Story: The original broadcast adventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, and quite a few characters who didn’t make it into the novels based on the series.
Review: This recent “10th anniversary” reprint of the complete radio scripts of the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio shows – which, for those who didn’t already know, predate the books, TV show and Infocom game, by the way – is much more of what I’d like from a script book. The scripts aren’t interrupted by the commentary; the commentary is instead placed at the end of each half-hour script, and includes such amazingly obscure and useful information as what music was licensed for use in each program, how casting decisions were made, and the origins of situations, characters, and so on.
The scripts themselves still hold up, but I still hold my opinion, to this day, that such things as the Footwarriors, the sentient birds, Lintilla and the Allitnils, among other plot points, were best abandoned by the time Adams penned the five Hitchhiker novels. Some of these things barely held up, let alone evoked laughter, in audio form, and the script book proves that they become even less amusing in print.
This book, though the most expensive of the bunch being reviewed here, is almost essential for Hitchhiker’s Guide fans – but it’s best savored if you’ve actually heard the radio programs themselves.
Year: 1985 – reprinted 1997
Author: Douglas Adams
Publisher: Harmony
Pages: 248