DVDLog
25. May 2017

It’s Towel Day again today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! This year, I don’t have anything new, but over on DVDLog there are still the long and comprehensive reviews of both the 1981 television series and the 2005 movie which I had updated and translated into English a while ago.

Something which I’ve always neglected to mention before is the devilishly difficult Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure, which is available online from the BBC. It’s one of the most frustrating and difficult text adventures out there, partly because of its convoluted development history. This has been extensively chronicled by Jimmy ‘The Digital Antiquarian‘ Maher in his 2013 article – he has also written a great post about Douglas Adams himself.

Meanwhile, the radio broadcast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Live Show from 2014 has unfortunately disappeared from Youtube and has apparently never been commercially released anywhere, so all that’s left is a trailer. But the Hitchhiker’s Guide on Radio does have a future – I only found out recently that the BBC has commissioned a sixth radio series which still seems to be in the planning stage, but will reportedly be based on Eoin Colfer’s sequel And Another Thing… and feature the original actors. I haven’t heard anything recent about it, but with Dirk Maggs involved, this will be amazing.

There’s also my old Youtube Playlist with some great Douglas Adams treasures, but now it’s unfortunately missing the rare South Bank Show documentary, which has sadly been deleted for a copyright claim – fortunately, there’s still another upload on Dailymotion available! I had  originally seen this in a dubbed version sometime in the early 1990s on German television. And of course, you can actually find the television and radio series themselves somewhere on Youtube if you search for them, but I’m not linking to them because the Youtube uploads have actually a really degraded image quality compared to the DVD and, of course, because of copyright reasons. Buy the DVD, it’s awesome! And it’s not like it still costs 30 bucks like it did twelve years ago.

Happy Towel Day, everyone!

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