There isn’t (wasn’t) anyone else whose mind worked in quite the same way as Douglas Adams’. He knew so much about how language, mathematics, physics and philosophy worked, but also had a keen sense of how so much of Human society and behaviour is completely ridiculous! Your mind is boggled 2 episodes in, but just wait until you see the rest of it!
American actress Sandra Dickinson's (Trillian) second husband was Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor), with whom she had a daughter Georgia Moffat who is now married to David Tennant (Tenth Doctor).
When Douglas Adams was trying to think of how to solve the problem of them having been thrown into space he realised that the problem was that any solution he could think of was very improbable, and that's how he got the idea of the infinite improbability drive.
The infinite probability drive works on a similar principle to the buttered-cat anti gravity device. If you've not heard of this marvel the theory goes like this: Cats always land on their feet. Toast always lands buttered side down. So what would happen if you buttered a cat's back? Because it would be trying to land both on it's feet and on it's back at the same time it would instead spin continuously a few inches from the ground and never actually land . Hey presto one anti-gravity device!🤔😁
There was another experiment done on the sly where they grafted four cats paws onto buttered toast. No results were recorded though, as when dropped it acted rather like a flying squirrel and glided out of the lab window never to be seen again.
Marvin the paranoid android was quoted so many times at school following this episode. 'Life? Don't talk to me about life. A brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.'
I loved your excitement at the end when you said "I love this" I saw this show back in the day and got excited too!. The writing and the casting is outstanding
Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers to actively hate writing. His two Dirk Gently novels were also comedy gold. So glad you're enjoying this cracking piece of my childhood (the tv series got me hooked young).
@@opusfluke2354 I meet him twice. He hated writing and loathed script editing Dr Who. They literally had to lock him in a room to get City of Death done.
In case no one has already told you, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings is a changed name from the original publishings of the book. Paul Neil Milne Johnstone requested that his name be changed as he did not want to be immortalised in this way. Adams knew Johnstone in their teens and Johnstone fancied himself to be a great poet at the time. The address given in the entry is also a thinly veiled alteration of an actual address Johnstone had lived at. Wasp Villas was Beehive Court, and it was in Redbridge not Greenbridge. And the drawing with the entry is Douglas Adams himself, in pigtails.
I remember reading the book on a long train journey and everyone thought I was mad because I really could n't stop giggling at the insanity of Douglas Adams's brain . Apparently he got the inspiration after being blind drunk , lying on his back on a Spanish beach looking at the stars . If you stick with the story you'll discover the answer to Life , the Universe and Everything and how to book your reservation in the Hotel at the end of the Universe - it's a wild journey .
"What was the guy on when he wrote this?" As Douglas Adams himself has said, he was very very drunk, and lay down in a field for a nap while on holiday, and found himself staring up at the stars, thinking there should be some kind of guide for it all. Zaphod's second head, hokey though it seems to us today, was shown off as a technical marvel at the time. It made appearances on several kid's science shows, demonstrating how it worked.
The sense of humour in this is brilliant and the word play is completely unique. I love the line "its rather unpleasantly like being drunk, whats so unpleaant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water"
Apparently, the third arm was the result of an ad lib by the actor in the Radio Series. And the second head was a problem.The poet named in the radio series happened to be the name of a real person so the radio programme was edited to change the name for later broadcasts.
Hello! UK viewer here. Always been a big Douglas Adams fan and it's so good to see your reaction to the classic TV series. I'm also a big comic book nerd and a lifelong fan of the British comic 2000ad, which premiered in 1977. You would be amazed at how many things this weekly comic book predicted correctly.
Just think what it was like to hear this on the radio at 10:30 pm when you were a sixteen year old in 1978 who was reading science fiction and philosophy this was a pleasure to hear this. The verbal wit in Douglas Adams reminds me of Tom Stoppard whose works I was reading at the time like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which asks interesting philosophic questions in a comedic setting
You missed the genius of the Infinite Improbability Drive. It's true party trick is you don't have to calculate anything at all because to reach Infinite Improbability you have to, by definition, pass through every finite probability in existence. All you have to do is turn it on and everything that can possibly happen happens, including whatever it was you wanted to happen. :D
Regarding the design of Marvin, Douglas Adams wanted a man painted silver, but the producer vetoed it, his reasoning was that what's funny about Marvin is that he's an robot who's depressed, and it's not as funny if it looks like a man.
YAY ! It’s been SO long since I saw this 🥴 Thanks so much for sharing your discovery….’Tis Great Fun watching it again with such an enthusiastic “Newby” …REALLY looking forward to seeing more !!
@@mattc3581 Got all the books and visited the Ankh Morepork Embassy several times too down in Wincanton before it closed to the public. Bernard Pearson is a legend.
Marvin the paranoid Android: such a great character. Douglas Adams wrote some scripts for Dr Who.. Hitchhikers gets better with more unusual characters appearing. Wait until you meet the Bistromatic spaceship in series 2.
I believe some of his ideas for the Dr Who story, Shada,turned up in Hitch Hikers Guide and were also used in the book "Dirk Gentlies Holistic Detective Agency".
Actually that is the third radio series . The second featuring the Shoe event horizon and the Frogstar isn't a book as far as I know and was dismissed as one of Zaphods fantasies .
I saw the original cast performing this on stage years ago, just as funny live as it was on tv and on radio. Just as amusing to me was the fact that most of the audience were wearing dressing gowns and carrying towels, myself included!
I was so disappointed when I listened to the record this song was on and Journey of the sorcerer was the only awesome tune on the whole record. Parts of the song Pro Memoria by Ghost feel like they were influenced by this song.
I won’t spoil anything by telling you about the golgofrincham ark B as the bbc did cover it in this series but the books tells of a better engine than the infinite improbability drive on the starship bistro math , in: Technology Bistromathics 1 Bistromathics is the most powerful computational force known to parascience. A major step up from the Infinite Improbability Drive, Bistromathics is a way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement through space, so it was realised that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants. Nonabsoluteness The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up. The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusions now play a vital part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field. The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.) Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe.
In the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, a particle only exists as a probability waveform until it is observed at which point the waveform collapses and either the position or the momentum of the particle is known..... to quote Keanu Reeves... "Its Quantum baby" 😂😂😂
So glad you are enjoying this! P.S. The humor does not stop. You may want to read the books afterwards. I have a funny story related to this episode. I attended the 1986 World SF convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Three? hotels for this con, thousands of attendees. As usual for events of this size, there were--issues with the elevators. On the third day (of a 5-day con) I entered the elevator and discovered that another fan had pulled off a marvelous stunt. THERE--just under the control panel, was a small engraved plaque (matching the color/style/font of the elevator controls) which stated: "Another fine product of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation" !! I'm sure the non-SF guests were totally puzzled by the laughter in the elevators.
At one of the first SF conventions I attended (in the early '80s) the elevator would always go and hide in the basement before it would take you to any other floor.
HI EB, Thank you for showing one of my favourite books,, Radio and TV programmes from the 70/80s. It was fabulous stuff and just magnificently portrayed. Among others, I loved Stephen Moore (RIP) as Marvin, and Mark Wing Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox. The imagination in the book is just stunning. Pease keep it up this is just wonderful !
Once you've seen this series, you really need to watch the newer movie, and then read the whole series. It's worth every minute. The concepts introduced are simply crazy. That petunia... LMFAO
You get most of the radio cast in the TV version. Simon Jones is Arthur in both, so are Peter Jones (voice of the book), Stephen Moore (Marvin voice), Mark-Wing Davey (Zaphod). David Dixon takes over the role of Ford, it was Geoffrey McGivern on radio, Sandra Dickinson takes on Trillian, Susan Sheridan played her originally. I hope you give the radio series a go, perfect for those late nights when there's nothing on TV or you want something to listen to. In some ways, its funnier on radio, the TV version was fun at the time but did suffer a bit from wonky FX and budget limitations although it was considered to be lavish back in 1981. Plus, listening to it on radio meant the entire audience would have a different mental picture so creating it visually meant it now is seen as the producers vision and may not compare with your own. Plus, Adams highlighted in an interview the difficulty of converting it to TV. Two pages of dialog would describe something on the radio but you can show it visually in 10 seconds on TV. Without visuals, you have to imagine it all...I enjoy doing that when I binge on the CD box set, its different on audio, your own vision. Radio series 2 is even wilder, but sadly never reached TV, the books truncate it and take the story elsewhere. Still, its just as whacky in that wonderful Douglas Adams way. BTW, the HHGTTG is based probably, on a real book, The Hitch Hikers Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh (last published in 1985). Story goes that Adams was drunk lying in a field near Innsbruck while hitch hiking around Austria with a copy of the guide in about 1970-71 when he had the initial idea. The radio show was written largely on-the-fly, one episode being so late for broadcast, the producer was literally sticking it together in the back of a taxi cross town on his way from the recording studio in London to the radio station, the BBC, in another location.
8:40 - I am straight up laughing so hard, I disturbed the cat that was on my lap! But wait until you hear how the infinite improbability drive came into existence.... 12:55 - Marvin... the "Paranoid Android", as he's called in the novels. Who ever would have thought an AI based machine would get a mental illness? ;) 16:45 - Also, I don't know about you, but I grew up with British humour. Benny Hill, Monty Python, etc... so I was already well primed for Douglas Adams. That style of humour actually helped shape my own sense of humour. When I got my hands on the books initially, I loved them. To be fair, though, even I wasn't quite prepared for the insanity of this series, but I tell you what..... I absolutely LOVED it the first time I saw it. Also: "I wonder what will happen if I press this button?" ... "Don't..." .... "A sign lit up saying, 'please do not press this button again!'" cracks me up EVERY damned time I hear it!
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is an odd one. Depending on how you first come across it (either the radio series, book, TV series or film) colours your reaction to it. The story changes between the medium (there are some scenes from the radio series that were 'un-filmable'). It may be worthwhile listening to the radio series (which was the origin of the story, I think they are on TH-cam), they make a great companion on a long car trip, and by the way they are seriously funny.
@24:25 Look up "The Lonely", Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode 7, from 1959, , starring Jack Warden [of 12 Angry Men, and Crazy Like A Fox]. It's about a convict in solitary, who is given an android companion. Excellent episode.
My first experience with the Hitchhiker's Guide was the computer text adventure game. Since then, I managed to borrow a copy of the book, and over time I listened to the radio show, then the TV show (so I think I did everything in the backwards order, lol). It's pretty awesome, and every one of them have a few little differences.
It never occurred to me that Hitch-Hikers would translate effectively to a North American audience. The quintessentially British nature of the comedy should be as alien to you, as Vogon Poetry is to everyone else. Fair Play to you for getting the gags. The other side of the coin would the utter failure of Seinfeld to find an audience in the UK. What was a phenomenon across the pond, was a damp squib over here. Most North American shows are populated by unrecognisable characters that do not exist in our world. The home-grown British shows that we love, are often remade in North America into something completely different. Fawlty Towers, Man About The House, Steptoe and Son, 'Til Death us do Part and even Red Dwarf have faced Americanisation, to varying degrees of success. You have a grand show here. Please keep up your hard work. Much appreciated. Cheers.
Little secret, lots of Americans never got into Seinfeld. I mean I liked it for awhile, but lost interest then near the end came to borderline hate it. I'd say at times it even felt "alien" to me as I've never even set foot in NYC. (It's also a bit odd for an American comedy as I think we tend to want sympathetic characters in our comedy.) Also I'm an American and I loved the Hitchhiker's Guide including this adaptation. (Not the movie so much.) Some of it's just clever regardless of nationality and though very British most of the characters are ostensibly not British.
@@ThomasReeves-s7u Thank you. Well said. I agree with your sentiments about the Film adaptation. I am very saddened to say I found it disappointing too. Eagerly I awaited the morro' when the cinematic release would come along. It was not great. I really enjoy your work. Well done.
Glad you're enjoying this - it continues in much the same vein. Brings back great childhood memories for me. And appreciate the effort in getting it past the copyright demons.
the 2 minute 52 second song/video ''Marvin, the Paranoid Android - A Side: Marvin.'' by Zeta Zeta plus the 6.32 video ''Douglass Adams on David Letterman (14th Febuary 1985),'' by DJ Solid Snail
l went to school with Zahpod Bebblebrox, he was a good friend of mine, but back then he only had one head. He was a good actor even then, writing many of our school plays...
I love this show I've got the audio from the radio and read all the books when I read the books I always read margins lines the way he speaks I don't know why I did that lol Great reaction love from the UK
I thoroughly enjoyed watching episode 2 with you. You’re right the logic is all there. Things that don’t make sense get explained later on. How was it to have your brain tickled? Glad you like Marvin. Something he said in one of the books nearly had me asphyxiate with laughter. I was apoplectic through laughter. I can’t wait for the next one.
Love this . First read the books when I was 18. Friend used to go on about it from listening to the radio. But I didn’t have the access . TV PRODUCTION was good less the film version around 2005. But I just remember reading the books and almost rereading each chapter to fulling understand loved them. And from tv so much I don’t want to spoil for your channel going forward. But Sandra Dickinson was a major crush for me !!, ,
Marvin the Paranoid Android/Stephen Moore released a couple of singles in response to the show's popularity, "Marvin", "Metal Man", and "Marvin, I Love You" titles spring back to mind.. They were marketed as 'double-B sides'. 🤖🎶 😄
Absolutely loved this show when it was originally aired in 81. I remember impatiently waiting for the next episode the week later. I just thought, I wonder if it's available on dvd on ebay? So I just looked and bought a copy for 4 quid. I now find myself waiting impatiently for my copy of the dvd to arrive, just like the good old days.... 😂
It's worth noting that all the "computer" graphics were painstakingly hand made, letter by letter There's a good "making of" on the DVD (and probably on TH-cam)
I can't remember if I said this for your reaction to part one (and me, most definitely not with a brain the size of a planet) but the original radio play is wonderful. And all the books. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Great reaction as always, saw this on tv when I was about 8 in the 1980s in Scotland. So fascinating compared to other sci fi. I know it’s not the best but hopefully you can watch the movie version when you complete these episodes to compare as it is enjoyable too.
Yesssss!!! More HHGTTG!!! I'm actually now rewatching this again but I'm going back a couple of episodes to watch this instead right now.... what we really need is someone to give the radio show The Ricky Gervais Show treatment. Many people think it was originally a book. It wasn't, although the books are also great
I loved Marvin in this . He looks just like the battery powered tin robots of my childhood . Not sure if it's Stephen Moore in this tv version but the depressed voice is just right . The movie had a pretty stellar cast and it's good points but you can't beat the original . I'm really glad you like it and I hope you try the radio show .
@@DavidSmith-cx8dg If you watch the film version of this with Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent there’s one point where the scene has a crowd of different characters in a kind of administration office and the group has the Marvin android from this tv version sat in the middle of the room .
Douglas was brilliant would do anything to not write he was a master of the throw-away line that comes back lines from this series would be titles of later books. The sub-etha net pre dates the internet by a few years the book pre dates ebooks and a reference to it being updated by anyone could be similar to Wikipedia.
Same. This and Red Dwarf ad nauseum was my childhhood. It's also the only thing I've ever bought on Prime since losing the DVD (and there seems to be s a bug in the encoding that means the last few minutes of episode one doesn't play :/)
Great stuff. If you're struggling to see the funny side of the human condition, read Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. The animated Guide parts of this series are the most well known, unfortunately for uploading, but are perfectly done. I think my favourite about the most intelligent species on earth is in the next episode.
The whole thing about physically painful poetry was born of one of Douglas Adam's friends, who apparently wrote really terrible, pretentious, unpleasant poetry. The whole idea was a playful dig at him. The original radio play gave the guy's actual name and address, but as you can imagine he ended up getting a lot of unwanted attention from Hitchhiker's fans, so all subsequent versions replaced him with Paula Nancy Milestone Jennings.
The guy being lynched by a group of angry scientists wasn't too far from reality as there have been times where someone found a solution through natural talent or inspiration rather than an official education. Good example being john harrison a self taught clockmaker and carpenter who had to fight hard to get anywhere with the royal society folk, he eventually won and thanks to his work the lines of longitude exist on maps of the world.
I always thought that they didn't give Marvin a depressive personality but a "normal" one, but having the brain the size of a planet very quickly computed his insignificance in the universe. 😔
To me Marvin being a White, Round Android was wrong, I always thought of him on the radio as being black, somewhat like a Japanese tinplate robot from the 1960s , with a square / rectanguar head
@@alexrogan6563 I don't think that appears in the TV series. You could argue that trin tragular got the idea for the total perspective vortex from studying Marvin's brain matrix. anyone fancy a small piece of fairy cake I found just laying around in this small chamber. 🍰😜
@@midnightzathras6870 No, it doesn't appear in the series, I was reminded of it by your idea about Marvin realising his own (in)significance. That's certainly what the Vortex does for its users, though Trin Tragula invented it in order to annoy his wife. Her death proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. Marvin is probably an exception as he's not organic, if he's alive at all.
Elon Musk said in the interview with Jordan Peterstone that this book made him want to go to space, keep watching, and all will become clear. Thank you for watching this 🙂🏴
Douglas Adams had a degree in literature from Cambridge university he was at the uni about the same time as some of monty python he worked for monty python for a while before writing this - he would have been at the uni about the time steven hawking left
Just rewatched the whole series. Totally forgot a Doctor (Peter Davidson) and Darth Vader (David Prowse). Both appear in the same episode. And also Roll Tide. Wife went there.
Dougie was a tiny bit prophetic at times.. I mean, does "the trickster having been voted to become president" ring a bell? 😂 Not to mention his book "Last Chance To See" in which he describes his travels to species that were going, some now are, extinct. Although in stark contrast to his rather humorous and over all fictitious works, including "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and all the little offshoots of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" like "The Electric Monk", "The Restaurant on the other Side of the Universe" and so on, yet is nothing less but 100% recommendable. 💪🏼
Marvin the Paranoid Android is/was one of my favourite characters in virtually all sci-fi shows... I'd be hard pushed to name another android with his peculiarities. His programmer must have been British!
wait until the series gets all metaphysically funny when you meet slartibartfast for the first time who is one of the aliens what makes and manufactures planets and who helped make earth.
fun fact, the worst poet in the universe, Nancy MIllstone Jennings is a real person Adams had a beef with, and that WAS her adress. She was not impressed lol
Not quite true. Douglas Adams went to school & uni with an English student/poet called Paul Neil Milne Johnstone which was changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Johnstone in the books (I think his real name was used on the radio though).
There isn’t (wasn’t) anyone else whose mind worked in quite the same way as Douglas Adams’. He knew so much about how language, mathematics, physics and philosophy worked, but also had a keen sense of how so much of Human society and behaviour is completely ridiculous!
Your mind is boggled 2 episodes in, but just wait until you see the rest of it!
He's in for a treat, I love watching people watch it for the first time
@@IDTV66 Who else have you seen watch this series?
@@IggyStardust1967 not me, that’s for sure.
Actually, another mind like his was Terry Pratchett (RIP)
@@johnpublicprofile6261 Completely agree! Their sense of the ridiculous was something special.
One thing the movie got absolutely correct: getting Alan Rickman to voice Marvin, with Stephen Fry voicing the Guide coming a close second.
American actress Sandra Dickinson's (Trillian) second husband was Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor), with whom she had a daughter Georgia Moffat who is now married to David Tennant (Tenth Doctor).
and Peter Davidson pops up later in the series under a lot of makeup.
I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
And Georgia Moffat played the eponymous "Doctor's Daughter" in the Tennant episode of Doctor Who... it all seems disturbingly incestuous! 😆
Improbability Drive at work 😂
"I like my job. The hours are good. Well, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy..."
I love Douglas Adams' way of playing with language.
So overjoyed to see your enjoyment of one of my absolute favourite authors, Douglas Adams.
When Douglas Adams was trying to think of how to solve the problem of them having been thrown into space he realised that the problem was that any solution he could think of was very improbable, and that's how he got the idea of the infinite improbability drive.
The infinite probability drive works on a similar principle to the buttered-cat anti gravity device. If you've not heard of this marvel the theory goes like this:
Cats always land on their feet. Toast always lands buttered side down. So what would happen if you buttered a cat's back?
Because it would be trying to land both on it's feet and on it's back at the same time it would instead spin continuously a few inches from the ground and never actually land .
Hey presto one anti-gravity device!🤔😁
There was another experiment done on the sly where they grafted four cats paws onto buttered toast. No results were recorded though, as when dropped it acted rather like a flying squirrel and glided out of the lab window never to be seen again.
@@jimb9063that’s sounds like something Douglas would write. 🤣
I dropped my toast - it landed butter side up !!! Being an '''optimist''' I thought I must have buttered the wrong side !!!!!!?!!!!!!!?!!
The main problem with the buttered-cat anti gravity device is you must not put in a box, otherwise you may kill it by looking in the box.🤔😒
The buttered cat thing just blew my mind ✌
I once worked with a guy who had the same outlook on life as Marvin. So naturally his nickname became Marvin and he was a joy to listen to.
Marvin the paranoid android was quoted so many times at school following this episode.
'Life? Don't talk to me about life. A brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.'
I loved your excitement at the end when you said "I love this" I saw this show back in the day and got excited too!. The writing and the casting is outstanding
Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers to actively hate writing. His two Dirk Gently novels were also comedy gold. So glad you're enjoying this cracking piece of my childhood (the tv series got me hooked young).
@@opusfluke2354 I meet him twice. He hated writing and loathed script editing Dr Who. They literally had to lock him in a room to get City of Death done.
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
In case no one has already told you, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings is a changed name from the original publishings of the book. Paul Neil Milne Johnstone requested that his name be changed as he did not want to be immortalised in this way. Adams knew Johnstone in their teens and Johnstone fancied himself to be a great poet at the time. The address given in the entry is also a thinly veiled alteration of an actual address Johnstone had lived at. Wasp Villas was Beehive Court, and it was in Redbridge not Greenbridge.
And the drawing with the entry is Douglas Adams himself, in pigtails.
Oh I never knew that. But I do know beehive court
I remember reading the book on a long train journey and everyone thought I was mad because I really could n't stop giggling at the insanity of Douglas Adams's brain . Apparently he got the inspiration after being blind drunk , lying on his back on a Spanish beach looking at the stars . If you stick with the story you'll discover the answer to Life , the Universe and Everything and how to book your reservation in the Hotel at the end of the Universe - it's a wild journey .
Yeah, you're getting it. Everything fits together. Things happen that seem absolutely bonkers bit yet there's an explanation.
Hitch Hikers Guide has always been up there for me, the genre and the humour were a perfect mix, first listened to the BBC Radio 4 series in about '78
Thursday evening at 10pm
"What was the guy on when he wrote this?"
As Douglas Adams himself has said, he was very very drunk, and lay down in a field for a nap while on holiday, and found himself staring up at the stars, thinking there should be some kind of guide for it all.
Zaphod's second head, hokey though it seems to us today, was shown off as a technical marvel at the time. It made appearances on several kid's science shows, demonstrating how it worked.
Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" is about Marvin, as they're big fans.
The sense of humour in this is brilliant and the word play is completely unique. I love the line "its rather unpleasantly like being drunk, whats so unpleaant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water"
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't, another classic
'You must come with me or you'll be late.'
Apparently, the third arm was the result of an ad lib by the actor in the Radio Series. And the second head was a problem.The poet named in the radio series happened to be the name of a real person so the radio programme was edited to change the name for later broadcasts.
Hello!
UK viewer here.
Always been a big Douglas Adams fan and it's so good to see your reaction to the classic TV series.
I'm also a big comic book nerd and a lifelong fan of the British comic 2000ad, which premiered in 1977.
You would be amazed at how many things this weekly comic book predicted correctly.
Wait till you hear aboot the ship that uses bad news as fuel, because bad news travels faster than the speed of light.
But were very unwelcome when they reached their destination.
"Big old engine that's fuelled by.... fuel" 😂😂😂
Just think what it was like to hear this on the radio at 10:30 pm
when you were a sixteen year old in 1978 who was reading science fiction and philosophy
this was a pleasure to hear this.
The verbal wit in Douglas Adams reminds me of Tom Stoppard
whose works I was reading at the time
like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
which asks interesting philosophic questions
in a comedic setting
You missed the genius of the Infinite Improbability Drive. It's true party trick is you don't have to calculate anything at all because to reach Infinite Improbability you have to, by definition, pass through every finite probability in existence. All you have to do is turn it on and everything that can possibly happen happens, including whatever it was you wanted to happen. :D
No. I didn't. I just couldn't keep the entirety of the explanation in and having that jump like the rest didn't make much sense.
Regarding the design of Marvin, Douglas Adams wanted a man painted silver, but the producer vetoed it, his reasoning was that what's funny about Marvin is that he's an robot who's depressed, and it's not as funny if it looks like a man.
I love your dimensions. Physical and cerebral ratios. Kooky squeeze.
YAY ! It’s been SO long since I saw this 🥴 Thanks so much for sharing your discovery….’Tis Great Fun watching it again with such an enthusiastic “Newby” …REALLY looking forward to seeing more !!
I refuse to believe that Douglas Adans books are anything less than philosophy. Marvin the paranoid android was marvellous
Marvin got me through my teenage years.
@@mustrumridcully3853 Guessing Pratchett provided some emotional support somewhere along the line as well!
@@mattc3581 Got all the books and visited the Ankh Morepork Embassy several times too down in Wincanton before it closed to the public. Bernard Pearson is a legend.
What gets me is Marvin is clearly depressed and yet he gets the monicker of being paranoid...
Marvin the paranoid Android: such a great character.
Douglas Adams wrote some scripts for Dr Who..
Hitchhikers gets better with more unusual characters appearing.
Wait until you meet the Bistromatic spaceship in series 2.
I believe some of his ideas for the Dr Who story, Shada,turned up in Hitch Hikers Guide and were also used in the book "Dirk Gentlies Holistic Detective Agency".
Actually that is the third radio series . The second featuring the Shoe event horizon and the Frogstar isn't a book as far as I know and was dismissed as one of Zaphods fantasies .
There is no series 2 to the TV series. We got six episodes, that's it.
I love a 'oh fucking hell' in the intro!
I saw the original cast performing this on stage years ago, just as funny live as it was on tv and on radio. Just as amusing to me was the fact that most of the audience were wearing dressing gowns and carrying towels, myself included!
I think I said it last time - but the theme song… by The Eagles of all bands. Because Douglas Adam’s felt the intro needed banjos.
The second half of Journey of the Sorcerer, if anyone was wondering
@@JohnJackson66 yup! It’s a great track.
I was so disappointed when I listened to the record this song was on and Journey of the sorcerer was the only awesome tune on the whole record.
Parts of the song Pro Memoria by Ghost feel like they were influenced by this song.
@@rolling-roadkillVanilla Queen by Golden Earring has a similar vibe too
The actor who plays the Vogon guard is a friend of mine. I expect he's known a few people he'd like to throw out of an airlock for real.
I won’t spoil anything by telling you about the golgofrincham ark B as the bbc did cover it in this series but the books tells of a better engine than the infinite improbability drive on the starship bistro math ,
in: Technology
Bistromathics
1
Bistromathics is the most powerful computational force known to parascience. A major step up from the Infinite Improbability Drive, Bistromathics is a way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement through space, so it was realised that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
Nonabsoluteness
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusions now play a vital part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.)
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe.
Marvin the paranoid android is meant to look like a robot, Zaphod's 2nd head is bling that he added.
In the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, a particle only exists as a probability waveform until it is observed at which point the waveform collapses and either the position or the momentum of the particle is known..... to quote Keanu Reeves... "Its Quantum baby" 😂😂😂
Im so glad this is the version of HHGTTG that you are reacting to.
So glad you are enjoying this! P.S. The humor does not stop. You may want to read the books afterwards. I have a funny story related to this episode. I attended the 1986 World SF convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Three? hotels for this con, thousands of attendees. As usual for events of this size, there were--issues with the elevators. On the third day (of a 5-day con) I entered the elevator and discovered that another fan had pulled off a marvelous stunt. THERE--just under the control panel, was a small engraved plaque (matching the color/style/font of the elevator controls) which stated: "Another fine product of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation" !! I'm sure the non-SF guests were totally puzzled by the laughter in the elevators.
At one of the first SF conventions I attended (in the early '80s) the elevator would always go and hide in the basement before it would take you to any other floor.
Remember the Radio series. Listened to it on the way to work
"errr... wha...?" -- Welcome to Douglas Adams' The Htichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy :) Don't panic, and keep hold of your towel, it's a fun ride!
HI EB, Thank you for showing one of my favourite books,, Radio and TV programmes from the 70/80s. It was fabulous stuff and just magnificently portrayed. Among others,
I loved Stephen Moore (RIP) as Marvin, and Mark Wing Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox. The imagination in the book is just stunning. Pease keep it up this is just wonderful !
Once you've seen this series, you really need to watch the newer movie, and then read the whole series. It's worth every minute. The concepts introduced are simply crazy. That petunia... LMFAO
You get most of the radio cast in the TV version. Simon Jones is Arthur in both, so are Peter Jones (voice of the book), Stephen Moore (Marvin voice), Mark-Wing Davey (Zaphod). David Dixon takes over the role of Ford, it was Geoffrey McGivern on radio, Sandra Dickinson takes on Trillian, Susan Sheridan played her originally. I hope you give the radio series a go, perfect for those late nights when there's nothing on TV or you want something to listen to. In some ways, its funnier on radio, the TV version was fun at the time but did suffer a bit from wonky FX and budget limitations although it was considered to be lavish back in 1981. Plus, listening to it on radio meant the entire audience would have a different mental picture so creating it visually meant it now is seen as the producers vision and may not compare with your own. Plus, Adams highlighted in an interview the difficulty of converting it to TV. Two pages of dialog would describe something on the radio but you can show it visually in 10 seconds on TV. Without visuals, you have to imagine it all...I enjoy doing that when I binge on the CD box set, its different on audio, your own vision. Radio series 2 is even wilder, but sadly never reached TV, the books truncate it and take the story elsewhere. Still, its just as whacky in that wonderful Douglas Adams way.
BTW, the HHGTTG is based probably, on a real book, The Hitch Hikers Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh (last published in 1985). Story goes that Adams was drunk lying in a field near Innsbruck while hitch hiking around Austria with a copy of the guide in about 1970-71 when he had the initial idea.
The radio show was written largely on-the-fly, one episode being so late for broadcast, the producer was literally sticking it together in the back of a taxi cross town on his way from the recording studio in London to the radio station, the BBC, in another location.
. Douglas Adams was a genius and I love them all , but the second radio series is my all time favourite .
I guarantee your experience with automatic doors will never be the same.
One set of arc words you won't find on the TV series, but definitely occurs in the radio show and the books, is 'Share And Enjoy'.
8:40 - I am straight up laughing so hard, I disturbed the cat that was on my lap! But wait until you hear how the infinite improbability drive came into existence....
12:55 - Marvin... the "Paranoid Android", as he's called in the novels. Who ever would have thought an AI based machine would get a mental illness? ;)
16:45 - Also, I don't know about you, but I grew up with British humour. Benny Hill, Monty Python, etc... so I was already well primed for Douglas Adams. That style of humour actually helped shape my own sense of humour. When I got my hands on the books initially, I loved them. To be fair, though, even I wasn't quite prepared for the insanity of this series, but I tell you what..... I absolutely LOVED it the first time I saw it.
Also: "I wonder what will happen if I press this button?" ... "Don't..." .... "A sign lit up saying, 'please do not press this button again!'" cracks me up EVERY damned time I hear it!
Marvin the Paranoid Android, one of the best Sci-fi characters ever written..... glad you get the show mate.....
Marvin was designed to look retro - even by 1980s standards.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is an odd one. Depending on how you first come across it (either the radio series, book, TV series or film) colours your reaction to it. The story changes between the medium (there are some scenes from the radio series that were 'un-filmable'). It may be worthwhile listening to the radio series (which was the origin of the story, I think they are on TH-cam), they make a great companion on a long car trip, and by the way they are seriously funny.
@24:25 Look up "The Lonely", Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode 7, from 1959,
, starring Jack Warden [of 12 Angry Men, and Crazy Like A Fox]. It's about a convict in solitary, who is given an android companion. Excellent episode.
My first experience with the Hitchhiker's Guide was the computer text adventure game. Since then, I managed to borrow a copy of the book, and over time I listened to the radio show, then the TV show (so I think I did everything in the backwards order, lol). It's pretty awesome, and every one of them have a few little differences.
It never occurred to me that Hitch-Hikers would translate effectively to a North American audience. The quintessentially British nature of the comedy should be as alien to you, as Vogon Poetry is to everyone else. Fair Play to you for getting the gags. The other side of the coin would the utter failure of Seinfeld to find an audience in the UK. What was a phenomenon across the pond, was a damp squib over here. Most North American shows are populated by unrecognisable characters that do not exist in our world. The home-grown British shows that we love, are often remade in North America into something completely different. Fawlty Towers, Man About The House, Steptoe and Son, 'Til Death us do Part and even Red Dwarf have faced Americanisation, to varying degrees of success.
You have a grand show here. Please keep up your hard work. Much appreciated. Cheers.
Little secret, lots of Americans never got into Seinfeld. I mean I liked it for awhile, but lost interest then near the end came to borderline hate it. I'd say at times it even felt "alien" to me as I've never even set foot in NYC. (It's also a bit odd for an American comedy as I think we tend to want sympathetic characters in our comedy.)
Also I'm an American and I loved the Hitchhiker's Guide including this adaptation. (Not the movie so much.) Some of it's just clever regardless of nationality and though very British most of the characters are ostensibly not British.
@@ThomasReeves-s7u Thank you. Well said. I agree with your sentiments about the Film adaptation. I am very saddened to say I found it disappointing too. Eagerly I awaited the morro' when the cinematic release would come along. It was not great. I really enjoy your work. Well done.
Glad you're enjoying this - it continues in much the same vein. Brings back great childhood memories for me. And appreciate the effort in getting it past the copyright demons.
So glad youre doing this and even more so that you love it as much as we do.
the 2 minute 52 second song/video ''Marvin, the Paranoid Android - A Side: Marvin.'' by Zeta Zeta plus the 6.32 video ''Douglass Adams on David Letterman (14th Febuary 1985),'' by DJ Solid Snail
l went to school with Zahpod Bebblebrox, he was a good friend of mine, but back then he only had one head. He was a good actor even then, writing many of our school plays...
Yes, Douglas Adams had the most genius sense of humor. :)
It sure took some watching but it was a hysterically funny yet immensely surreal series.
I love this show I've got the audio from the radio and read all the books when I read the books I always read margins lines the way he speaks I don't know why I did that lol
Great reaction love from the UK
This show is amazing and pretty close to the books. So far ahead of its time and smart humor
The whole show is so cleverly written, as was the radio show and the theatre production.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching episode 2 with you. You’re right the logic is all there. Things that don’t make sense get explained later on. How was it to have your brain tickled? Glad you like Marvin. Something he said in one of the books nearly had me asphyxiate with laughter. I was apoplectic through laughter. I can’t wait for the next one.
Love this . First read the books when I was 18. Friend used to go on about it from listening to the radio. But I didn’t have the access . TV PRODUCTION was good less the film version around 2005. But I just remember reading the books and almost rereading each chapter to fulling understand loved them. And from tv so much I don’t want to spoil for your channel going forward. But Sandra Dickinson was a major crush for me
!!,
,
Marvin the Paranoid Android/Stephen Moore released a couple of singles in response to the show's popularity, "Marvin", "Metal Man", and "Marvin, I Love You" titles spring back to mind.. They were marketed as 'double-B sides'. 🤖🎶 😄
Nobodys ever understood the plot like you: WOW !! well done buddy!
Theres a plot ?
Absolutely loved this show when it was originally aired in 81. I remember impatiently waiting for the next episode the week later.
I just thought, I wonder if it's available on dvd on ebay? So I just looked and bought a copy for 4 quid. I now find myself waiting impatiently for my copy of the dvd to arrive, just like the good old days.... 😂
Ah, I might need to grab another copy of that. It is also on Prime
I grew up on this and it is amazing and I am so glad you get it.
It's worth noting that all the "computer" graphics were painstakingly hand made, letter by letter
There's a good "making of" on the DVD (and probably on TH-cam)
Don't forget this was first broadcast in 1981 (radio)
1978.
Get your hands on the audio set of series. Grab a drink, perhaps not a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, kick off your shoes and relax into infinity.
I can't remember if I said this for your reaction to part one (and me, most definitely not with a brain the size of a planet) but the original radio play is wonderful. And all the books. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Great reaction as always, saw this on tv when I was about 8 in the 1980s in Scotland. So fascinating compared to other sci fi. I know it’s not the best but hopefully you can watch the movie version when you complete these episodes to compare as it is enjoyable too.
Yesssss!!! More HHGTTG!!! I'm actually now rewatching this again but I'm going back a couple of episodes to watch this instead right now.... what we really need is someone to give the radio show The Ricky Gervais Show treatment. Many people think it was originally a book. It wasn't, although the books are also great
READ THE BOOKS! Great to see this old thing again though! 10/10.
I loved Marvin in this . He looks just like the battery powered tin robots of my childhood . Not sure if it's Stephen Moore in this tv version but the depressed voice is just right . The movie had a pretty stellar cast and it's good points but you can't beat the original . I'm really glad you like it and I hope you try the radio show .
@@DavidSmith-cx8dg If you watch the film version of this with Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent there’s one point where the scene has a crowd of different characters in a kind of administration office and the group has the Marvin android from this tv version sat in the middle of the room .
A nice touch .
Douglas was brilliant would do anything to not write he was a master of the throw-away line that comes back lines from this series would be titles of later books.
The sub-etha net pre dates the internet by a few years the book pre dates ebooks and a reference to it being updated by anyone could be similar to Wikipedia.
Radiohead wrote a song about Marvin the Robot, “Paranoid Android”
Oh EB...it's not meant to be logical & make sense...it's from the mind of a man who's brain worked in ways most of us can;t simply begin to comprehend
Can't wait for you to meet Slartibartfast.
Video'd this series when it first showed on tv when I was a kid and I think I wore the damn tape out watching it so many times lol
Same. This and Red Dwarf ad nauseum was my childhhood. It's also the only thing I've ever bought on Prime since losing the DVD (and there seems to be s a bug in the encoding that means the last few minutes of episode one doesn't play :/)
If you really want to get into Hitch-Hikers, listen to the original radio broadcasts. The first two series were pure genius.
I always like to think whoever came up with the Borg in Star Trek was a hitch hiker fan...resistance is useless 😆 🤣 😂
Douglas Adams was a great writer
Great stuff. If you're struggling to see the funny side of the human condition, read Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.
The animated Guide parts of this series are the most well known, unfortunately for uploading, but are perfectly done. I think my favourite about the most intelligent species on earth is in the next episode.
You ain't seen nothing yet, wait till you meet the mice! & the big computer
The whole thing about physically painful poetry was born of one of Douglas Adam's friends, who apparently wrote really terrible, pretentious, unpleasant poetry. The whole idea was a playful dig at him. The original radio play gave the guy's actual name and address, but as you can imagine he ended up getting a lot of unwanted attention from Hitchhiker's fans, so all subsequent versions replaced him with Paula Nancy Milestone Jennings.
The guy being lynched by a group of angry scientists wasn't too far from reality as there have been times where someone found a solution through natural talent or inspiration rather than an official education. Good example being john harrison a self taught clockmaker and carpenter who had to fight hard to get anywhere with the royal society folk, he eventually won and thanks to his work the lines of longitude exist on maps of the world.
I always thought that they didn't give Marvin a depressive personality but a "normal" one, but having the brain the size of a planet very quickly computed his insignificance in the universe. 😔
To me Marvin being a White, Round Android was wrong, I always thought of him on the radio as being black, somewhat like a Japanese tinplate robot from the 1960s , with a square / rectanguar head
Without even needing a stint in the Total Perspective Vortex. Now that's clever.
@@alexrogan6563 I don't think that appears in the TV series. You could argue that trin tragular got the idea for the total perspective vortex from studying Marvin's brain matrix. anyone fancy a small piece of fairy cake I found just laying around in this small chamber. 🍰😜
@@midnightzathras6870 No, it doesn't appear in the series, I was reminded of it by your idea about Marvin realising his own (in)significance. That's certainly what the Vortex does for its users, though Trin Tragula invented it in order to annoy his wife. Her death proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. Marvin is probably an exception as he's not organic, if he's alive at all.
Elon Musk said in the interview with Jordan Peterstone that this book made him want to go to space, keep watching, and all will become clear. Thank you for watching this 🙂🏴
Douglas Adams had a degree in literature from Cambridge university he was at the uni about the same time as some of monty python he worked for monty python for a while before writing this - he would have been at the uni about the time steven hawking left
Just rewatched the whole series. Totally forgot a Doctor (Peter Davidson) and Darth Vader (David Prowse). Both appear in the same episode.
And also Roll Tide. Wife went there.
Dougie was a tiny bit prophetic at times.. I mean, does "the trickster having been voted to become president" ring a bell? 😂
Not to mention his book "Last Chance To See" in which he describes his travels to species that were going, some now are, extinct.
Although in stark contrast to his rather humorous and over all fictitious works, including "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and all the little offshoots of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" like "The Electric Monk", "The Restaurant on the other Side of the Universe" and so on, yet is nothing less but 100% recommendable. 💪🏼
Marvin the Paranoid Android is/was one of my favourite characters in virtually all sci-fi shows... I'd be hard pushed to name another android with his peculiarities. His programmer must have been British!
wait until the series gets all metaphysically funny when you meet slartibartfast for the first time who is one of the aliens what makes and manufactures planets and who helped make earth.
Folks, I think we have a convert.
fun fact, the worst poet in the universe, Nancy MIllstone Jennings is a real person Adams had a beef with, and that WAS her adress. She was not impressed lol
Not quite true. Douglas Adams went to school & uni with an English student/poet called Paul Neil Milne Johnstone which was changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Johnstone in the books (I think his real name was used on the radio though).
@@hexkid6351yes and his real address was also used on the radio show. So after he complained they changed his name for the book and this TV show.
She gets more space in the book than Earth itself lol
Most Hollywood SF is made simple for kids this is grown up humour you have to think
Oh thankyou again - am laughing all the way with you - roll on No.3 :-))
Hey Alan, so glad you are enjoying this. If you can PLEASE try and find the original books of this. You will never laugh so much not put them down.
One of the first things my wife and I found we had in common shortly after we met was our love of HGTTG.