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May 25th is Towel Day {wiki} in tribute to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that a towel is “the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”
On Towel Day, all of Adams’ fans are encouraged to carry a towel around with them, or to at least know where their towel is, following the great tradition of hitchhiking, traveling, managing, and adventuring laid out in his work. Naturally, this got us to thinking about all the hoopy (really together guy) froods (really amazingly together guys) that we know in fiction that really know where their towels are. You know, the characters who you could drop off anywhere and anywhere in the space time continuum, and come back in an hour and they’d already be lounging in perfect confidence and opulence, nocking back something highly alcoholic. Any one who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Movie, comic, and science fiction fans will surely find something to argue over in this list at The Mary Sue. Link -Thanks, Susana Polo!
Marvin The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Knit Doll – $14.95
Attention Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fans! Behold the adorable Marvin The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Knit Doll from the NeatoShop. Who knew that a depressed and paranoid robot doll could make you feel this darn happy? Even Marvin, with his vast intellect, would be surprised!
Also available: Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Ford Prefect.
Be sure to check out The NeatoShop for more fabulous Plush Toys!
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We know that 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, but how did Douglas Adams come up with it? In this excerpt from the book 42: Douglas Adams’ Amazingly Accurate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, author Peter Gill teases us with some background on how Adam’s radio comedy series (and later, book) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came about.
As the book’s title suggests, Adams, like most authors, was not afraid to borrow, and there are revealing similarities between Welsh’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of these provides perhaps the most intriguing explanation for “Why 42?”. As you may remember Adams had Deep Thought perform a little expectation management and say: “You’re really not going to like it” before revealing the Ultimate Answer.
Curiously, Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe had told of visitors to the UK searching for family roots finding “the answer a little disappointing” – after travelling around the world in search of “the solution to the most puzzling question of all”. A coincidence, perhaps . . . but this coincidence is on page 42.
Coincidence or not, knowing the origin of “42″ takes nothing away from the genius of Adams’ work. Read more from the book at The Guardian. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
Comments Off Technically, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy should probably be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, as the book most certainly explores multiple galaxies, regardless of semantics though, the story is undoubtedly a worldwide phenomenon. As a book, it has been translated into 30 languages and was voted the fourth most loved book in all of Britain.
In honor of the book’s 30th anniversary, which took place earlier this month, Neatorama is presenting you a collection of facts related to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Whether you’ve read the book, heard the radio broadcasts, seen the movie or seen the TV show, there’s certainly something here you don’t know yet.
Fans often abbreviate The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as HHGTTG, but Adams uses the abbreviation of H2G2, which is also used on the official BBC online guide. Other nicknames can include “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” “The Guide” or “Hitchhiker’s.” To make matters more confusing, when people use the full name, they are sometimes referring to the series and sometimes referring to the fictional book the series was named after. Just to ensure you’re entirely confused I plan to use all of the names in this article.
Image Via Nicholas “Lord Gordon” [Flickr]
Fans of the series might know that the Guide started as a radio series (which technically makes H2G2 31 years old, since the first broadcast was 1978), which quickly spawned a series of 5 books, a TV show and a movie, but you may not know there were also a number of stage shows, a comic book adaptation and a computer game based on Hitchhiker’s. There was even a series of towels released with towel part of the first novel, which some fans consider to be the “official version” of the book (if you aren’t familiar with the works, then you may not know how important towels can be).
In other works, these adaptations would end up being watered-down, mediocre versions of the original that don’t reflect the artist’s actual vision. Fortunately, most of the adaptations involved with the HHGTTG were done by Douglas Adams himself.
The H2G2 has even spawned its own holiday. May 25 in Towel Day. Towels are, after all, one of the most important things an interstellar traveler can have with them at any time. If you’re wondering how to celebrate Towel Day – why, just bring a towel with you all day, of course! There are even two sites dedicated to Towel Day, the countdown site, IsItTowelDay.com, and the informational site, TowelDay.org. Here at Neatorama, we’ve even covered towel day twice before.
Image Via JenT [Flickr]
As mentioned above, the first incarnations of the Guide were in radio form. The first series actually was originally going to be called “The Ends of the Earth,” which was to be a six-part radio series. In each of the episodes, the story would end when the world ended – each time in a different way.
When Adams started writing the first episode, he realized he needed an alien there to provide context and the alien needed a reason to be on Earth. In coming up with this reason, he finally decided to have the alien be a researcher for a “wholly remarkable book,” which would be known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Eventually, the story ended up focusing on the book, which started up the whole crazy phenomenon.
Later on, Adams claimed that he had already came up with the idea of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” while hitchhiking through Europe in his youth.
Image Via Adam Foster Codefor [Flickr]
The series is notable for being the first BBC radio program to be produced in stereo and later in Dolby surround sound. Adams claimed he wanted the program’s production to be comparable to that of a rock album, and as a result, a lot of the program’s budget went towards sound effects.
Speaking of rock music, the tune used on the radio, television, LP and film versions was “Journey of the Sorcerer,” an instrumental Eagles’ song from the album One of These Nights.
The novels were originally released as a trilogy, but then Adams came out with So Long, And Thanks for All The Fish, making the books “a trilogy in four parts.” Then he released Mostly Harmless and the series became “a trilogy in five parts,” the cover of which advertised itself as “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.” The blurb on the book went on to say, “the book that gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘trilogy.’”
At this point, fans continued to be hopeful that the series would eventually become “a trilogy in six parts,” but Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 before a sixth book was finished. Before he passed though, he had hinted that the newest novel he was working on, The Salmon of Doubt, may have been this sixth book. He said in an interview that Mostly Harmless was “very bleak” and that he would love to finish the “trilogy” on a “slightly more upbeat note.”
Image Via Jenbooks [Flickr]
It’s only natural that any phenomenon as big as the Guide would have inspired some other works – of course, these works are particularly off-the-wall, just like the work that inspired them. Monty Python member Terry Jones actually wrote a novel, Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, based on Adam’s computer game, “Starship Titanic,” which was based on an idea in Life, the Universe and Everything.
In 2005, Michael Hanlon published The Science of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, which covered important topics such as the Babel fish, parallel universes and space tourism.
There was tons of merchandise made for Hitchhiker’s over the years. Some of the favorite memorabilia items, as mentioned above, were towels with the Guide’s entry for towels. Then there were the singles released by Stephen Moore sung in the character of Marvin, the Paranoid Android, “Marvin,” Metal Man,” Reasons To Be Miserable,” and “Marvin I Love You.” My favorite though, was the “Beeblebear,” a teddy bear with an extra arm and head like Zaphod Beeblebox.
Image Via ZoeARP [Flickr]
Although the story was first composed as a radio script, the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published 30 years ago today. Fans in Britain are marking the occasion by wearing dressing gowns and carrying towels. Chris Irvine writes in The Daily Telegraph:
Hitchcon’09, the fans’ convention at the Royal Festival Hall contained a spacesuit worn by a Vogon, the galactic galaxy’s bureaucrats notorious for their aggressive manner and terrible poetry, as well as Adams’ bath, where the author, who died in 2001, claimed to have some of his best ideas.[...]
The Hitchhiker books began as a Radio 4 comedy show in 1978. Adams then adapted the radio series to create the initial book, completing four more instalments over the next 20 years. He died of a heart attack in 2001, which writing The Salmon of Doubt, published post humously.
Link via GeekDad | Image: Random House
In addition to being Memorial Day in the United States, today is Towel Day — a day to honor Douglas Adams and the importance of carrying a towel around with you, as advised by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough
