Having seen the movie and read the first four books of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, I enjoyed the opportunity to revisit this story once again in radio form. It's interesting to compare the different formats of the story. They all seem to stick pretty close to each other for the first half of the series and drift off from there. Even the same auxiliary jokes are preserved from format to format in the first few episodes. One “addition” I noticed (I guess it's an omission, since the radio series came first) was the character Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton, who appears in the bar scene before Earth is destroyed. The humor did lose a bit of its charm though from the book, as a lot of the non-dialogue descriptions were simply not there yet, such as the digital watches gag (one of the better jokes from the first book, in my opinion). The radio version also seems like it has less channels to communicate humor with than the other formats. Radio misses out on the visual gags that the TV series and movie get (my favorite being the gags in the “Don't Think” sequence of the movie), and due to pacing/length, misses a lot of content that the book receives. These shortcomings aside, I enjoyed experiencing the root of the whole Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
No comments:
Post a Comment