Today is Towel Day in honour of Douglas Adams and it’s one of the 6 Impossible Things To Do Before Breakfast to try and describe how important Douglas Adams writing was to me as a child, and especially the TV series and books (my love for the radio series came later). I would write differently, my humour would be different, I might not have developed a love for absurd humour – yes even with Monty Python I didn’t really get them until after H2G2 – or even got into science fiction (although I was always into the less serious or more intellectual stuff, rather than that heavy BIG TITLED endless SF/Fantasy series with brooding covers).
So to celebrate here’s the 1993 one-tape US edition of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in wondrous VHS quality and this Star Wars style intro (riffing on the thing that H2G2 was accused of jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon, despite it being in production before the film was released!):
EDIT: that’s been taken down, so you’ll have to make do with the BBC original version 🙁
DOUGLAS ADAMS DEDICATION:
This is the specially expensive version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy video tapes, and ones of the things that make it particularly desirable and worth spending all the extra money on is that is has this paragraph on it. It is a paragraph of immensely high quality, lovingly crafted exclusively for the reading pleasure of you, the discerning collector of extra-expensive things which have ‘Special Collector’s Edition’ labels stuck on them. The extra profits will not be donated to any form of charity but will be added to a special fund that the author intends to go and have a great time spending in, probably, the Caribbean.
Thank you so much.
Douglas Adams January 1993.
Also apparently this has extra footage, which I missed…I still have my original off-air VHS tapes of H2G2 from the late 80’s when they were reshown, must get a DVD copy, my ‘special edition’ LOL.
As a bonus, here’s the Making of H2G2. Love the Blake 7 and Doctor Who inclusions…
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