On Apr 29, 2005, at 8:21 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote:
Well, I've never been blessed by the Beeb's TV production. Was it any good (since it sounds like you've seen it.)?
It was OK. Not great; not on par with the radio or books, but not terrible either. The feel of it was a bit like the humor and settings of Red Dwarf coupled with the SFX of Doctor Who.
A lot of the voices from the radio series were kept; Marvin, Eddy and the Guide were all the same. IIRC they were actually the same *recordings* done for the radio series added to the track for the TV production. I think that was done out of budget interests -- I seem to recall Adams mentioning in _The Salmon of Doubt_ that the Beeb only had to pay their voice talent for the original radio recordings, so they didn't have to pay them again for use of their already-recorded voices.
In terms of keeping "true" to the story, the TV production was superior to the film, but the film did have some good moments. The Vogons were impressively lifelike, Alan Rickman as Marvin was a good choice, and the Magrathean factory floor was quite good. But you know those were *technical* choices; the guts of the story just weren't there.
It was the unforeseeable way things fit together that really made the story so damned clever. (Well, that and Adams's careful honing of language, most of which was changed in the script by someone with the same notions of subtlety as a hammer-wielding three-year-old.) Arranging events in conventional storytelling order breaks the spontaneity, and while brevity is the soul of wit, its heart is the unexpected.
Did they at least retain the awesome philosphical/metaphysical/mathematical humor bits?
No. Anything that required attention, thought or intelligence on the part of the audience was removed. This clearly was targeted at an American crowd. :(
The entire sequence of Ford turning into a penguin at South End with the infinite monkeys is gone too; that probably wouldn't have translated well to screen, but I would have liked to see a little more exploration of what the Infinite Improbability Drive really *did*.
And one of the choicest (to me) pieces of dialogue was just gone, for no good reason; when Ford and Arthur are in the airlock of the Vogon ship (no Dentrassi either, BTW), Arthur does *not* say "I wish I'd listened to what my mother used to tell me when I was a boy," so of course we never get to find out that he didn't know what she used to tell him because he never listened.
'Cmmb the shag'?Oh la di dah, aren't we the fancy one! In *my* day we didnae have shag! We had woven poison ivy to cover our floors, and we liked it! The rashes kept us warm when we ran out of dung to burn.
Ahh, hae ano'er potaato an shet yer gob, granddad.
Bah- youngsters these days, ain't no respect to'em a t'all... Whole dadgum societies going to perdition... where's ma birch stick? ....
I've got some ideas but you'd probably resent them.(Hint: Think colorectal polectomy.)
;)
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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