that I had already been exposed to the radio version, and by that point I had kind of caught on to the spirit of the Guide.

What I mean by that is that Douglas Adams, may he rest in peace, was a bloody genius. When it came time to adapt the story from the original radio play into a novel, he completely grasped the fact that he was moving his franchise into a different medium and as such, it needed to be actually different. He didn't just flesh out his original scripts, he gave us a whole new story. The core adventure was mostly the same, but there were all kinds of new details, and some things that could only have worked in an audio version were eliminated altogether. It was also his chance, I'm sure, to drop anything he didn't like the first time around or expand upon something he felt hadn't got quite enough attention yet. The same principle applied to the wonderfully horrible and cheesy 80's television series BBC ran (and of course, I have that too). Now we were actually seeing that guy with two heads and three arms, now we could actually see if the Vogons measured up to previous descriptions, or if in the visual version they were something else entirely (they weren't--other than their creation by Adams, the Vogons defy much in the way of imagination). So by the time the movie came around, I was expecting differences, and even in some ways eager to see what they were and to learn how some old staples flourished in their new environment.

It almost makes me wish that I could approach all book-to-film (or other medium transpiring) adaptations this way, but I know I won't. Sigh. I don't know what it is about the Guide, but it just has that knack for getting me to look at the world in a different way.

Of course, if they hadn't kept the sperm whale and the bowl of petunias in every version so far...well that probably would have been the end of my open-mindedness. You can't not have the sperm whale and the bowl of petunias, after all.

Anyhoo...that's all I've got. If you haven't read the book(s) or seen the movie, well, what are you waiting for? It's good stuff. Guaranteed to make you laugh.

Until next time, gentle readers, I hope you know where your towels are,
C